Show notes have three jobs: convince a browsing listener to press play, help a past listener find a moment again, and give search engines something to read. One template covers all three, and none of its parts requires writing talent. What it requires is knowing what was actually said, which is why the workflow below starts with a transcript instead of your memory of the recording.
The template
Copy this structure and fill it per episode:
- One-sentence hook. What question does this episode answer, or what does the listener walk away with. Not a summary, a reason to listen.
- Guest line. Who is talking and why they are worth hearing on this topic, one or two sentences.
- Three to six topic bullets. The main things discussed, phrased as what the listener learns, not chapter titles.
- Timestamps. Five to ten moments with mm:ss marks, so people can jump. These come straight out of the transcript.
- One pull quote. The single best line of the episode, attributed. It is the part people share.
- Links and resources. Everything mentioned: books, tools, articles, the guest's site and socials.
- Call to action. One, not five. Subscribe, review, or the next episode to hear.
The workflow: transcript first, then fill the blanks
Writing show notes from memory means re-listening, scrubbing back and forth for that one quote, and guessing at timestamps. Working from a transcript turns the same job into reading and copying.
Get the transcript of the episode. If it is on YouTube, paste the link into Scriber and you get the full text back, with speaker labels on paid plans so an interview reads as a conversation rather than one block. Then work through the template top to bottom:
- Skim the transcript once and mark the strongest exchanges. Those become your topic bullets and your pull quote.
- Note where each marked moment sits in the episode for your timestamps. You are copying, not composing.
- Search the text for every name, book, and tool mentioned. That is your links section, and searching text beats re-listening every time.
- Write the hook last. After reading the whole conversation in text, the episode's actual point is usually obvious in a way it was not while editing audio.
What to skip
Long paragraph summaries of the whole conversation: nobody reads them, and they push the useful parts below the fold. Inside jokes without context. More than one call to action. And do not paste the raw transcript in as show notes; it is source material, not the product.
Why speaker labels matter for interviews
For a solo show, any transcript works. For interviews and panels, a transcript without speaker labels makes quote attribution guesswork, and misattributing a quote to the wrong person is the one show notes mistake guests actually notice. Labeled transcripts split the conversation by voice, so the quote and its owner arrive together.