The show’s guest in this episode is Nikki Nash. She is a Hay House author, international speaker, and marketing mentor for women entrepreneurs. As host of the Market Your Genius podcast and founder of the Genius Profit Lab, she equips entrepreneurs and authors with the tools and resources they need to share and profit from their experiences.

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Listen to the podcast here

Experimenting with Marketing and Profit

Hello, everyone, I am so excited to be here with you live. And I am just I’ve been thinking about my own leadership today. And actually, as I was walking in here to do this podcast, I’m in Canada. And yesterday was Thanksgiving and in Canada that Thanksgiving weekend. It’s not like you just do one day like in the US you do Thursday in for the Thanksgiving holiday. And then, you know, the rest of the weekends just kind of chill. But in Canada, there’s, there’s three days. And so if you invite someone to Thanksgiving, you always have to figure out what day Are they coming? What are you going to do? Usually we do one Thanksgiving meal, sometimes we get invited to someone’s else else’s house for another one. So we ended up doing two big, you know, big dinners, we had 12 people for Italian on one day of Thanksgiving. And then we did a turkey and had eight people the second day. And so today is actually kind of my Monday morning. And so I walked into my office to get ready for the podcast. And literally, there were piles everywhere, because people had been we’d cleaned the house. And we’re like, post COVID So we cleaned the house. And, um, and so piles got put on my desk, as we were just trying to tidy up. And then I had you know, this, that and the other and I just thought, gosh, you know, this is kind of the life of being an a female entrepreneur, my desk is the catch all place, I work at home, where you know, my work, life gets intertwined, and impacted by my family life. And I just wanted to comment on that. It’s, it’s the challenge of waking up being ready to go looking like I’m, I’m ready. And yet my home life in cringes constantly on who I am. And, and so I always wonder if like, do I pretend that I’ve got it all together? Or do I show the vulnerability of what it’s like to actually be me? And what’s the happy balance there? Like, who wants a coach who has a life that’s like super sterile, but also who wants a coach who’s flying by the seat of our pants all the time? So I just I invite you to think about that question like, Who do you present to the world? Who do you want to present to the world? What’s your authentic place in all of that? And why? Why do you pick one over the other? Which one do you elevate? Which one do you marginalize or make smaller? Because I’m super curious about that. And I’d love to hear, you know, kind of what you think, either on our Facebook page, or you can send me a note or you can type something in the chat on this today. I’d love to know what you think. Your strategy is for how you embrace leadership and embrace how your life touches your leadership. It’s great to be here today.

And I’m really excited about our guest. My guest today is Nikki Nash, who’s a Hay House author. She’s an international speaker, and she’s a marketing mentor for women entrepreneurs. As the host of the market your genius podcast and the founder of the Genius Profit lab. She equips entrepreneurs and authors with tools and resources they need to share and profit from their experiences. And she just released a new book on August 24. And her book is called Market Your Genius. I am so excited to have Nikki here. 

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Welcome, Nikki.

Thank you so much for having me.

Oh, I’m thrilled. I can’t wait to talk to you about all of this. So we’ll just dive right in. Tell me a little bit about what you’re up to in your life and your work right now. And how are you experimenting?

Hi, again, everyone. My name is Nikki Nash and I, about six to seven years ago built a business where I help entrepreneurs, build marketing plans that help them generate leads and get more gym clients and all of that magic Ness. And right now what I’ve been focused on and also experimenting with is the launch and continuous launching of my new book called Market your genius. And one of the biggest experiments that I’ve been doing with it is figuring out okay, well, how can I essentially like most entrepreneurs want to do sell more products, right? So how do I get more books purchased? How do I get more reviews? How do I get more awareness about the book and the content of the book? And what’s really cool about it is that because I’m very meta, like in the book, I talk about my framework for how to do marketing experiments. And I’m using that framework to help sell my book and constantly reiterate and adjust my actions to get better results.

And it gets even more meta if you’re on a podcast, where we’re talking about experimenting.

Exactly. It’s like, do you guys get the message you should be experimenting?

Well, what specifically? Have you tried? And have you tried anything that fails?

Good question. So I’m, specifically what I my false talk with my hypothesis. And then that I’ll give you insight into why I’ve tried the things that I’ve tried. But what I’ve known and figured out about books is that a lot of book sales come from word of mouth, it’s like somebody’s going, Oh, my gosh, I read this book, it’s amazing, you should go read it, right. And that’s how most people hear about books, or somebody’s talking about it on a stage or they heard somebody speak or something along those lines. So my philosophy around this book sale or promoting the book was that if I can do as many podcast interviews as possible, as many like lives, on social media as possible, as many speaking engagements, where I go into people’s groups, and train and teach as possible, I will be able to kind of spark my own word of mouth, because people won’t just be going, ooh, I’ve picked up the book, because you know, at the beginning, you need somebody to read the book in order to tell somebody about it. But at least people could say, oh, my gosh, I heard Nikki speak on the show, or I heard her speak in our mastermind, or I heard her speak in our membership. And I loved her so much that I got the book, and oh, my gosh, the book was great, too. But maybe they start the word of mouth with just I heard her speak. And so that’s a lot of what I’ve been doing is speaking places, and building relationships with folks adding a ton of value, and then inviting them to go pick up the book, in terms of what hasn’t been working, it’s a little it’s not so much. What hasn’t been working. What’s interesting is that what I didn’t do from the beginning, that I should have been doing, which is hilarious, because I tell people to do it, I teach people to do it. But I didn’t really think through the best way for me to track specifically which shows or which activities or lives were driving the most book sales. So like, overall, the strategy is working. And I hit my first week goals, and I’m on track to hit my first quarter goals and, and things along those lines. But what I don’t know is like, oh, are there specific, like types of shows, or specific types of handles on Instagram are things that I should be focusing on? To see the most traction or like the best results?

Well, and you know, obviously, we do marketing in our company. And it’s like, a lot of work just to get the marketing out there and to then do the podcast or be in the speaking. And I imagine, you’re like, we are where, you know, we know something works, because things are happening. But we’re not exactly sure what works the best. And we’re not exactly like there’s a certain amount of luck to it all. And then a certain amount of steadiness keeps the luck up or something I’m not sure. You know, it’s it’s not very linear, in my mind. But it might be more linear if we were able to track every single piece of metadata around our marketing and see what led to something.

Yeah. And for me, it’s all about, you know, what’s important to you to track and what your goals are. Right? So for me, looking back, the reason why I made the decision not to track every single individual podcast is because in the year 2021, I’m on track to be interviewed on about 100 podcasts. And I was like, I don’t really want to track 100 podcasts individually right now, particularly because podcasting or doing things like this have a long shelf life. So it might be that, you know, maybe week one, it didn’t get enough traction or a lot of results. But who knows if in year one or year two, or suddenly somebody, you know, blows up, right? There’s so blows up and everybody’s watching it and they’re going back and choosing episodes based off of the topic, right or the subject. And so there’s that piece of it. And then there’s also other benefits to doing the podcasting that I’ve found. So for me overall, I’m just like All right, let’s just track in general podcasting. And then if it’s worth it, maybe then I’ll get a little bit more granular. But let’s see if this is even something we want to keep doing.

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Well, and I’m, I’m like, super impressed like 100 podcasts in a year. That’s that’s a feat. And I know that people listening would love to know how you do that, because so many people see podcasts as a way to grow and build and you’re in marketing. So what any pro tips on how do you get booked on 100 shows a year?

Yes. So let’s start with the fact that I set this goal because in 2020, I doubled my podcast from being weekly to being twice a week. And bi weekly always confuses me, because it could in America, or in a lot of places, it could either mean every other week or twice a week. That’s a weird, so I’m gonna say twice a week was like, I’m gonna do a podcast episode twice a week. And so, and in 2020, I did well over 100 podcast episodes of my own show, in that year alone, and I was like, you know, I wonder if I can guess be a guest on 100 podcasts. And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to write about it because, you know, to me, I my brain thinks like, a little bit like a journalist. So we talked earlier, before we started recording that I was an English major, and thought I was going to be a journalist. And so I’m like, you know, it would be a cool article, if I was like, I went on 100 episodes, 100, podcasts and 2021. Here’s what I learned, right? People would want to read that. So to do that, though, I had to be 100 fuck us. Otherwise, it doesn’t really work for an article. So I did a number of things. The first thing I did was I committed because I truly believe that when you commit to something weird things start happening in the universe, where it’s like, suddenly, people are inviting you to be guests on podcast purely because you set your mindset. And your thoughts around, I’m going to do this thing. Another thing I did was I did hire a podcast booking agency. And so they were contractually obligated, I guess, is the word. But we were in a contract for them to book me on 48 shows. So it was about 50%. So I had to put myself on 52 shows, right?

Okay, that is such a crazy goal.

So then I started doing things like, Okay, well, I have my own show. So why don’t I ask people who have a show? Who are guests on my show, if they’d be willing to interview me as well. I also started asking anybody who interviewed me on their podcast, if they knew of anybody else who had a show that it might be interested in having me. I had reached out to people who had been on my show in years prior and I said, Hey, I have this book come out, would you be interested in doing an Instagram Live with me or having me as a guest on your show or something like that? And I had a number of people say, Yes, I kept telling everybody how I was trying to get booked on more podcasts. And so when I just publicly said that somebody would go, Oh, you know, who has the podcast, this person, or that person would be listening to me say, my goal this year is to be on podcasts. And they would go well, I have a podcast, would you be interested in being on my show? So it’s almost like I narrowly focused and when you get narrowly focused, that helps. There are also tools, I use some of them at the beginning. But like pod Booker and pod match, are also tools that help you get guests for your show, and also book people on your show. When you’re experimenting with marketing, how do you know what’s working? Yeah, so I think one of the things that’s always important to be clear on is what success looks like for you. Because, you know, I could post something online and say, it’s not working, and be using the wrong metrics. And I’ll give you guys an real life example. That’s great. So when I started my business, I went live on Facebook all the time, it was my jam. It’s what I did. I used referrals and friends and family and networking to get my first few clients. But at the same time, I really believe that the more that I showed up and shared my knowledge and experience experiences online, the more people would say, you know, hey, I want to work with you. Given that it might take a period of time for that to happen. So I started the show, I called it content and coffee, and I would share content and online marketing tips. And I went live, what started kind of like five days a week, I would do a Monday through Friday, quick little show. And then it became once a week, and then it became every other week. And then it became kind of non existent. And the reason why It dwindled down is because I was sitting there doing this over and over and over again. And I’m like It’s not working. Right. I was just like, this is not working. So I quit. And guess what happened? About eight 910 months later, I had someone sign up to work with me, paid 10 grand and said I had been watching all of your videos and I just I’m now ready Ready, right. And I was using the metric of nobody is showing up live when I go live, nobody is leaving comments in my videos. And that was my metrics of success that I was looking at. And quite frankly, I wasn’t even tracking it. So it was very emotional and anecdotal, real talk. And what I really needed to know is, is this generating leads for my business? Is this getting people, you know, who might become a client for me? And how long do I think that would take and I was looking for instant results. And so often people want those instantaneous results, like I did this thing, and I want a million dollars, right? Like, I’m being melodramatic on purpose or exaggerating a purpose. But when you sit down and you go, Okay, I am going to just like looking back, I’m going to use content marketing and see how it goes real time example, for right now, I’m doing Instagram reels, right? I have no real idea of what Instagram reels is going to do for my business. But I believe that the visibility will help me drive my follower followers on Instagram and ideally, book sales, right? So how I’m looking at this is I’m going alright, how many people are viewing my reels? How much is my following growing? How many people are clicking the button that says, like, learn more about my book or buy my book? And when I track those things, then I can start seeing is this number going up? Am I hitting my target? Am I reaching success?

What do you do? If you’re I mean, I, I do this all the time, like I go live, I do these things? And if you’re not measuring likes, or follows or downloads or something like that, what are you measuring?

Yeah, so oftentimes, likes are vanity metrics. And I say that coming from corporate where we wanted more likes, purely for vanity reasons, so that we could be in the press saying, like, So and so like Intel has like over, you know, 10 million followers and like, when they rank tech companies or something, because somebody would often do that. But when you are a business owner, especially if your business is not making like gazillions of dollars, like most businesses, you have to ask yourself, Why am I doing this in the first place? So your question would be, why am I doing these videos in the first place. And for me, if I’m doing the videos, because I’ll give you an example, YouTube, where we’re doing my YouTube strategy, right, I’m creating those videos so that I can show up better on search inside of YouTube, right? Like, I want people who are searching for specific things to watch my video and come to my page, and ultimately, join my email list, right, like, click for my email list. So things that I’m measuring are, my top metric is leads coming from YouTube, like how many people are signing up for my email list from YouTube, that’s number one. Now I could have one video that has five people watch it, and another video that has a million people watch it. And while that’s helpful, I don’t need every video to be successful to get leads, right? Some videos will do better to get leads than others. And so my goal at the highest level is to get leads. And that’s what I should be measuring. Now, that doesn’t mean you don’t look at video views or things like that, that will help you figure out which topics I should maybe focus on maybe which how long the videos were that people watched, when they opted in to my email list, that information is helpful. But my key metric, like my number, one thing that I’m going to care about is leads generated. And so if I’m doing I’m making, I’m making this number up, but if I do 100 videos, and in you know, six months or a year zero, people sign up for my email list, then I’m gonna go okay, well, clearly, something I’m doing is not working here, right. But most people don’t have a strategic metric that they’re looking for, or looking at. And most people also don’t give themselves ridiculously long amounts of time to test a high level, you know, strategy or tactic like, for example, YouTube, like I’m going to give myself a year to sort of figure out YouTube, and then quite frankly, I’m probably going to need to give it three years before I see like my business completely transformed with that right.

I think this is this is such a powerful point about experimenting. And if you’re using real metrics, like actual especially in marketing, because the real metric is business conversion of some kind. I think the timeline super important, I think in my field, people I know like in I’ve been coaching for a long time and I know I sometimes know that somebody is gonna hire me and I talked to them Three years before they’re gonna hire me, I know, when I have an initial conversation with them, I’m like, oh, yeah, they know they’re gonna hire me. But they don’t know when. And, and so it could be, you know, when I think of corporate coaching or coach team building and leadership development, that kind of work, I always think of the timeline as six months to two years as the timeline for a sales cycle. And the marketing cycle is even longer than the sales cycle. So it’s so interesting that you say that, you know, how long do you have to try an experiment? The The interesting thing I talked about in my, in my book is that experiments need to be short, like week long experiments, so that you’re getting lots of iterations so that you can improve. And these two things that we’re talking about are really in opposition to each other. And I think that’s really interesting.

They’re actually not so when I say, and here’s why. When I say give YouTube a year, I mean that you’re testing over arching YouTube for one year to three years. But it’s not like I just do the same exact thing on YouTube for three years, it’s I have to keep testing little things, to see what works, right. So if you think about, you know, the light bulb, right, because that’s an example I use in my book, they did like 1000s of experiments. For the light bulb, right? In a short period of time, I’m talking from like, the filament to like the actual, like construction of the light bulb, they tested him bajillion things, essentially. But they were focused on the light bulb for a long period of time, right. But they did a ton of Mini, or micro experiments along the way. And so when I tell people, you know, oh, I want to start a podcast, I’m like, That’s great. This is good. You have to, if you want to start podcasts, I need you to agree that you’re going to commit to this for three years, because you’re gonna have to figure out a lot of stuff over that three years, right? Like how frequently you want to post what type of content works best? What’s generating your leads, and growing your business? How like, long? Or do you want the episodes to be so many things can change. But you need at least three years to really make it beyond anybody else who has a podcast.

I think it’s so interesting to think of those very timelines. And you’re right, you don’t try the same thing for, you know, three years, you don’t do exactly the same thing. And you learn along the way. So, you know, and that I think that’s really important to stop on a regular cadence and just think, Oh, what did we learn for us for our podcast, I learned that I really liked a different life platform, you know, I wanted to be, I wanted the thrill of being live, it’s like so much more fun and feels so much more real. And the idea that people could put questions in, and you know, we could answer things live is really exciting to me, as a host. And I figure if I’m excited, I’m hoping my hypothesis is, is if it’s exciting for me, then I hope it’ll be exciting for everyone who may or may not be true, but we’ll have to do it for a while to figure out whether or not my hypothesis is correct.

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s the excitement. And beauty of it is that you have to give yourself enough time to figure out if your hypothesis is correct. And so often, and I am guilty of this, I have done it. But I would say you know what, I’m gonna start doing webinars, right? I do one webinar. And I’m like, Well, that didn’t work the way I thought it was going to mind you, I was looking at the wrong metrics. Because if I had been looking at different metrics, I would have said, Oh, that works, despite so many other things going wrong. But I did one, and I was like, alright, that didn’t work. And then I moved on to the next thing and moved on to the next thing and moved on to the next thing, when in reality, I should have said, no, like, you have to do webinars for at least a year. And you’re going to figure out how many webinars you’re going to do in the year. And then you’re going to figure out, like, maybe you need to test, maybe you have one webinar topic, but you’re going to test a couple of different stories, or you’re going to test a couple of different training frameworks that you’re going to teach in it or you’re going to test your sales pitch at the end in order to see what’s going to get you the best results.

I love all of this. And I also wanted to ask you a question. I know you focus on women entrepreneurs, and how do you think women in this space this experimental space are different than men? Or are have their it doesn’t even have to be compared to men, but how are their challenges? unique or special or something, you know, what should they be thinking about?

Yeah, so one of the big things that I see with the clients that I work with, and they’re primarily women, and since I comparatively haven’t worked with the same amount of women as I have men I can’t say that there’s like this is what separates women but it is something that I’ve seen across my clients. So if you are a Women Entrepreneurs, this may apply to you. And that’s collapsing the results of the experiment with their self worth and success.

I know it’s like it breaks my heart. Coaches, by the way, are horrible for this. Every time coaches marketing fails, they go get more coach training. They, they think, Oh, it didn’t work, I must not be skilled.

Right? It’s like, this didn’t work. Something’s wrong with me is often like the collapse, or something’s like I did something wrong, or I don’t know what I’m doing, or I’m not good enough at this, or I need to hire somebody else to do it. And I’m like, that’s not true. I’m like, I fail all the time, literally, and I coach people. Luckily, I also coach people on failing forward. You know, in marketing, it’s just like something that comes with the package. Because, you know, I won’t know that something’s going to work. Unless I do it, right. Like, I posted something on reels. I did a reel it got, I think within the first couple hours, like 1500 views, I did another reel later the same day, like hours later, it got like 50 views in the same span of time. I did another one the next day. It got like, you know, maybe 100 views? And I’m like, Alright, I still don’t know yet. What made the first one do so well. So I have to keep doing them. And seeing what the heck it was. I’m like, was it the topic? Was it the title? Was it the way that I cut the video? I don’t know. I have to keep figuring it out. And when you go into things with curiosity, like, why is this working as opposed to attaching it to like, Man, I suck at reels. I don’t know what I’m doing. That one was a fluke. And I’m just doomed for success. I mean, like doomed for failure. Like that’s a whole another situation. That’s that’s really just stories that you’re telling yourself versus truth and reality.

I think it’s so interesting to think about the challenges of marketing and the stories that we tell ourselves, these stories get in our way all the time. And I look at it and leadership Lee, we tell ourselves stories about how we’re not good enough and leadership or him have imposter syndrome or other things. And in marketing. It’s it’s like, oh, you know, I’ve never been a marketer. But today, I’m going to try it for the first time. And I must be a total failure as a human because my marketing didn’t work. And clearly, that’s not you know, what you want to go for in an experiment? Like we want resilience in experimenting, which is what you’re talking about, I love this idea of setting the timeline, the long timeline for the big picture experiment before you start the short iterations of where you want to improve.

Yeah, and one of the things I have people do, because it helps a little bit from a mindset perspective, at least it has for me, is let’s say, I’ll I’ll use webinars as an example, because that’s just an example I’ve been using before. Let’s say I want to sell a course. Right? And let’s say I’ve decided webinars is the way in which I’m going to sell the course. You know, I may watch a, an expert, tell me that they’re going to give me the webinar strategy that made them millions of dollars, and I try it once and I fail, and then I never do it again, that’s historically what happened to me. But instead, what I encourage people to do is to go, Okay, it’s probably going to take me a couple of times, maybe six, maybe 50, maybe 100 of doing this webinar, before I’m going to hit any sort of sales, happiness, right? Like, you know, it might not even be full on success, it might just be like, Oh, I’m happy with that I could do better, but I’m happy with it. So what I tell people to do is, is say, Okay, I’m going to do webinars in 2022, right? How many times am I going to do the webinar? Am I going to do it 10 times am I going to do it 12 times am I going to do it 52 times, however many times you’re going to do it, and put all of those dates on the calendar, and then put on the calendar time to review the results. Because if that’s baked in as well, then you’ve blocked off space to go, Okay, I did it, it didn’t go as well as I’d like, let’s look at the results. But guess what, I’m doing another one next week, or in a few weeks or in a month or however you know, far you spaced them out. It’s gonna be okay. Let me just really quickly take some things I’ve learned and apply it to the next time. Bam, it changes the way you look at it because you know, you’re going to do it again and again and again, as opposed to putting all the pressure on the first time to be magically successful.

I love this conversation. And I would love for you to just tell people where they can find you.

I am at nikkinash.co. And the another great way to kind of get to know me or connect with me is to check out my book because I literally walk through framework that discusses everything we’ve been talking about from an experiment standpoint. And that’s sold everywhere, like Amazon target the works. Possibly even oh my gosh, there’s a store in Canada. What is it called? It’s like Indigo. Yeah, yeah. I now know like, Canadian and Australian, and all these, like the stores that are specific for the regions. Like I want to go visit them. Post COVID.

I know. Cool. Well, that’s, that is great. Thank you so much for being here. It’s been really fun to get to talk to you about iterating. And how to experiment, the long timeline, the short timeline, the making adjustments of it is just so close, near and dear to my heart. And it’s really fun to hear an expert in marketing talk about, I know that marketing and business is like one of those places where it’s there’s data to collect. But I think it’s really interesting to think about how some of the data isn’t what you should be collecting. So this has been a fascinating conversation for me, and thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

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What I am so struck by in this in this synergy is I love that Nikki is talking about experimentation around marketing. I talk about experimenting as a leader all the time, but I think marketing is one of the purest places, because we attach dollars to our marketing. We’re used to tracking so we can really use some of the ideas that we use in marketing. When we do other thought leadership in organizations, we can think about what we want it what we’re trying, we can think about what we want to measure. We can think about how we do that. And it’s a really great way to experiment but also to learn the lessons of marketing. It’s been great being here today and go experiment.

Nikki Nash

Important Links: 

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        • Nikki Nash- LinkedIn

Nikki Nash is a Podcast Host, Hay House author, motivational speaker, and creator of the Genius Profit Society, a training and development program on a mission to equip entrepreneurs with the tools and resources they need to share and profit from their message.

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