Ep 222: Why Your Lurking Community Members Matter More Than You Think with Paul Gowder

“A community-first mindset means showing up for your people—even when they’re just quietly watching.”

That’s how Paul Gowder, founder of PowWows.com, defines decades-long success in the online space. What started as a college hobby has blossomed into a vibrant, multimillion-follower platform celebrating Native American culture and proving that niche communities can not only survive but thrive in today’s noisy digital world.

Paul’s journey is a masterclass in staying true to your values, listening to your audience, and building engagement through heart, strategy, and the occasional well-placed email sequence.

Paul Gowder is the founder of PowWows.com, a digital hub for people wanting to explore Native American culture. With over 40 powwows live-streamed annually and a Facebook page boasting more than a million followers, Paul has spent nearly 30 years nurturing one of the most engaged online communities out there.

We Also Talked About:

• How Paul turned a college web project into a thriving, sustainable business
• The surprising power of “lurkers” in online communities
• Why email is still king (and how Paul uses Kit (was ConvertKit) to dominate it)
• The moment social media nearly killed his forums—and how he pivoted
• Using Group Leads to bridge Facebook groups and email sequences
• What a “community-first mindset” really looks like in action
• Hiring from your own community to build a rock-solid team
• How a mastermind and a coach helped him 10x his email marketing results
• Why the medium (Facebook, email, TikTok) is less important than the mindset
  

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Find a PowWow near you:  https://www.powwows.com/powwowsnearme
• Paul’s personal site:  https://www.paulgowder.com
• Behind-the-scenes look at his email toolkit: https://www.paulgowder.com/emailtools
• ConvertKit (now branded as Kit) – Paul’s go-to email platform  (affiliate link)
• Tool to sync Facebook group signups with email sequences –https://groupleads.net/
• Mediavine – Advertising partner for monetizing traffic – https://www.mediavine.com/

Want regular access to tips, techniques, and advice from experts about growing your business? Sign up here.

_____________

Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

Affiliate Disclaimer: If you click on links on this page and then make a purchase, I may earn a commission (at no extra cost to you).  I am a proud affiliate of these resources because I use them in my own life and business.

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 222: Why Your Lurking Community Members Matter More Than You Think with Paul Gowder

[00:00:00] What happens when a college hobby turns into a thriving decades long online community that connects hundreds of thousands of people around the world? And what if that community is built around a culture that lots of people would love to explore, but most people don’t know how to access it respectfully.

In other words, how do you keep an online community alive, engaged, and growing for nearly 30 years, especially through massive changes like the rise of social media? In today’s episode, I’m talking with Paul Gowder, the founder of powwows.com. Which is a vibrant, welcoming online space for people who want to connect with Native American culture.

Paul takes us behind the scenes of how he grew his site from a simple college side project into a high traffic community powered platform. We talk about what it means to have a community first mindset, how email marketing transformed his business.

And the surprising role that [00:01:00] lurking can play in building powerful engagement. You’ll also hear how Paul uses tools like Kit, which was ConvertKit and Group Leads to run a lean but highly effective content engine. Now, Paul is a master at blending heart and strategy with over 40 powwows live streamed annually and a Facebook page with over a million followers.

He’s proof that niche communities can thrive. Even in today’s ever-changing digital landscape. If you’re looking to build a sustainable community-centered business, Paul’s story is one that you don’t want to miss. 

Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m Trudy Rankin, and I bring you stories, tips, and advice from online entrepreneurs who have overcome problems and challenges to get to success, [00:02:00] because if they’ve done it, so can you.

My mission is simple. I want to help you solve the challenges you face as an online business owner so that you can have more time and money for yourself and your family, and more choices in how you live your life. 

So Paul, welcome to the podcast.

Paul Gowder: Thanks so much. I appreciate you having me. 

So let’s go ahead and dig in a little bit and get started. Share a little bit about yourself, who you are, your backgrounds and we’ll progress from there. 

Paul Gowder: Yeah I’m Paul Gatter, I’m from Lexington, South Carolina been married 28 ish years, and we have a a daughter who’s 20, works in Walt Disney World, right now.

So I started Powwows. com, my main website. I started that back in 1996 and didn’t start it as like a business like, I want to have this side business or whatever. It was, I was building web pages for fun in college. And that one took off and it took off because from the beginning, People [00:03:00] came to it and wanted ways to interact.

And so one of the first things we ever did was I found some free software back then and was able to throw up a forum and let people have those interactions and talk with each other. And that’s really been the heart of powwows.com is the people feeling connected with each other and having that community aspect.

And that’s what took it off in the beginning and still is what drives the site now. 

Trudy Rankin: So just for the sake of our listeners, some of which will not be from America, you’re talking about Powwows. 

Paul Gowder: Yes. 

Trudy Rankin: And maybe just talk a little bit about why that particular name, what is it about yourself or your area of interest that, that sort of got into that, what it’s about, what is it about?

Paul Gowder: Yeah, so powwows. com is we are all about helping anyone, whether you’re Native American or not, explore and experience and connect with Native American culture. And we do that through, in the beginning it was the forums and letting, mostly back then it was powwow people who danced and participate at powwows.

And now it’s more of a [00:04:00] worldwide audience, people that are interested in Native American culture. Powwows themselves are just a festival or a celebration. They happen all over the U. S. and Canada. Yeah. Throughout the year, there’s probably, if you live in the U. S. and Canada, there’s probably one within an hour drive of you and they’re open to the public, you can go and experience the culture up close and see it it’s a very vibrant thing that still happens in styles and things are still evolving, it’s while historic it is still a modern thing and it has modern twists to it so that’s what we do and that’s what powwows.com is all about. 

Trudy Rankin: It’s really interesting. I know a lot of people are fascinated by Native American culture and they do want to learn more about it and experience it. And that is a really interesting thing to be creating a community around. And once you set up that forum, and you started to see that people were interested in it, wanted to talk to each other about these things, just talk us through the growth and the journey of that, of building that up.

Paul Gowder: Yeah, and in the beginning, like I said, it was Powwow people and really it started in, [00:05:00] mostly people in the southeast, people I knew that, people I went to Powwows with, right? And then it started growing and becoming a little more U. S. based, mainly. And it, yeah, for the first few years, It was these powwow people.

And so a lot of the time, my job was just to stay out of the way and just to give people the resources that they wanted. There were times where people wanted a place to talk about a particular dance style or like beadwork. And so we would create a forum and create a place for people to go and talk about beadwork.

At some point, people started becoming friends and wanted to talk more, about about stuff outside of powwow. So we created forums, we had one called chit chat and we had lots of sub forums in there where people could just talk about, whatever the TV show was, or, whatever was going on.

So it was for me, it was figuring out ways that I could continue to give, People, ways to engage and moderate the site and, make, do the technical stuff. And while I participated in the discussions, it was really letting just the people back then just interact with each other and, we [00:06:00] would, I would post occasionally one of the first things we did was build a calendar of powwows. So we would work on that and then just let the community blossom. 

Trudy Rankin: So just out of sheer curiosity, you’ve built up this community. Is it a free community? Is it, do you monetize it?

How do you deal with keeping it going from a money perspective? 

Paul Gowder: Again, I never started thinking it was a business. And I ran powwows.com once we did start to monetize and in the beginning, monetization for us was just, there’s bills. We had to start paying bills, so we had to figure out a way to pay for it.

I was, I worked full time in South Carolina State Government throughout this. I was able to retire just a couple of years ago and go full time with powwows.com. So the way we monetize now is our communities, and I consider everybody in powwows.com one big community.

We have several places that people can interact as community. All of that is free. We don’t charge for any of that. We make money mostly on advertising revenue. So we are part of the Mediavine network. And of course, then we [00:07:00] also do some advertising, brand deals, that kind of thing. In addition to that, we stream PowWows live.

People that organize PowWows they hire us to come in and stream. We did, I don’t know, I can’t remember the total. We still have a couple more to go this year, but we’ll be in the ballpark of 40 something PowWows we streamed this year all over the U. S. and Canada. And so that’s another part of our monetization model.

But yeah, today, again, the community is free and we have Facebook groups, we have an email list. We have different places that people can engage and all of that is still open. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s interesting. So just my brain instantly is going, that is a lot of work. That is a ton of stuff happening.

Do you have a team that you work with? 

Paul Gowder: I do. My wife actually went full time with the site before I did because I was working state government. I had to work so many years before I could get my pension, but she she manages our powwow calendar and does all the relationships and makes sure all that information is posted correctly.

And then, of course, I have a lot of virtual assistants, but then, the other two really critical people on the team is I have [00:08:00] two guys, Michael and Ryan, who do most of the live streaming for me. Especially Michael Gabbert. He does a lot of our live streaming. He did 25 of these powwows himself this year.

So yeah, it’s a good team. We’re, we’re still a small team but it’s really, it’s a really good time. And what’s interesting is Michael and Ryan both came out of the forums. They were members of the forums back in like 1999, and that’s how I got to know them and they started working with me.

Trudy Rankin: That’s interesting. I’ve had a few other people say that the best people that they get on their teams are from people that have used to belong to their community. It’s interesting, because they share the same passion, the same interests, and care about it as much, which I find fascinating. But one of the things that I wanted to ask you about given that you’ve got this long history of building a very engaged community, one that’s in there, talking to each other, they’re not just waiting for you to feed, [00:09:00] spoon feed them stuff.

And basically they’re interested in being part of a community, almost like a real face to face community, but just online. What have you learned over the years about helping that community thrive and grow?

Paul Gowder: For me, people ask me that all the time. And it, what I tell people is you have to have a community first mindset.

And to me that means, Everything you do needs to be engaging people as if they’re part of your community. And I would, go back to Facebook groups are great, but that’s not your community. That’s a place where your community can go, but a Facebook group is not your community. Your community is anybody out there who feels some kind of connection with you or with each other.

Email is a really great place to engage your community, even though it’s you talking to them, it’s not them talking to each other, but they can still feel like they’re part of the [00:10:00] community, and so you have to have that community first mindset in that everything you do, email TikToks, or even a Facebook post, when you write these things, you have to think community first, and some of the stuff we post on social media, Is lots of photos and videos because that’s what our community wants to engage with.

They want to see photos of powwows. They don’t necessarily while we do things like asking questions and running polls that my audience wants to engage with photos and videos. And so we post a lot of that. And then people will, They have that sense of being there and being a part of it. And then with email, I got a message today with somebody.

Telling me how they feel really connected because of the information and because the way I say things in email, I talk very personal. I talk first person. And I try to have it one on one conversation. I don’t do things like, Hey, thank you everybody who subscribed, right? I’m saying thank you for subscribing, I want to tell you about this thing, I’m, I try to do that and be one on one, and I think that’s really important and that can [00:11:00] drive when you make decisions about other things you want to do, is be community first.

Trudy Rankin: \ That’s interesting. So you’re using a lot of Tools to connect with people. How did you figure out that people wanted, in your community, wanted to engage via a specific way, which is the videos and the images and things like that? Did you ask them? Did they tell you?

How did you figure it out? 

Paul Gowder: It’s years of experimenting, right? I’ve been doing this a long time, but it is asking questions. It is listening. And I coach people on email and it’s interesting to see how many people will send messages out, newsletters out, and they never respond and they never talk to people when they get emails back.

It’s just not part of people’s workflow sometimes. And that’s where you can have really interesting conversations. Not only, Can you form a relationship with somebody who’s subscribed, but you’re going to get super information out of them, right? So when, this was maybe three or four years, four years ago, probably, or [00:12:00] more I was getting lots of the same questions and really working on my email marketing.

So I was like, I’m getting these same three or four questions. And so I built an email sequence that answered those questions. And now I’m able to, with my email list, say, Oh, You’ve never been to a powwow. You want to go to one. I have a whole series on what to expect at your first powwow, and I can answer all of your questions on that.

And again, that email sequence is very personal. I talk to them. I ask questions. I say things like, I know you’re probably anxious and you don’t know what to expect. And here’s some things that you might be feeling. Let me help you with that. And I get replies back and I’m able to send them and then, you hear, Oh I did go to a powwow.

That was the goal, right? I got somebody to go to a powwow and experience it. Yeah, it’s listening and it’s asking questions and just being a part of the community yourself. Even like a Facebook group, you don’t have to be in there, the one posting every day, but you need to be in there listening and looking and see what people are posting about and figure out then ways that you can build content that, that delivers [00:13:00] the information they want.

Trudy Rankin: That’s interesting because my, my, my brain instantly went to that whole phrase,

Paul Gowder: yeah and that’s what my email list is, right?

I feel like email is the heart of our community because that’s because we send, three or four messages a week, that’s where people feel it. It is a touch point that they get. Often and more directly than, say, a social media post. So that is the heart of our community and that’s where I’m able to engage.

And that’s where people tell me they feel connected because I’m sending out these messages and they feel like I’m delivering the information they want. It’s amazing that you can, those people feel like they are part of this bigger group even though they’re not in a Facebook group or, joined some kind of membership thing.

Trudy Rankin: That’s interesting because, some of the things that we read about, especially post COVID, is that people really desperately feel the need to belong. And being able to generate that feeling of belonging is absolutely critical. Did you ever have a time [00:14:00] when you were building your community where you had really low engagement and people weren’t talking to each other and you’re sitting there thinking what do I do about this?

Paul Gowder: Yeah. The one that always comes to mind is When, so we were around before social media, right? And when that, when the whole Facebook thing started happening and people started moving over, there were people in the forums that were posting messages like, Hey guys, I love this thing. Thanks so much, powwows.com. We’ve had great fun here the last few years, but you guys are dead. I’m heading over to Facebook. And so it was, several months, a year there, where trying to figure out how we transition, how we, where we fit in a social media world. So that was tough and, you definitely saw a decline in the activity on the forum.

And so it was then, figuring out, okay, how do we continue to deliver the content people want to create that sense of belonging on a social media platform? It was new to everybody, right? And we figured it out and we have a really [00:15:00] great, we have two, two Facebook groups. I had three Facebook groups.

Killed one. That’s a whole nother story, but I have two Facebook groups that are really active. We just started another one and our page our page has over a million followers now. And so we get a lot of engagement there as well. Yeah we were able to succeed on social media, but it was a hard transition for us.

Trudy Rankin: That’s interesting because with all of the changes that are coming or that are already happening in terms of the technology and things, it’s interesting. I’m curious, can you just talk a little bit about the tool set that you use, the types of tools that you use to help you run your business and to work with your communities?

Paul Gowder: The thing I’m in every day is Kit or it was known as ConvertKit, the email platform, that I’m in that Every single day, that’s, I start I make sure that’s my priority is to, write the next newsletter or to, whatever I need to be doing in there, whether it’s editing a sequence, creating a new flow or whatever, I’m in [00:16:00] that every day all day long, so that is, is a big help as I think about the system is used, I’m in my Outlook, my email All day, every day, making sure I follow up on those engagements.

And I use some tools like TextExpander to help me have some kind of pre filled things that I can send over and then customize as I need. So there’s that. One really cool thing, again, email being the heart of our community, I use a tool called Group Leads that lets me take when somebody requests to join our Facebook group, it can take the email addresses that people leave in the answers to our question, it automatically puts that into our ConvertKit email sequences, and so it delivers content to them automatically.

So that’s a big help to us. We have a Facebook group that’s over 125,000 people, so we’ve been able to convert a lot of people into the newsletter that way. Yeah that’s just a few. I use I said I’m with Mediavine, and for ads, they have a free tool that anybody can use, I absolutely love it, for emails called Grow.

And that lets me build embedded forms [00:17:00] on my site and craft them to show different ones based on the WordPress category. Like I said, I have a What to Expect to Traverse Powwow email sequence. On pages where I think people New people would be, I put that there on pages that are about ancestry and genealogy, I put another form that’s embedded there, it takes them through a whole series on how to use Ancestry.com, how to trace your Native American heritage, all that kind of stuff, so it’s able to, I’m able to figure out where, how to deliver content, exactly what people are looking for on those pages. The growth is, that’s an awesome tool. 

Trudy Rankin: That sounds amazing. I want to come back to, to, it’s called Kit now, but in my brain I’m calling it ConvertKit.

What made you choose Kit or ConvertKit instead of some other email platform? 

Paul Gowder: I started with MailChimp and used it for years. And my emails looked like Sunday morning sales papers. I think you and I are probably at the age we still remember getting Sunday [00:18:00] sales papers. That’s what my email looked like.

They were heavily graphic, heavily tabled and columns and all this stuff. And they were really pretty and they got some engagement and it was probably about six years. I worked with an email marketing coach and went through his process and, I had seen other people doing it and why I reached out to him and I said, I want to do better with my email.

I want to figure out better ways to engage. So we went to a more tech space and that’s where I really started building out these ways of communicating better in email instead of just shout. I felt like I was just shouting at people in those emails and that was a big transition for us. Again, We were doing well with our social media and our Facebook groups and all that kind of thing.

But again, it was really making that conversion and changing the way we did email that has really helped boost things and have that base of people no matter what the algorithms do, I know I have that base of subscribers that I can communicate with. 

Trudy Rankin: So it’s mainly because ConvertKit’s text base that you shipped it across?

Paul Gowder: It was that and the fact that I like the way that I can build the flows and [00:19:00] sequences in that for me it made more sense. MailChimp and all the others do it. It just, for my brain, it didn’t work as easy. I probably have 50 different email sequences in my Kit right now. Some active, some not, but it just, for me, it was a much easier way to do it.

And I was able to use the tags and those, the forms that they have. It all just flowed better for me. I found myself struggling to build that stuff in MailChimp, whereas in ConvertKit, it’s, it just makes sense for me. 

Yeah no, absolutely. Absolutely. And ConvertKit’s got some really interesting little add ons to it that it’s quite attractive.

You can get into their program where you Support other people’s emails and, or newsletters and they support yours and you can use it as a tool to grow your basically grow your email list. 

Paul Gowder: Yeah, their recommendation network is awesome. It’s great. 

Trudy Rankin: And do you use it quite heavily?

Paul Gowder: I do use it to recommend other people and I’m also use their paid parts so that I’m able to [00:20:00] monetize recommending newsletters. Building my own for my coaching, my, my kind of that side of things. I’m building it on Kit now and I’m going to, I’ll probably do better with that.

It’s. While I do good recommending other people’s newsletters, there are people who recommend powwows.com, but we are such a niche. We don’t get a lot of inbound subscribers from the Recommendation Network just because we’re a strange niche. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, no, that, that makes a lot of sense. I want to swing back just really quickly to something that you mentioned before we finish up, because I understand our time is quite limited.

But you mentioned that you actually got yourself a coach. To help you improve the email part of your business. Can you just talk us through your mindset? Why a coach rather than trying to figure it out by yourself? 

Paul Gowder: It’s how I work, right? It, I’d done a couple of courses and still every once in a while I will buy a course and I’m, I have a couple of courses, so I think they’re good.

For me I get more out of [00:21:00] it when I have the one on one coaching. The guy I worked with, he had a course, but then his add on was his one on one coaching. For me, it forces my, we all do it, right? We’ll take a course and then we just procrastinate finishing it. Don’t make it a priority, whatever, but I know when I spend that little bit of extra money that I will complete it.

At the time, and still to this day, I was in a mastermind group, which is one of the things I, they’re so good. That’s recommend everybody find a mastermind group. And that was I was going through and figuring out ways to do things better and to level up my business. And that was, we were talking about email and how I could do it better.

So I was like, okay, I’m just going to commit and go ahead and make that extra investment in time and money and hire the coach. 

Trudy Rankin: And it sounds like it’s paid off. 

Paul Gowder: Yes. Huge. It’s funny that I still talk with him. We still we had a good conversation last week about some stuff, even though now I’m doing what he does, and I don’t, and he’s been doing a whole lot longer, but and now I’m being invited to speak and go to conferences and talk about all this [00:22:00] stuff.

So I’ve somewhat traveled in his footsteps. So it’s fun. But yeah, it changed my whole mindset for what I knew email could do and be. And it’s just changed everything we do and how we do operate our business. 

Trudy Rankin: And I think that’s really important, not only the fact that it’s completely changed the way you operate, it’s made a difference to the success of your business, but it shortcuts that, that.

That time that you would have to spend trying to figure it out on your own, and maybe not actually reaching the level, the same level as you would otherwise. 

Paul Gowder: Exactly. And just having that accountability, which is another thing with Masterminds, that’s the thing that I need. I need somebody to say, Hey, have you done this?

Did you finish these tasks that we laid out? So that was really huge. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah that’s really important point. Paul, it’s been fantastic talking with you. If people were interested in reaching out to you either to connect with you or to just find out more about what you do, where’s the best place for them to go?

Paul Gowder: First, I want to say again that powwows are open to the public. I highly encourage you to find one near you. [00:23:00] You can go to powwows.com/powwowsnearme, and that will take you to where we will send you powwows in your area. If you’re interested in the other part of what I do, paulgowder.Com is the place.

And I do have a video you can watch on some of those email tools we talked about. So paulgowder.com/emailtools will take you to that. And I go through how I grow and build my email list. 

Trudy Rankin: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Paul. It’s been really interesting. 

Paul Gowder: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

If this episode sparked ideas for your own community or made you realize you’ve been treating your Facebook group like the whole building, when it’s really just the lobby.

Then you’ve just had a taste of Paul Gowder’s wisdom in action. I loved it when Paul said that a community first mindset means showing up for your people even when they’re just quietly watching.

Because too many times we can mistake lack of engagement in our online communities for lack of interest, and that definitely isn’t always the case. So make sure to check out powwows.com to see [00:24:00] how Paul’s created something truly special that honors culture and builds connection.

And if you want to level up your email game head to Paul gowder.com/emailtools for a peek into how he keeps his community so deeply engaged. And if you enjoyed today’s episode, please hit that subscribe button and leave a review. It’s one of the best ways to help other people find the podcast and learn how to launch and grow their online business too.

Thanks for listening. And remember, your community is more than just clicks and comments. It’s people, real people. So build your community for them.

So until next time, keep taking those steps, big or small, toward building the business and the life that you want.