Speaker 1: Hey everybody, my name's James. Now, writing a podcast script is a great way to keep your podcast on track and make sure that you're not going off piece too much. But the thing is, if you write a script that's too rigid, it can kind of sound, well, exactly that, scripted, and it can prevent you from injecting your own personality into a podcast. So in this video, I wanted to give you eight things that you can put into your script, which will allow you to follow a structure whilst allowing you to also inject your own personality and make your podcast sound great. All of that coming right up. Hey, my name's James Mulvaney. I'm an entrepreneur working within the podcast space. I'm founder of radio.co, podcast.co, and matchmaker.fm, and also more recently, QPodcast as well. Now, if you are thinking about creating a script for your podcast, make sure you watch the end of this video because I'm actually gonna provide you a series of frameworks and scripts I've put together that we've been using for a lot of the work we do with clients to produce high-end podcasts. And in this video, I'm gonna give you eight steps to writing an effective podcast script to ensure that your podcast flows ever so smoothly, but also allows you to get across your personality and all the points that you wanna make. So let's dive right in. So firstly, the introduction. Just as I've done in this very video, it would be a bit weird if, say, like a movie didn't have some kind of title sequence or an opening scene to kind of set the scene and set the picture and kind of give your audience an idea of what's coming up. Just like that, a podcast also needs an introduction. And it's really, really useful when it comes to podcasting to actually include an introduction to tell people or tease people what is coming up in the episode. It's gonna keep the listeners engaged, and it's gonna promise what they're gonna learn or what they're gonna discover or how they're gonna be entertained through the episode. So quite often, introductions are recorded after the episode's been recorded. That's a really great way of doing it, a top tip there. If you record your episode, then go back and record the introduction after because it allows you to kind of summarize what is coming up in your episode. Try and keep it slick. Try and keep it within sort of 30 to 60 seconds. It doesn't need to be much longer than that, a couple of minutes, maybe a maximum, but really summarize what's coming up in the episode, why should the listener keep listening, and also what are they gonna learn or what are they gonna gain from tuning in for the entire episode? Next up, a message from the sponsor. It's quite common nowadays for podcasts to have sponsors or to have some kind of promotional upsell, and it's great to get this in either really before the podcast even starts or straight after the introduction. This is often called a pre-roll. This can sometimes be a predefined message that you will be asked to read word for word, which is what is known as a live read, or it can kind of sometimes be improvised a little bit. But generally speaking, this is when the host is promoting a product or service. And if you don't have a sponsor for your podcast, this could literally be some kind of call to action. It might be that as a podcaster, you want your listeners to subscribe to your newsletter so they're notified when new episodes are released. Or it could be something like, go and check out our merch store. Whatever it is, it's always a good idea to get this in before kind of getting into the nitty gritty of things. You can also do a mid-roll or a post-roll, but basically this is a commercial message. Number three, introductions. You should introduce yourself as the host and also introduce any guests that you've got on your show. This can again be simple. You don't need to go into the whole life history because that's the point. If you've got a guest on your show, you'll really, really get that from them. But it could be simple as I'm interviewing, for example, I'm talking about myself here. I'd say I'm interviewing James Mulvaney, who is founder of podcast.co and matchmaker.fm. And he's an entrepreneur working with the new audio space. Try and summarize it within a few words, a couple of sentences at most, let the guests speak for themselves, let them tell their stories, but introduce them, set a precedent as to who they are and what you can potentially expect to learn from that particular guest. And of course, it's always a good idea to introduce yourself as the host as well. Next up, include a seg or two. You might have noticed that podcasts often aren't a linear format. They might have different features going on or different elements within that podcast. And a seg is simply a link between one section and another. This is commonly used in radio. You might seg between two songs, for example. So let's say I might outro a song and say, we've got this song coming up next. And likewise, in a podcast, you can seg between two different topics or two different elements of your show. So it might be saying, well, that was great. Now let's learn about X. Or it might be saying, here is our weekly feature where we talk to one of our listeners, or whatever it might be. But make sure you put these into a script. So you're remembering to record these and this will make it much easier in the edit afterwards. If you've got some elements to play with, again, you can potentially even script these. Word for word is fine. You can always record these afterwards as well. Quite often, you've recorded the different elements of your episode, and then you wanna kind of structure it together. Look at segs as the kind of glue that binds all of your episodes together between various different sections or elements. Next up, the main topics for discussion. This particularly is very useful if you are interviewing a guest for your show, or maybe you're doing a discussion with your other co-hosts. It's always really good to actually map out on a document as part of your script, what you're gonna be talking about in the episode. I know this kind of sounds obvious, but sometimes people will just have one topic of discussion, and that's fine. But then you can quite often forget to talk about certain things, which can sometimes really add to your show or add depth to what you're talking about. So split your topics of discussion out into bulleted lists of things that you wanna talk about, you know, headings, subheadings, or topics and subtopics, and really try and go into some detail so you don't forget to talk about things that are kind of crucial to the kind of core of your show, what it is you actually wanted to talk about. As I say, I know it sounds obvious, but make sure that you're writing the things that you wanna talk about in your episode down. You've got it in front of you. It doesn't matter if you then start going off on slight tangents, but you've got something, a reference point that you can bring you back on track, and make sure that you're following exactly what you want to set out to talk about. Next up is the summary. A summary is a really good way of drawing your episode to a close. Once you've recorded your episode, you might actually wanna go back and listen to it, and then record your summary after interviewing, say, a guest. Draw out some quotes on them, maybe edit it together, a nice little package, or just reflect yourself on what you think you've learned by talking to that person. Or you can even use the summary to talk about potentially things that are coming up in the next episode. Use it as a tease to talk about what is coming up in future. But summary is a really good way of just basically saying, here's what's been in this episode. We think this has been really useful. You might have gone into a lot of detail, over, say, 40 or 60 minutes. You can wrap it up within, say, a space of a five-minute chunk of audio, basically just to give the listener a little refresher on some of the things that you've talked about. Always a really good way to finish your episode and draw it to a natural close, I think. Number seven, the outro. An outro is simply saying, thanks for listening to the podcast. Maybe remind the listener to leave a review or comment or get involved in the discussion. And it's just a good way of wrapping up the episode or drawing it to a close, basically saying goodbye. And then finally, number eight is the call to action. Kind of very similar to the intro, what I talked about earlier. You might want the listener to take some kind of action. This could either be a commercial sponsorship message, or it could be saying, go and subscribe to our newsletter, go and follow our social media accounts, whatever you think is relevant and appropriate for your podcast. Quite often, call to actions might be a combination of these things, but ultimately, it is just that. It's a call to action. It's telling your listeners to take some kind of action. And I think too many podcasters neglect this and don't get involved with their listeners as much as they should be. It allows you to get that all-important feedback from listeners and allow them to engage with you. Because ultimately, someone's listening to your episode. You don't always know who that person is. But if you get a call to action in place, which says, hey, send us an email with your thoughts, or tweet us, or follow us on Instagram, or join our newsletter, you've immediately got an open line of communication with that listener. Suddenly, you start to build a picture of who your real audience is. So call to action, really, really important. If you've not got one at the end of your podcast, I'd recommend you do, because it's one of these things that can change your podcast and really allow you to grow it significantly. Once you've got that connection, that bond with your audience, you'll notice things start changing very, very rapidly in your favor. So there we have it. That is my eight-step formula to writing a successful podcast script. Of course, all of these elements are interchangeable. You might not necessarily need all eight of them in every single script you write. And of course, there are no hard and fast rules to writing a script. Of course, you wanna adapt what I've talked about today to suit your podcast and your style of presenting or hosting. Now, just to finish up, if you found this video useful, I'd really appreciate a thumbs up. And also comment below with your tips to writing effective podcast scripts. Perhaps there's some things I've not mentioned today which you think others might benefit from, and let's get the discussion going. And finally, if you wanna get hold of a set of frameworks that I've put together, script templates, and basically the bare bones of how we create podcasts for high-profile clients that we work with, I've actually uploaded them for free. You can download them on my website. If you go to jamesm.com slash frameworks, that's jamesm.com slash frameworks, you can get hold of our scripts and some of the frameworks that we've used for various different types of podcasts on there. Well worth checking out. And as I mentioned, I thought I'd throw them up there for free so anyone can get hold of them. Head to jamesm.com slash frameworks to download your copy today. Hopefully you found this video really useful. Remember to subscribe to the channel for more stuff like this. Really appreciate your subscriptions. And again, if you've got any questions, comments, please leave them below. I'll speak to you soon. Take it easy. Bye for now. Bye.