Podcast show notes can sometimes come as an afterthought but they really are an important part of your podcast.
One of the reasons they can be a pain to write is that they are time consuming, especially when having to reformat the text for different applications like your podcast host or website.
Help is at hand! You can solve the formatting problem with Markdown.
Make sure you check the video at the bottom as it shows examples of my podcast show notes and explains Markdown a bit more.
Markdown is an easy way to format text for the web.
The web works on HTML which can be complicated to learn so Markdown helps by simplifying the formatting.
For example this is bold text in HTML:
<strong>bold text</strong>
In Markdown it’s:
**Bold Text**
What this means is that you can write your show notes in a Markdown editor and then copy the text either as HTML for the web or Plain Text for your podcast host.
I use Simplecast as my host and they accept Markdown in the show notes editor.
My website works on WordPress which wants HTML.
I write my show notes once and copy the text in whichever format I need. Simple!
To be able to do this properly you need to be using a Markdown editor and thankfully there are lots of them around, some are paid and others are free.
The Markdown editor does the converting from Markdown to HTML just by selecting the text, right clicking and choosing Copy as HTML.
The Markdown editors I use are Typora (in beta which is free but will be paid), Mark Text (free and open source), iA Writer (which is a very fancy paid app).
All of these apps give you the ability to write in Markdown and copy and paste as HTML, without writing HTML.
The other week I recorded a video (below) which goes into a bit more detail on Markdown formatting, the apps I use and there’s also an example of my show notes and how I write and copy them.
I hope this helps.