Broadcasting is a communication model for a node to emit the packets via wireless channels to its neighbor nodes. In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), it is commonly implemented through flooding to find routes, send alarm signals and page a particular host. Conventionally, ad hoc routing protocols, such as AODV, use blind flooding extensively for on-demand route discovery, which could result in a high number of redundant retransmissions, leading to serious contention and collisions referred to as the broadcast storm problem. A gossip-based approach, in which each node forwards a message with some probability, has been proposed in past years to alleviate this problem. The approach combines gossiping with AODV (denoted as AODV+G) and exhibits a significant performance improvement in simulations. In this paper, we make a mathematical inference from observing the behavior of the gossip-based approach, and improve the gossip-based approach by employing the remaining energy of nodes in the gossip mechanism (denoted as AODV+GE) to extend the lifetime of the entire network and improve the packet delivery ratio. Through mathematical inference and simulations we show that AODV+GE outperforms AODV+G in terms of the lifetime of the whole network, average node energy consumption, and packet delivery ratio.