How to Build A Community With Email Marketing w/Paul Gowder

Paul Gowder shares how he used email marketing to build a list of over 100k. He's used this strategy to build a large community without depending on social media platforms to grow his brand.

Takeaways

• Building a Family-Centered, Location-Independent Business (00:00:13)

Paul discusses how he built powwows.com while prioritizing family life and being location-independent. He and his family traveled extensively, including 42 trips to Disney, while balancing his growing business.

• Starting a Business as a Hobby (04:09:61)

Powwows.com started as a hobby in 1996 when Paul was learning HTML and building webpages. It wasn't until years later, when expenses increased, that he began to explore monetization.

• The Shift from Forums to Social Media (06:33:14)

Listen as Paul explains how he shifted focus while building his brand and broadening his influence using powwows.com

• Challenges and Fears of Scaling a Business (09:13:21)

Paul shares his fears about scaling powwows.com, especially when dealing with increasing expenses, changing technology, and fluctuating SEO and social media rules. He highlights how quickly things can change, using Facebook's sudden exit from podcasting as an example.

• Importance of Email Marketing for Community Building (13:52:10)

Paul emphasizes that email marketing is the heart of his business. Despite the rise of social media platforms, email remains the most reliable way to connect with and maintain a community, as it allows for more direct communication.

Connect with Paul: Website | LinkedIn

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Paul Gowder and His Journey
• 3:01 Balancing Family and Entrepreneurship
• 5:52 The Birth of Powwows.com
• 8:49 Navigating Fears in Business
• 12:11 The Importance of Community and Email Marketing
• 15:03 Strategies for Growing Your Audience
• 17:51 Gratitude and Lifestyle Flexibility

Transcript

Jennifer Francis (00:00.078)
Today's guest, Paul Gowder, started his community on powwows.com in 1996. And while he has achieved success, like 100,000 emails, I'm often struck when I'm doing these interviews by the personal story, know, the personal stuff that comes up during these interviews, which is why ask them to tell me who they are.

and what they're grateful for. Paul Gowder's daughter wanted to go to Disney 40 times. They went 42 times. The other most notable thing about this podcast and about this guest is that he does everything he does with his family location independent. That means he travels around all over the place while these

built a community over the past 20 years, had children, gone to Disney World 42 times, all while building a business. So when you listen to these episodes, I ask you to also, in addition to the little nuggets you get from these thought leaders, these business leaders, these entrepreneurs, listen to the human elements.

the human story. It's quite fascinating. I'm J. Rose Marie. Thank you for listening.

you

Jennifer Francis (01:37.464)
My guest today is Paul Gowder, owner and founder of powwows.com, the leading online community celebrating Native American arts and culture. Welcome Paul. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Yes, for sure. Before we get into what you do, could you tell us who is Paul? Yeah, thanks. So I live in Lexington, South Carolina, and most importantly, I am a husband and a father.

My daughter just turned 20 last week and been married since 1996. So quite a while back at the same time, the year we got married, started, I started playing around with web pages and building HTML sites, you know, just playing with that whole thing. And out of that years later became a company and an online community that really has been an amazing thing to see develop and thrive. But yeah, also

We're huge Disney fans and travel. We've really prioritized our life to do a lot of traveling. So we've been fortunate to take a lot of really cool trips and that's kind of why we do what we do. okay. Thank you. Yeah. I see where it said in your description that you and your family went to Disney 42 times. That's amazing. That was my daughter's goal. When we started going, we took her for the first time. She was about four and a half years old and

Somewhere along the way, we started going more regularly. And then she came up with a goal before she graduated high school. She wanted to go at least 40 times. So we hit that goal for her. And now she works there. So I guess it all worked out. Yeah. Well, that is wonderful. That's amazing. All right. So family is obviously important to you. How have you been able to mesh?

your business life, your entrepreneurship with your family life? know, it's a challenge and I don't know that I always did it well. I think at times I probably prioritized the wrong thing at the wrong time. I mean, having family support over the years was really important and they were understanding. know, I can think back to thinking about Disney trips. I remember one time we had a major issue on the website and I can remember

Jennifer Francis (04:01.132)
I didn't know how big of a problem it was. And I was like, we were at Disney. was like, y'all just go, go, go downstairs and wait for me in the lobby. I'll be right there. And I had to finally call them. It's like, it's going to be a while. And we had a major issue. we mean things like that happen. But what I tried to do, and I was working a full-time job for, for most of that time, in addition to doing powwows.com. So it was, it was a tough struggle of finding time to spend, you know, how to prioritize family and how to prioritize the business.

So it was lots of late nights and weekend work and working on my lunch hour from the full-time job and things like that. It was a struggle, but it was just, it was something that we had to continue having conversations about and making sure that everybody kind of understood that. And when I did have business time and when I did like set aside that time, was that everybody knew, hey, I need a couple of hours to do this and then we can.

then we can do other stuff. It was hard. Yeah. Thank you. Yes. Thank you for sharing that. It never is perfect when you're trying to balance. And in your case, you were juggling three things, work, entrepreneurship, and family. So yeah, that's really good. You still got to go to Disney with your daughter, and that is important. So thank you. Yeah. All right.

So why did you start PowerWire and tell us about that? Yeah, I mean, it was never meant, I didn't think it would be a business. It wasn't something I created saying, you know, like so many people do now, hey, let's start a YouTube channel or hey, let's start this shop or whatever. Let's try to sell things online. That was back in 1986. I don't think people really knew that online businesses were a thing. It was really just I liked playing and tinkering on the computer. And so when the web started coming out,

I wanted to see if I could build webpages. So I built webpages about things I knew. And at the time I was just starting to get into, and people were taking me to my first powwows and teaching me all that and learning about the regalia and the songs and all that. So I built pages about that. was like my story of just, I'm learning about this. This is really cool. Check this out. At the same time, I also built a website about Star Wars toys. You can see I've got my mask there and that right there is a signed

Jennifer Francis (06:22.946)
picture of Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, and Mark Hamill. So yeah, I'm still a big Star Wars fan, and I built that page. But that was before Disney bought Star Wars, and there weren't any prequels, and there weren't any more movies. So that one didn't go anywhere. The other one took off, and people started coming, and they wanted to interact with each other. So we started a forum, and it started growing from there. And it really wasn't until we started having bills, and I started having to pay for things. I'm like, hey, you know,

Maybe I should figure out a way to at least break even. And it was probably 10 or 15 years before we really started seeing profit and started thinking, well, this could be something more. And never dreamed it. Well, it was a dream, but I never knew, thought it would be a reality that I could actually leave my job and go full time. I was fortunate enough to be in a job. worked for state government so that I did have a pension. And after I worked so many years, I could leave and continue to be paid.

you know, in retirement. that kind of helped make that transition. And now I do it full time. So it's just been amazing. Yeah, that is. So what is this community and how were you able to attract that community? Tell us about it. Help us connect with it. Sure. In the early days, it was, it was just powwow dancers and powwow singers and people, you know, that were actual participants. And we built a forum, but this was back before Facebook groups and social media.

So we built this forum and people would come and interact and we'd have conversations about how to do different crafts or what the history of this was. And so it was very, very specific on powwow dancers. As social media emerged and we started growing, we really started seeing that other people outside, whether it was people with native heritage or not, but people wanted to know more about powwow. So that's when we kind of transitioned and it was a slow transition. It wasn't like an overnight thing, but we started

putting up more content of explaining things for people who are first time here and sharing that type of articles. now with our Facebook page has over a million followers. We know that we're much, much bigger than just a native population. attract people all over the world. So now our community is all about helping raise awareness, helping get more attention on certain things, helping businesses see more customers, helping powwows see more visitors.

Jennifer Francis (08:49.518)
So that's what we hope to do now is just take our following and help shine spotlights on different things and really help elevate everyone together. Right, right. Yeah, sounds exciting. It's funny, in 1990, I started a website, something similar. It was just fun for me though. Right, right. Yeah, this is amazing. I wanted to talk about your fears when you realize

this was not just a part-time hobby for you? Yeah. I can remember there were lots of things that as you start having bills and having expenses, the first time we started seeing enough traffic that we had to do more than just a $20 a month hosting plan, we actually had to start.

getting dedicated servers and those kind of things. You start seeing big bills. And so it was, you know, it was tough and it was a very fearful thing of knowing, not knowing if we could cover expenses month to month. Then we started doing live streaming and started traveling to Powwows and you know, didn't, I didn't know like if another Powwow would call us. And you know, there a lot of unknowns. That was probably the biggest fear in the beginning in the first maybe decade is just not knowing

if this thing was sustainable. And then as we started making it more of a job and more of a part of us, then it was like, okay, well, you know, the fear is how do I balance this and how do I make sure that if we start transitioning more into this being more of what we do, can I continue to, you know, pay the bills, right? And when I made that jump, even though I retired and had a pension, it's still like,

And still my fear now is, you know, with me being full time, is that the best decision for the company? Right? Do I bring enough value to justify me being full time? And that was a fear for, you know, leading up to that and still that first year or so, like, my gosh, should I have stayed my job and just hired somebody else to do things? you know, was there a better investment in the company? I hope that ultimately I did make the right decision.

Jennifer Francis (11:13.442)
But yeah, mean, there's always fears about whether or not you're going to be able to continue and do what you had done before. Right. So even at this stage where you're somewhat successful, I mean, you are successful, you're doing it and people are attracted to what you have to offer, you are still fearful. And that's probably, you know, common to most entrepreneurs.

this may not have been the right decision. mean, yeah. Well, you know, and with the things of, you know, we saw back in the, what the early two thousands as social media has really started coming in. I mean, the landscape changes so fast and like we had a forum and we were completely, everything we did was based on that forum. All of our traffic, all of our interactions, all of our revenue was based on that forum. And when people started going to social media, I mean, that was a huge shift for us. And we, we lost.

a lot of traffic and we had to really adjust. Now with the changing SEO and AI and all this, and over the years how organic reach has changed on social media, I mean, there's always the unknown, right? And like so many people that were hit with like helpful content and all these core updates, we've seen swings in our SEO traffic and that kind of stuff is scary. And you just don't know as you become dependent on...

Google sending you traffic or Facebook sending you traffic. It's like if they change the rules, we have a podcast at Powells.com and Facebook decided a few years ago, like, hey, we're gonna get into podcasting. It was wonderful. I this is an easy example of how things change so fast. We were getting 15 to 20,000 downloads on Facebook of our podcast every episode. And I was like, this is great. This is awesome.

Overnight, Facebook said, we're going to kill that. And they got rid of the entire inner, you know, nothing. There was nothing left of podcasting on Facebook and all of those downloads went away overnight. And so, you know, we had sponsorships and we had, you deals with different companies to advertise on that platform. And all of that was just gone overnight. So, you know, these these companies, Google, whoever else, you know, they they they're dependent on they look out for themselves and they're

Jennifer Francis (13:37.898)
investors, not necessarily us as a small business. So it's really scary. And I went to a meta conference back in May, and that was one of the topics is these platforms invited us to build our businesses on them, but they changed the rules. And it's kind of scary for us. so that was we we met with some legislators and that was a conversation a lot of us had. And we've been fortunate, you know, we haven't been hit as bad with some of these SEO updates. But I know

So many entrepreneurs out there have gotten hit and, you know, having to change their entire business model. So yeah, this kind of stuff is scary. You never know what's going to happen the next day. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I remember when Facebook jumped on the podcast, Ben Wagon. And that's why I believe that community is so important. And it's that connection you have with those people and not everybody will follow you off. Right. But

Most will your core listeners, your core audience will follow you. And I guess that's one thing to take away from this conversation is that your audience from back then stayed with you regardless of where you were. Right? Yes. And I'm now, one of the things I do now is actually help people with this, but email has been one of the key pieces of that. And not many people think about email as part of their community, but our

our email subscribers are really the heart of our community. And that's kind of where we want our home base to be is not our Facebook group, not our Facebook page. Even though those are huge platforms, we want, if you're gonna really be part of our community, we want you on our email list. And that's where we're gonna deliver the messaging and everything first. And these other places are just extras. yeah, email and being able to talk directly to our subscribers is unbelievable. that's really, really been.

the backbone of everything we do. Right. Okay. All right. Now that we've touched on that, tell us what you do for your clients and how we can get in touch with you. Yeah. And so that was a great transition there. Nowadays, I help people and help entrepreneurs figure out ways to develop community online and have that sense of community, have that sense of belonging, whether it's through social media or email. do right now, most of my clients were

Jennifer Francis (16:00.408)
we're really focused on helping them level up their email and using automations and sequences to really segment their audience and deliver the right messaging to the right people to help sales, help traffic or whatever. That's what I've been helping people do is really figure out ways to use their email and to grow their email to be a vital part of their business. Okay, and how can we get in touch with you? Yeah, I'd love to help you if you're interested.

PaulGadder.com is where I post all of that kind of information and I do have a video where you can see what my favorite ways of growing email is and that's PaulGadder.com slash email tools and then show you how I've been able to grow my email list to over 100,000 subscribers and use that is really the key and the heart of Powwows.com. Awesome. Thank you. We'll put those links in the show notes and you know, so people could use them. Thanks. All right.

So I see this, you give me this idea, I'm stuck. How do I grow my following? one of you know, and I'm actually, I'm speaking in a conference next month. And so I've been working on this and this is one of the things we're going to talk about is, know, if you, if I had to start over, where would I go and how would I grow my list? there's a few things I would do. And I think that the key thing with email marketing is not worrying about what you're going to send out every week for these.

broadcast messages or messages that goes to everybody, I think the more important thing is to figure out what information your subscribers are looking for. So for example, if you are going back to my Disney World stuff, if you're a Disney travel agent, then you're to have people that are looking for information for Disney World. You're have people looking for information for cruises. You're have people looking for information on maybe all inclusives, right? Those are different segments of your audience. So figure out how you could

put something on your website to attract people to just your cruise information. So maybe you have a cruise packing list or here are my 10 tips for first time cruisers. And then you build a whole series of emails based on that segment of audience. I think that is the most important place to start. Having an email opt in that just says, hey, subscribe to my newsletter. That doesn't really help grow your list. you need to figure out what your segments are, how your audience breaks down.

Jennifer Francis (18:19.702)
and give them something that applies to that group and you'll see your email list grow. And I think that's really the best place to start. The second thing I would tell people to do is my favorite tool right now is ConvertKit and they have a recommendation engine or recommendation platform and it is helping people grow their list significantly. And it's creators recommending each other and they have it all automated with their email opt-ins. It's really great.

So if you're looking to grow your list, I highly recommend going over to ConvertKit and using that recommendation engine as well. Thank you. I love those tips and really, podcasters can use those tips as well to grow their audience. All right. Thank you. All right. So what is Paul grateful for today? I am so grateful that we are able to have this lifestyle we created of travel. Just this past weekend, I I got back yesterday, we drove down to Florida to visit our daughter.

Like I said, she works at Disney World. So we were able to go down for a couple of days and she worked in the mornings. And so my wife and I would stay in the room and do our work because we can work from anywhere. So I'm really grateful that we had that kind of flexibility. And so we were able to work in the morning, spend the evenings with her and get to visit and being flexible and having this kind of schedule and options to work from anywhere has really let us travel and go all over. Two weeks ago, we were in Alaska. In March, we did a cruise from

Honolulu to Vancouver. It's just amazing that we're able to do these trips, continue to work and continue to do our business. So I am really grateful for this lifestyle we've created. Yeah, that is, that is amazing. I appreciate that. All right. So I'm going to let you go soon. I really appreciate you coming in and talking to us today. I enjoyed the conversation, but I want to ask you and specific to podcasters, how can a podcaster use giveaways to grow their podcasting business?

Yeah, I love doing giveaways. It's one of my favorite things. An easy tip I have for podcasting especially is it's so hard to get listeners to come back to your website, right? That's the whole thing is how do we get our listeners to come back? Offering them show notes and offering them links or whatever is good, but giveaways are so, good. And here's one of the things I do is first on powells.com, it's the same URL for every giveaway we do. It's powells.com slash win.

Jennifer Francis (20:39.736)
So it's really easy for me in a podcast to say, hey, you want to enter a giveaway, powwows.com slash win. That's the first thing. Then I use a software called ViralSweep, which lets me have to create bonus codes. So in a podcast or in a live video, I'm able to say, hey, we're giving away this prize. If you guys on this podcast want extra entries that only people listening to this podcast get, here's a code. Maybe it's six digits or whatever. And I give them that code and it's only

you know, that code is only good in that podcast episode, then they have a reason to go back to that episode. That has helped me with, again, like with our live streams, my weekly live show podcasting, it really helps get people from those platforms back to the website. And then of course they subscribe to our email list and then we can continue to talk with them and have them as part of our community. Yeah, that is an awesome tip. I love it. Thank you. Thank you, Paul Goder for coming and speaking to us today. Any parting shots?

If you're out there and you're stuck with email marketing or growing your community, I'd love to help and work with you. Go over to paulgatter.com. You can book a free discovery call. I'd love to help you. It's really been fun to see what we can help other entrepreneurs do and grow their business and their revenue by just doing a few simple things in email. So I'd love to work with you. Awesome. I appreciate you, Paul.