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When I first got started in podcasting, I had zero people listening to my show.

Listen, maybe that's a little bit of exaggeration. My mom was listening. So I had at least one

person listening, but the reality is I had really low numbers. But then I literally did one

thing, one thing to my show. And within just a couple weeks, I went from just a few people listening to literally thousands of people listening to every episode, ranking on search engines, top of my category for my show. It was an exhilarating experience. And today I'm really happy to share that with you. Hey, my name's Alex San Felipe, if I've not met you, and I'm really excited to dive into this. Now, first, I just have to say, I hope that hooked

you a little bit there, right? It is the truth, but it's not something we can do anymore. Now, hold on, don't disappear and be like, oh, man, I can't, what do you mean, I can't do it anymore? I'm going to share what I did, but I'm also going to share what's coming next and why I think it's actually even better.

It's how we can capitalize in a similar way.

Now, when I first started my show that I just referenced, it went from zero to thousands, it felt like overnight. It was, again, really exhilarating. It was a fun thing be part of. Search engines were different. The podcast player apps were different. The way that people searched, the way we did anything online, was different. So I'm dating myself here. This was a while ago. But my show was a faith-based show. I'm a follower of Jesus, and I was talking about my faith. The show was called Paradigm Shift, which doesn't really mean anything. It's a shift in our thinking, right? But as a show, like, the name is kind of hard to spell maybe and at least for me and maybe

didn't like really mean anything and so i just decided i'm like you know what let me just try a more

literal name i changed the show to good christian podcast good christian podcast three words and i was like

let's just see what happens changed my hosting provider waited a couple days and just kept on going

my way didn't really change anything else about the show. Everything was pretty much exactly the same.

Well, I started noticing something. The next day, I was like, oh, there's a lot more people listening. Just like a couple hundred people overnight. Oh, a couple thousand the next night. Oh, wow. These numbers are crazy. And then I started going to search engines, places like Google, typing in the name my show or typing in just Christian podcast. My show was number one on those. It was number one in the category on Apple and all the other places you could listen to podcasts. And I was literally having thousands of people find my show. And again, that was a different time of the world. People would not type in questions back then. Like now if you were looking for a Christian podcast, type in, what's a good Christian podcast for me to listen to? Back then, our brains weren't really evolved to that yet, which sounds weird to say. But if you were looking at, you would only type in the words you were looking for. So you type in good Christian podcast, the name of my show. What do you know? And search engines and all the player outs back then ranked based off of words only. There There was no reputation involved. There was no such thing as word stuffing yet. Like, all these things didn't exist.

So guess what? And all the player outs back then ranked based off of words only. There was no reputation involved.

There was no such thing as word stuffing yet. Like all these things didn't exist. So guess what? Everyone was typing in good Christian podcast. And guess what show came up? Mine every single time. I capitalized big time on that. So listen, this doesn't work anymore. Now, side note, it is still important to name your content what it's about. That is very important because when people see it, you still want them to click into it

and actually want to check it out, right? So I think that that show name was solid even in today's world, but I really capitalized on a different time of the internet. And thankfully, we've evolved, and now that I've dated myself, I want to get into what I think is coming next. Now, this might scare some of you, and there's some podcasting gurus out there. They're not

going to like them even bring this up. So I'm sorry scare some of you, and there's some podcasting gurus out there.

They're not going to like them even bring this up. So I'm sorry to all of you OGs out there. The algorithm in podcasting. The rise of the algorithm in podcasting. In the podcasting space, I will admit, this is a dirty word. Like the industry people that I kind of roll with will not like to hear me say that word because it is a big no-no in our space. But I can't not share it because I believe it's coming and I believe there's a way for us as independent podcast guest and host to position ourselves to really capitalize on this. So I want to talk to you about this idea of the algorithm. And I'll get into at the end why I think this is actually a good thing. I'll dive into that really deep, but I want to share some ideas first. First off, how does an algorithm work? Algorithms have evolved over times, but now there is just one thing. There is one ranking factor that matters above everything else. And I could really say, I could argue, that is literally the only important metric. And I know there's people everywhere that are like, you need more comments, you need more this, you need more that, you need to tag people,

you got to go with accessibility. All this stuff is important, sure, but there's only one thing that

actually matters to an algorithm. You ready? That one thing is time on screen. Time on screen.

What that means, we'll just take some of the scrolling social media

things as an example. When you're scrolling and flipping through them, right, when you stop and you watch,

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