Podcasting Changed My Life

I recently took the WhyOS Discovery with our partners at The Why Institute and for the first time in my life, I feel proud of my career history. The WhyOS helped me understand that my WHY, which is contributing to a greater cause, is helping people find meaningful work. Meaningful work could be volunteer work or the highest level of pay one’s ever had, but it’s time spent using strengths and talents to provide value to the world. I believe that meaningful work propels a meaningful life. Just think about a time that your work was fulfilling and think about a time it wasn’t and how it impacted all the other hats you wear. That’s usually a loud illustration. When we do meaningful work, we live a more meaning-filled life.

My why powers my HOW, which is to find a better way. I’ve had a lot of naysayers over the years with their “what’s she doing now” comments. I can finally articulate why. I constantly pursue a better way to fulfill my why. I have found many new ways to pursue my why over the years, but podcasting has been my best way. The Gut+Science Podcast was created as a mentoring community to help leaders share their learnings and insights around increasing employee engagement. The show turned into a launchpad for my ever-evolving ideas to grow and help leaders better impact the engagement levels of the employees they lead. There’s so much variety in podcasting. It’s one effort that can produce multi-channel content and various results at the same time.

Get this! All of this podcasting goodness produces outstanding business results. Podcasting is a medium that enables me to build rich relationships and relationships are the lifeblood for business growth. In today’s world, we must create content around our business and why not co-create content with people that can impact business outcomes together?! It’s meaningful networking. That’s what we do at PeopleForward Network. And we teach and enable hundreds to live this practice as well.

Here are my key learnings about getting results from podcasting:

1. Only start the effort if you are passionate about the WHY you’re doing it. It is A LOT of work.
2. Find a niche audience and provide niche content. “You’ll get rich in a niche” is true and I could go on forever backing that quote up, so just ping me if you want to have a conversation about this.
3. Podcasting can establish you as a thought leader and build your credibility. PSA: there are still less than 3 million podcasts in the world so if you do one, you’re very much part of a smaller group and podcasting helps you share your genius, consistently. If you have the fire to share a message, then I know you have lots of it and podcasting is THE way. Pretty soon podcasting will be the norm, like blogs. Get ahead of the curve.
4. It can increase your revenue through ad monetization & building relationships with ICPs by inviting them on as a guest to your show. Podcasting changed my career. It used to be a way to get to the goal and now it is my main thing.
5. Podcasting creates a flywheel of content. Do one episode and get (at least) five marketing touches and tons of assets to use for many weeks (and maybe years) ahead.
6. Podcasting is the number one source of new relationships in my life and has been for 4 years. That means that even in year one the podcast was producing ROI.

Bottom line: Determine your why, set big goals, and stick to them. Odds are, you’ll emerge a better human and a more effective leader…and you’ll have loads of fun learning and growing along the way.

Love,

Nikki