Holly Homer / CEO. Blogger. Software Developer

From Pajama Jeans to Pagewheel: What Holly Homer Can Teach Us About DIY Entrepreneurship

Holly Homer didn’t plan to start a business—she just needed an outlet from the chaos of motherhood. Her journey from sending long Saturday morning emails to a friend to building KidsActivities.com and Pagewheel is proof that success starts with showing up.

She used her life as content, leaned into her mess, and built one of the most beloved parenting brands online. When tech became her bottleneck, she didn’t outsource—she co-invented a platform to make funnels easy. Holly’s story is a masterclass in turning real-life chaos into creative currency—and building the tools to do it again and again.

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Holly Homer is a pioneering content creator who stumbled into entrepreneurship over two decades ago when she launched one of the earliest mom blogs, June Cleaver Nirvana. Today, she’s the founder of the wildly popular KidsActivities.com and co-creator of Pagewheel, a no-tech funnel-building platform designed for creators who’d rather focus on content than code. Based in Dallas, Holly’s journey from overwhelmed mom to digital powerhouse is marked by scrappy innovation, heartfelt storytelling, and a passion for making online business more accessible.

Pagewheel.com 

For those with kids: KidsActivities.com

Paul Povolni, the founder of Voppa Creative, has been a creative leader for over 30 years, with clients around the world. He’s led teams in creating award-winning branding and design as well as equipping his clients to lead with Clarity, Creativity and Culture.

Headsmack Website

Transcript

Paul Povolni (02:33.272)
Hey, welcome to the Head Smack Podcast. name is Paul Pavolny and I'm excited to have another misfit with me. I have Holly Homer, who accidentally started one of the first mom blogs 23 years ago and it has led her on a crazy entrepreneurial adventure. She runs kidsactivities.com and is a co-founder of Pagewheel, which was created to solve her biggest tech problem. Holly lives in the suburbs of Dallas with her husband, the occasional grown child and a Frenchie named Panda. How you doing Holly?

Holly (03:02.409)
I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me today.

Paul Povolni (03:05.646)
I'm looking forward to the conversation. I am a little sunburned here. I've got a little bit too much sun over the weekend celebrating my 30th anniversary. And so if the glare hurts your eyes, I'm sorry.

Holly (03:21.838)
I'm good. I'll wear my sunglasses.

Paul Povolni (03:24.15)
All right, all right. So Holly, the way I usually like to start this, and I appreciate you coming on today, the way I usually like to start this is by just hearing a little bit about your origin story. So we heard a little bit about it in the introduction in reading your bio, but I just want to kind of hear from you. What's the origin of Holly? How did you, you can go as far back as you want, but just share a little bit about Holly.

Holly (03:49.385)
Yeah, and you'll have to cut me off if I talk too long, but Vy, so I was a physical therapist, but I had always wanted to be a stay at home mom. And so I had bugged my husband daily before we had kids, just reminding him as soon as I was gonna have kids, I was gonna stay home. He was gonna have to figure it out. So we had been married about 10 years before we started having kids. And so I stayed home. And before that, like,

Paul Povolni (03:53.781)
No, you're good.

Paul Povolni (04:08.108)
Yeah.

Holly (04:18.057)
I was a director of a clinic and people listened to me when I talked to them all of a sudden, I was home. And the children, they just do not listen. Yeah, and we ended up with three boys. And it was very isolating coming from having people all around me all the time, adults, and then coming home and being kind of stuck.

Paul Povolni (04:28.298)
Yeah, especially when they hit two, right?

Paul Povolni (04:46.626)
Yeah.

Holly (04:46.641)
when you have like the first one you can take place as the second one, a little bit. And then by the third one, you're pretty tied to the home. so my husband was, he's a doctor. So he's at the hospital like all the time, because it was the beginning of his career. And so I started sending these emails to one of my dear friends from college who was kind of in the same situation. She had two boys. And we had an every Saturday, basically, I would sit down at my email.

Paul Povolni (04:50.466)
Yeah, yeah.

Holly (05:15.433)
and this was like 24, 25 years ago. And I would, I'd ask my husband before I went to work to download my email, because I had no idea how email worked. And I'm sure he was just rolling his eyes at me. So he would open the computer. Now I know, he opened the computer. But anyway, and I would write these long letters to my friend Jodi, and she would write back, and we did this every Saturday morning for over a year. And then,

Paul Povolni (05:23.374)
the

Paul Povolni (05:31.502)
Yeah, yeah.

Holly (05:41.543)
And it was like one of those things that was like therapy and it was awesome. And I was like, like made it through the week because like I knew at the end of the week, I'd like make this long. We would work it out together on Saturdays. So, and then one day on Saturday, her subject line was, we need to stop emailing dot dot dot. was like, okay, I don't think Jodi understands how important this is to me.

Paul Povolni (05:46.402)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (05:54.721)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (06:09.431)
Hahaha

Holly (06:10.137)
And so I opened up the email and she said, I think we should start blogs. And I was like, don't know what a blog is. And then she was like, because I've been emailing someone else. So like she was cheating on me. And so her point was if we started these blogs, then we could write these things on these blogs.

Paul Povolni (06:19.374)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (06:24.174)
no. Yeah.

Holly (06:37.339)
And then she wouldn't have to write it twice. She didn't want to copy and paste basically. And so in her email, she's like, go to blogspot.com because this was going three years ago, and start a blog. And so of course, I'm doing this within the next few minutes because I'm like Jodi. So I went on to Blogspot and I decided to choose the name June Cleaver Nirvana.

Paul Povolni (06:40.214)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (06:48.833)
Right.

Holly (07:04.633)
because I felt like I was like in this really traditional life but not really kind of thing. And so I started a blog that day. I've never read a blog, don't even know what a blog is. And I have a blog. So I started writing and actually, I didn't start writing. I started posting pictures because I'm not a writer or I wasn't a writer at that time. And I started posting pictures and realized that

Paul Povolni (07:28.92)
Yeah.

Holly (07:33.961)
I had a very expensive scrapbooking habit, because that was back in the heyday of scrapbooking, and I was making multiple scrapbooks for my mom and my grandma and all these things, and I was like, oh my gosh, I can have them come to my blog, and then I won't have to spend all these hundreds of dollars on scrapbooking supplies. And so that was how that started, and so I was telling my mom and my aunt, and so I had three readers right there. And then about,

Paul Povolni (07:38.903)
yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (07:58.167)
you

Holly (08:02.675)
Three weeks in, I got a comment that wasn't Jodi, wasn't Jodi's friend, and it wasn't my mom. And I was like, what? And so I clicked, yeah, well, and then I like, so I clicked on like the, you know, the name because like it was a different color. This is how clueless I am. I'm blogging for like three weeks and have no idea that I'm not the only blogger in the world.

Paul Povolni (08:12.618)
Other people are seeing this? Wait a second.

Paul Povolni (08:28.47)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Holly (08:29.321)
And so I clicked through her name was Megan and she had a blog. I was like What? And then because it was a long time ago. She had a blog role in her sidebar and so I fell in love with the internet that day because I started going through her blog role and I was like, my gosh there's other people just like me and I'm not alone in the world anymore and

Paul Povolni (08:36.918)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (08:42.689)
Ha ha ha.

Holly (08:58.241)
many of those people that were in Megan's vlog roll are still my best friends today. Like it's crazy, like, because it was such a small community back then and you know, anybody who's still survived this long is a hearty soul.

Paul Povolni (09:05.058)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (09:12.172)
Yeah.

Wow. Wow. So what was your blog about? What was some, once you finally got started getting a little more into blogging and understanding it a little more and what was the blog about?

Holly (09:26.889)
So it was really what I would call the Seinfeld of motherhood. It was about nothing. So all these re, you know, like being a mom is like, like, those hours are just endless and nothing actually happens in those hours. But like, it was such a blessing for me because it gave me perspective because I felt I kind of decided that if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it every day. So I kind of

push myself to write every single day. And then I'm looking back at the end of day, looking at nothing. So I started really wanting to put a silver lining because I was so blessed and so grateful to be in the position I was. And so what I found through writing in those early years, so they're just silly little stories about what my two year old said or what my dynamics.

Paul Povolni (10:02.54)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Holly (10:24.123)
most of it was about the dynamics between the boys because I'm a girl and three boys is a foreign country. so like, it was really kind of like trying to figure out that, that I'm an ambassador to that country and then always making something funny or something silver lining or something like a gratefulness about it. And

Paul Povolni (10:30.346)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Holly (10:51.631)
what I found over those years, and this was such a blessing to me, that I would be in the middle of like freaking chaos in my life or everything had gone wrong. And instead of like panicking, I was literally like stepping back in the moment thinking, this is gonna be a story.

Paul Povolni (11:11.34)
Yeah.

That's funny, kind of like speakers and preachers and stuff, like everything in their life becomes a story for their sermon or for their speech or for their book or whatever. Yeah, that's hilarious.

Holly (11:15.262)
Yeah!

Holly (11:26.729)
So it was so good because it gave me a perspective I wouldn't have had otherwise because I was like, thank God, I something to write about today.

Paul Povolni (11:33.966)
Ha

Holly (11:37.16)
you

Paul Povolni (11:37.442)
Yeah. So you looked at any, any misbehavior or any, funny words or anything like that. It's like, okay, awesome. Now I have content.

Holly (11:45.253)
Yes, my life was content, really good content. yeah, so that's kind of how I got started. And I was just so, so thankful that like, you know, well, I believe everything happens for a reason.

Paul Povolni (11:58.892)
Yeah. So how did that evolve? So you're blogging about motherhood with three little boys. How did that evolve? Did that evolve into something else? What was next for you once you kind of got into the rhythm of blogging?

Holly (12:15.817)
Yeah, it was really interesting because in the early days, nobody was making money as a blogger. There was no monetization. There just wasn't. And in fact, there was nothing. You would Google something and you might get no results. This was so long ago. no, SEO was like,

Paul Povolni (12:26.902)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (12:36.155)
Right, right, right. Most people don't get it and what it was like.

Holly (12:41.961)
keyword stacking, you know, I mean, like it was ridiculous. In fact, there was, that was even prior to SEO, as we see it today, but so like, as things evolved, like it was interesting because we started to see the community over years and this is pre Facebook, pre social media altogether. The early days of blogging really was the first social media because like I would have like,

Paul Povolni (12:43.52)
Yeah.

Holly (13:09.937)
I had a pretty large blog at the time for the, which might get like maybe 300 visits a day to my new content, because I was writing every day. But I would have 200 comments, because people came not to read, but to put their two cents. And then you would go and, kind of like you do on social media, go visit your top 20 blogs and leave comments. And that's how we communicated, because it was before that.

Paul Povolni (13:22.734)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (13:36.952)
Right?

Holly (13:38.949)
When social media started, I was one of the first on Twitter, and that was groundbreaking because we, and by the way, we were anonymous, blogging anonymously at the very beginning. It wasn't until Facebook came out that we had to, it was a conscious decision to join Facebook because all of a sudden, my name was gonna be associated with my writing, which was one of those kind of.

Paul Povolni (14:03.234)
Hmm, wow. Yeah.

Holly (14:05.767)
because of course we thought the internet was full of ax murderers back then. So it was just really different. And what was so fun is that all these stages, like Twitter, I live in a town called Flower Mound, which is just out of DFW, Texas. And Flower Mound, Texas had the largest Tweet-ups in the world.

Paul Povolni (14:09.961)
Hahaha.

Holly (14:32.44)
Meaning that we would like say hey everybody tweet up at you know this bar or whatever everybody meet and we'd have like 150 people from Twitter show And so through Twitter we started making contacts with companies and then companies started thinking about platforms and So I started a company Really early on called business a blogger

Paul Povolni (14:42.441)
Wow, wow.

Holly (15:00.701)
that was based on, I don't know if you're familiar with Haro, but like where writers would find people to interview and stuff like that. But Business a Blogger in the early days was like, hey company, if you need someone to write for you, here's bloggers that are, it's like a matchmaking service. And so like the early, early days of influencer, we didn't know what that meant. I was like one of the first freaking influencers, even though I hate that word, but.

Paul Povolni (15:16.524)
Okay.

Paul Povolni (15:23.342)
Hahaha

Holly (15:30.185)
But like, like Chevy was one of the pioneers of kind of the influence and I ended up, well, the first year they did, they put bloggers into cars. They got the bloggers through radio ads.

And so I met the lady who was running the Chevy, my gosh, I met the lady who was running the Chevy blogger campaign at one of the Tweet-ups. And she was like, I just can't find any bloggers. And I'm like, I have a list of 500 bloggers in in DFW. And she was like, well, we ran all these radio ads and we can't find anyone. I was like, bloggers are not listening to the radio.

Paul Povolni (16:15.702)
Yeah.

Holly (16:17.395)
Like there's a disconnect there. So that's how I kind of got into like running blogger campaigns and putting together bloggers with companies. And I realized early on that somebody was gonna make money at this. I didn't know how, but there was money floating. So I was like, if somebody's gonna make money on this, it's gonna be me. Because like my prior life, I was not a writer. I ran clinics.

Paul Povolni (16:35.489)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (16:45.761)
Yeah, yeah.

Holly (16:47.305)
doing promotion and like the director of a pain clinic. And so like I had the business background just from hands on kind of doing it, that I was like, this, I think this is really a timing thing, like being in the right place at the right time is gonna be a good thing. And so I've run, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 different websites through the years.

Paul Povolni (16:59.244)
Ryan.

Holly (17:13.801)
99 % of them failed. But you know, only need one or two. So that's where we are today. And, and really, the other side of this is when we started out, we had no idea where this is going. I still don't know where it's going. But the, the me writing about the boys, like worked really, really well when they were little. But I remember I was my oldest was in

Paul Povolni (17:16.396)
Ha ha ha.

Right, right, right.

Holly (17:42.537)
first grade, kindergarten, something like that, maybe second grade. And I was in car line picking him up and his teacher ran out and had me unroll my window and said, started talking about something that she had read on the blog. And I was like, crap, these stories are not mine to tell. Like we didn't know, like we had no idea.

Like I think it's different, like if you're talking about a two or three year old, that's not as permanent. But like if I'm talking about him as a third grader, as a fifth grader, as a high school student, like that's not my story anymore, like that's his story. And so I had a little bit of a crisis at that time because I have no other life. This is my only content.

Paul Povolni (18:25.569)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (18:33.582)
They are my content generators, yeah.

Holly (18:37.449)
And I was like, but like I have to figure out a way that I can do this with and I'm a terrible cook So I can't start a food blog. Although that wasn't even a thing back there like like I'm limited and that was the time of that I I was running DFW bloggers this list of 500 bloggers we'd have meetups and

Paul Povolni (18:50.444)
Yeah, yeah.

Holly (19:02.873)
one of the meetups was at a play place at a local mall because it's only 110 in the summer here. And I met Rachel Miller and she said, and this was about, I don't know, 16 years ago, she said, hey, why don't you come over to my house for a play date? And so I went to her house. At that time she had four kids, I had three. we, I walked in, this is Rachel Miller to a tea. I met her once at a play place. I walk into her house.

I sit in her kitchen, I'm there five minutes, and she looks at me and she goes, I need to sell my blog. And I said, without even thinking, I need to buy your blog. And we sat and talked about it, and she was running a blog called Corky Mama that was, she wasn't writing about her kids, she was writing about what activities she did with her kids.

like, we did this learning activity or we did this craft together. And it was very primitive in the early days of all of this. And I took a look at her blog and I was like, that's my solution. And the weird thing is I had just bought my partners out of a site that was exactly the same traffic. And so I said to her at that table within five minutes, 15 minutes of her saying this,

I said, Rachel, I don't think you're gonna be happy with this offer, but I know what it's worth to me. And I gave her the number based on the valuation I had done for this other thing. said, I don't want to insult you, but this is what I would buy it for. And I said that number and she said, that's exactly what I need.

And so we shook hands and I bought her blog and she worked for me for a few years in the early days as the transition. And then we put some other projects together since then, including what we're doing now, which is Page Wheel. So we've been partners for 15, 16 years off and on through the years.

Paul Povolni (20:55.511)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (21:15.394)
Wow. Wow. So some of those, you mentioned you had a lot of failures, lot of stumbles, a lot of trips, a lot of things like that. What are, what are some of the lessons, you know, because it's, you know, one of the things that I like about doing this podcast is getting to talk to people with these incredible inspiring origin stories. And, and the reason I like starting there is sometimes we see the

Holly (21:25.107)
Thank

Paul Povolni (21:41.26)
where people are right now and we don't fully understand that they didn't start there. And in our mind, they just were, that's them, they were there, they're successful. And so I like starting, yeah. So I like starting with the origin story and hearing a little bit about that journey. And so with some of the things that you said you've had tons of websites, you've had tons of other things that you've done, what are some of the biggest lessons you've learned along the way that got you to the point where you're sitting in Rachel Miller's

Holly (21:50.793)
you

Paul Povolni (22:10.2)
kitchen and buying her blog. So, so tell me some of those stories.

Holly (22:12.349)
Yeah, yeah, know, everything I've learned and I wasn't as open to this in the early days because everything was new for me. Like I literally was having my husband download my emails. Like this is how low tech I am. And this, I had a laptop but it was one of those like trimmed down things that like I just opened up.

for use of emails. So tech has always been an obstacle for me. so like everything I did was always like for the first time. which was kind of good because it started getting me used to like, okay, like the blog fairies not coming to my house.

Paul Povolni (23:06.55)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Holly (23:07.493)
If, and it's really DIY, like if this is gonna be done or if I'm gonna figure out how this is going, I have to figure it out. And like I said, Google was not even a thing back then as far as being super useful in this space. there's a lot more information out there today. so that, it's almost like the pioneering spirit of, okay, this is either not gonna get done or I have to figure it out. And so I took that into everything.

going forward. So one of the things that, like this is seared into my brain in that, so as we became, and I ran a local Dallas site called Shia's Dallas for a while, so like I was like trying to like figure out that bridge between online and offline and stuff like that. And so what would happen in the Dallas market is in during holidays and when like TV stations did it.

have anyone to show up, they would invite bloggers on. And I was always really excited to go on. And usually, they would be like, we need you to talk about this random subject that you have no idea about. So I would go. And generally, they're really short. They just wanted a quick, quick whatever. And I was not great at it. But I was like, really want to get better at this.

Paul Povolni (24:08.739)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (24:21.513)
Ha ha ha.

Holly (24:35.945)
And so I had done it a few times on different things. And then one day I got the call that they wanted to actually talk about kids activities in Dallas. Like what? Like I actually know something about that. So I was so excited. It was on like the regular morning show, not like on a holiday or not at 430 in the afternoon. was like more like people would actually be showing like showing up and like, you know, I would actually be able to, you know, be seen.

Paul Povolni (24:45.624)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (24:57.036)
Right, right, time.

Holly (25:05.865)
So I go in and it's outside, you know, because it's in the springtime, so they're talking about summer activities for kids. And I'm gonna have, like, I have it all prepared and, you know, I have some things to show. And we're outside of the studio and they have several other people that they're talking to. And the camera comes to me and I freeze.

Paul Povolni (25:28.795)
no.

Holly (25:29.897)
I freeze for like 20 seconds out of like a 45. Oh my God, I nearly died. Like I probably did die. mean, I am just a ghost of what I was. So, oh, it was horrible.

Paul Povolni (25:32.935)
my goodness, 20 seconds is an eternity in TV and radio.

Paul Povolni (25:40.248)
Hahaha.

Paul Povolni (25:49.663)
your audio just went out.

Holly (25:51.977)
See? I can't be trusted. So I was horrified. And I mean, like this was one of those things where like, why can't I do this? Like, I'm a capable human. I should be able to do this. And so I cried all the way home. I lived 45 minutes from the TV studio. And I was just like, I don't like the way this feels.

Paul Povolni (25:55.214)
You

Paul Povolni (26:09.078)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (26:15.15)
Oh no, oh no.

Holly (26:20.745)
I do not like the idea that I can't accomplish something I want to do so badly because of nerves or whatever. And so I was like, how am I going to do this? And so I was like, OK, at that time, Google Plus was a thing. And for those of you who do not know who Google Plus was, bless you. But Google Plus was really the first time you could do live video. And one of the things

my tech obstacles to video up until that time was I'm not editing anything. I'm just not, that's beyond my skill set and my desire. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna use Google +, which connected into YouTube at the time, and I'm gonna go live every day. I'm gonna do a video every single day. I'm just gonna start posting it until I get comfortable because that's how I can overcome

Paul Povolni (27:14.958)
Wow.

Holly (27:17.093)
like this situation. And so I did. in fact, my YouTube channel, you can see those really early. And the early ones I'm like, I hate video. because you know, we had no structure back then, which is kind of good. Like we'd learn how to create content by like doing it. And then I started teaching, was like, I'm running out of things, kind of like my other life. I'm running out of things to say. So what am I doing?

Paul Povolni (27:24.494)
Awesome.

Paul Povolni (27:32.695)
Yeah, yeah.

Holly (27:47.227)
I was working on the Facebook page, Corky Mama, and growing it and having success. And so I started just talking about how the algorithm works. And I'm a numbers girl, so I love algorithms. I love how everything on the internet can be measured. And so, and that's a little bit unusual for a blogger because most bloggers got into it for the writing and the creativity. And I was more like, oops.

Paul Povolni (28:08.067)
Yeah.

Holly (28:17.417)
and so I started talking about that and I realized that people were watching and I was just like talking for an hour like I have just I have literally have hundreds of hours of this conversation on my YouTube channel and people were watching and then I would go to conferences like blogger conferences and stuff and like people would act weird around me and I was like or they were like walk up to me and like know me

Paul Povolni (28:46.423)
Yeah, yeah.

Holly (28:46.773)
What? And then I realized that there were people really watching, overdosing on Holly Homer. It couldn't be a problem. And their children were sending me notes because it was in the background of that. And I was like, this is so powerful. The ability to actually connect with someone with just... It's kind of like the writing did for me at the beginning. And then I realized the video is even more powerful because...

Paul Povolni (28:54.669)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (29:03.64)
Wow.

Holly (29:16.273)
When someone has watched, and I feel like podcasting is kind of that next generation, when someone has been in your home for hours and hours and hours, they have a connection to you that is unlike anything else. And so it was just amazing. It made me just obsessed with live video. And so over the years, when Facebook Live finally came to my page, I was live within a few minutes of it.

Paul Povolni (29:32.269)
Brian.

Holly (29:46.273)
And that opened so many doors and then it led me into monetization of live video, which was a crazy journey into, I sold LuLaRoe leggings, became one of their top sellers with a partner, because we were doing three hours a night and we were just piping in silliness.

Paul Povolni (30:03.662)
Wow.

Holly (30:12.603)
and kind of happiness into what I think a lot of people just needed that lightness at the end of the day. So, in exchange for buying a legging here and there. it's just been crazy because like everything opens doors and there's like literally no predicting. Like if you had told me the last thing on my bucket list ever would have been software development.

Paul Povolni (30:30.231)
Hmm.

Paul Povolni (30:41.042)
Hahaha

Holly (30:42.469)
literally know nothing, but that's where I am today because every single step and every stumble created something, an obstacle that we ever had to go around or over or through or stop and turn around. every single one of them has been like what it took to get here. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (31:03.32)
to get to the next level, yeah. So with your journey, when was the first time that you realized, because monetization, it wasn't a easy thing. When was the first time that you figured out monetization and what project was that with?

Holly (31:15.069)
Right.

Holly (31:21.833)
So this was back in June, Cleveland, Urbana. And this was before, well, I think we had Google ads, but the Google ads, you had to get to $100 to get the first payout. So I hadn't hit it yet. And my husband and I were laying in bed one night and we're watching infomercials, because duh.

Paul Povolni (31:42.766)
Cause that's what couples do.

Holly (31:46.505)
And it would happen to be the infomercial for pajama jeans, which they look like jeans, but they feel like pajamas. So he was like, you want those? And I'm like, no, I do not want those. And he's like, no, I can tell you want those. We're sitting there in the dark and just watching. Yeah. And he's like, no, he goes, I totally, I totally know you, you want those? I'm like, no, no, they look horrible. I do not want those.

Paul Povolni (31:57.292)
Yeah, yeah.

Hahaha

Paul Povolni (32:07.458)
debating over pajama jeans.

Holly (32:16.137)
And he's like, I have an idea. Why don't you buy them as a business expense and write about them on your blog? And I was like, huh, all right. I've never even thought about that. But number one, of course I wanted them.

Paul Povolni (32:27.426)
You

He knew you well, yes.

Holly (32:33.897)
Yes, we've been married a few years. anyway, I did that. I ordered them. And when I got them, they were kind of awful. And so I took the, I didn't know, I did not know what I was about to do was one of the most genius SEO hacks ever invented. But I took.

Paul Povolni (32:45.592)
Ha ha.

Holly (32:59.101)
the, I embedded the commercial from YouTube into my blog post and then I quoted like, looks like, you know, jeans. And then I would put my two cents, well, maybe from a distance and then feels like pajamas, if your pajamas have rivets, you know, like, and so I went through the whole like infomercial with all the keywords, the video embedded and gave them like kind of was,

Paul Povolni (33:17.004)
Yeah, yeah.

Holly (33:28.649)
kind of mocking the whole pajama jeans situation. Well, my blog at the time was probably getting maybe 10,000 page views a month. And this was on June Cleaver Nirvana. And then all of a sudden, I was getting 100,000 page views a month. And I was like, what? So I was like, Google Ads. I'm going to hit that 100, you know? Well.

Paul Povolni (33:47.04)
Wow. Wow.

Paul Povolni (33:53.486)
Yeah.

Holly (33:56.113)
What had happened is that, back to the radio, is that there were radio ads for pajama jeans. And so people were coming and Googling pajama jeans review. And my post was number one on Google for this. But it took me a little while to figure that out because I wasn't even paying that much attention until 100,000 people hit one blog post. So.

Paul Povolni (34:09.08)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (34:21.582)
Wow.

Holly (34:23.609)
Then the people that were affiliates, the people who were the affiliates for pajama jeans reached out to me via email and said, hey, if you put this banner ad at the bottom of this pajama jean thing, we will give you $11 per pair of pajama jeans that you sell. was like, and then I had like a total moral crisis because I didn't like these.

I didn't think they were very nice. So I was just like, like I don't want to trick someone into buying something. And so I went back and I read my article. And then I was like, if someone still wants to buy pajama jeans, I should certainly profit from this decision. So I put that down at the bottom and I started selling 10 pairs of pajama jeans a day.

Paul Povolni (34:53.527)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (35:08.302)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (35:21.902)
Wow. Even after all the the that you'd said about him, people are still like, but I got to get a pair. Yeah. Wow.

Holly (35:23.207)
What?

Holly (35:28.037)
I kind of need them. and so like those then what was crazy is pajama gram then brought on pajama jeans like the biggest you know advertising company at the time brought on pajama jeans for their Christmas and so

I was just selling pajama jeans left and right all through Christmas. And I was like so excited because I put the connections together that it was the radio ads that were getting people there and then going on. so was like, it was just an amazing Christmas. And I was like, this is going to come to an end. And then in pajama grams, not stupid, they thought if you really love your sweetheart, you need to buy them pajama jeans.

Paul Povolni (35:52.608)
Wow.

Holly (36:15.881)
So then I had a rush all the way through Valentine's Day and it was amazing. And then, Jamagram thought, if you really love your mother, you would do it for Mother's Day. So I rode pajama jeans through those three months, or those three holidays. And that was literally the money that I paid Rachel Miller for this blog. So it was really, it was like,

Paul Povolni (36:16.099)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (36:25.681)
wow, wow.

Paul Povolni (36:39.938)
Wow. Wow.

Holly (36:43.027)
Pajama jeans and Rachel Miller in her kitchen.

Paul Povolni (36:47.79)
That's amazing that it started off with you guys just laying in bed watching infomercials and him knowing you and saying you need to get a pair and then you turning that into content and you making, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars from selling. Yeah.

Holly (37:02.441)
thousands and thousands of dollars. And remember, I hadn't even hit the $100 on Google ads. So this was just money from heaven.

Paul Povolni (37:08.568)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (37:12.81)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And the funny thing is, is you weren't even, you weren't pitching them. were dissing them. You were actually, you know, not even supporting them, but you had the right keywords in there that just got, got found by Google. That's amazing. And so, so, you know, you, you bought the, the, blog from Rachel. what did you do differently from what she was doing or did you just continue what she was doing?

Holly (37:37.285)
So it was called quirky mama at the time and this SEO little lesson I was I started really honing in on SEO and stuff like that just because I was good at that like that was something that resonated with me and so I wanted to I rebranded it pretty quickly kids activities blog because I wanted those keywords for kids activities and although

At that time, we couldn't change the name of the Facebook page. So that was still Remain Quirky Mama. And so just moving forward, I started laying out more of a plan of action of making sure we had different types of things. And this was right around the time that people were concentrating on recipes or concentrating on crafts.

Just kind of built that out a little bit of trying to think what would a mom need? Like, you know, what what could we give them and really this and then kind of even later when Pinterest came around I started realizing that a lot of the internet was really it well it kind of fell into two categories It was either really glossy meaning like nobody could achieve that like think Martha Stewart before she went to jail you know, like

Paul Povolni (38:38.402)
Yeah. Yeah.

Holly (39:00.231)
like too, like unachievable, like you could never, like even if you got that life, would you really want it? And then the other side was even something that hurt my heart even more was the of the dogging on motherhood. know, like my kids suck, you know, like this life sucks, that kind of stuff. So I wanted to like figure out that, like that safe space for people to like.

Paul Povolni (39:25.623)
Right, right.

Holly (39:26.823)
like not have to spend money, like open up the kitchen junk drawer, entertain your kids, make memories, doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be Pinterest worthy. It just needs to be like an invitation to play. And I realized the younger, and I was started out as an older mom, because I didn't start having kids until my 30s, but like the younger moms, to a certain extent,

almost because they saw a lot of this glossiness. That was what their vision of everyday was. And so like that hurt my heart because like that was not the reality of everyday like, like, in fact, that's almost the anti everyday. And so if we can't like embrace those normal moments and the waiting in the doctor's office or the waiting in car line, there's a lot of waiting.

Paul Povolni (40:05.812)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (40:14.635)
Right, it was a highlight reel, yeah.

Holly (40:25.629)
of the mess on the kitchen floor, all that kind of stuff. That's what I wanted to show in a positive way and how, you don't need that expensive stroller. This umbrella stroller is really awesome. Or here's how you do it, different way. So it was kind of like discount Martha Stewart. Just do it, spend time with your kids.

Paul Povolni (40:38.925)
Right.

Paul Povolni (40:48.054)
Yeah, yeah.

Holly (40:53.885)
Who cares if you can't put it on the refrigerator and display it? Because it's more about making those memories and getting, just having that family time and filling, quite honestly, filling that time. And with three boys, like literally, for me, activities, and not so much crafts or coloring pages, because they're boys, but activities was how I got through the day with them.

not killing each other. Like if I could distract them at the park for an hour, then it bought me another hour or two of sanity, you know? And then, well, if we went to the pool in the afternoon, it bought me, you know, a nap on the way home. So showing other people that this is not just a luxury, but more of like how you're gonna survive these early years.

Paul Povolni (41:24.032)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (41:36.438)
Yeah

Paul Povolni (41:47.47)
Yeah, I love that. And I think we need more of that. I think, and for some reason, we as humans, we see these Instagrams, we see these Pinterest, we see these posts of the highlights of people's lives. And for some reason, we have a hard time disconnecting that from the reality of that's just the stuff they're sharing. You know, that's, you know, you don't see all the behind the scenes, the boring parts of life.

that can hold just as valuable memories and just as valuable experiences and, stuff that, you know, your, your kids, your family will talk about, you know, for years to come that aren't Pinterest worthy or aren't Instagrammable or aren't shareable on social media. But for some reason we as humans kind of almost have a hard time detaching the fact that what people are showing is the very best. It's showing the

the highlights and you don't see the monotony or the boredom or the waiting. Like you mentioned, there's a lot of waiting in parenthood, you know? So I think that's amazing that you did that. so your blog started growing, your influence started growing from simply showing that and that's still what you're doing with kidsactivities.com,

Holly (42:57.993)
Yeah, so it grew, you know, from, you know, just kind of another mom blog to, you know, basically the largest resource site in the space for, you know, for kids activities, crafts, learning things. I partially homeschooled the kids. So there's just a lot of just never I had spent a lot of time with those children. So like, there's just a lot of kind of what we did. And then the other thing I loved about

Paul Povolni (43:21.056)
Yeah, yeah.

Holly (43:26.889)
this whole, you know, adventure and kind of what turned into be like the business that feeds my family is that I could hire other moms, you know, to tell what they're doing with their kids and stuff like that. and like, I didn't need, I mean, it's nice if they had great photos, but even if you go into the site, it's not to the level of your average food blog or something like that. And that's intentional to a certain extent, that I don't want it to feel like you can't make this paper plate craft.

Paul Povolni (43:39.0)
Yeah.

Holly (43:56.243)
I mean, give me a break. But I do, you know, one of the things that you said about kind of perceptions and all this kind of stuff is something I would just because I'm old and a little bit wiser on this, I would, I'd love to share a little bit of my experience of being like an influencer and why I shun that today.

Paul Povolni (43:56.886)
Right, right, yeah.

Holly (44:23.419)
And I thankfully got this lesson really early on when the kids were really little because some of the early opportunities for me was to work with companies on blog posts, the early sponsored posts and stuff like that. I just remember one night I had made dinner and I put it on the table. And like I say, I don't cook very well. And so this wasn't like...

A lot of times my husband wasn't home, so we were like just grabbing things at the countertop and stuff like that. That's more how even today how our life is. And I just, but this night I'd set the table and I had made something for dinner and the kids were all sitting around. We had a little banquet. They're sitting in the banquet and nobody was moving. And I was like, why aren't you guys eating? And they're like, don't you need to take pictures first?

Paul Povolni (45:09.614)
You

Paul Povolni (45:17.614)
Oh wow, wow.

Holly (45:20.585)
And I was like, my god, no, eat. I need to reevaluate how we're living this life. that's what your impression is, mom only made dinner because she's gonna photograph it. So I made a really conscious decision. I don't do sponsored.

Paul Povolni (45:31.875)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (45:40.942)
Yeah, wow, wow.

Holly (45:49.373)
vacations, anything that, in fact, from that day on, anything that included my kids, they were, I had a contract with them and they were paid for the event. The reason why I had the contract with them is if they got fired during the event, then I've kept all of the money. But so that way when, know, because we did do some things where like we did webisodes and stuff where camera crews would come into the house and stuff like that, but my kids beforehand.

Paul Povolni (46:03.881)
Hahaha

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Holly (46:19.165)
They had the ability to say, do not want to do this, because I would say to the company, only two of my kids are willing to do this. Are you OK with that? And for the most part, all three of them would do it. And then we'd have, hey, I'm going to pay you this much amount per day, blah, blah, blah. And it worked really, really well, because it gave them agency over not being a subject of moms.

Paul Povolni (46:22.179)
Brian.

Holly (46:46.653)
like mom's content. Like they get to be a kid, not a content provider.

Paul Povolni (46:48.206)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Not a, not a, a tool or a, a whatever. And I think, I think separating that and saying, Hey, we're doing this, this is for content or this is for what mommy and daddy are doing for business. But unless I make that clear, it's not going to be shared. It's not, it's not online. And, and, and I think, I think separating those sometimes.

Holly (46:57.234)
you

Holly (47:10.237)
Yeah, it's not online.

Paul Povolni (47:16.934)
I think is wise because then you don't have the kids sitting around and then foods going cold. they're like, mommy hasn't set up the lights and cameras and taken a photo of this yet. can't eat.

Holly (47:29.307)
I was just like, crap, I needed to make dinner a more often.

Paul Povolni (47:32.814)
Yeah, yeah, right, right. Yeah, yeah. Mommy doesn't cook that often, so when she does, guaranteed it's for the blog.

Holly (47:39.404)
my gosh, yeah. No, know, I'm just stumbling through this life.

Paul Povolni (47:43.63)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I've had to do that with my kids too is, know, when I want to take a photo of them, let them know this, I'm not posting this, this is just for us, you know? And, um, because they're like, I don't want you to post this. I don't want you, you know, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to be online. And so understanding that and respecting them and honoring them and saying, no, no, no, this is just for us. This is for our own personal enjoyment. This is for our own photo album. This is for our own memories. Nobody else will see this unless you want me to share it.

Holly (47:46.473)
You

Holly (47:52.53)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (48:12.974)
unless you're okay with it, but it's not, it's not automatically, you are just not a, an actor in my movie, you know, and, and, know, everything that you do, I own, you know, and, is my content. so that's a, that's amazing. And that, is something that people do need to think about because we are in such a culture and society where everything is sharing, you know, you're sharing just every part of your life. And sometimes we forget about the collateral people in it.

Holly (48:19.492)
Yeah.

Right.

Paul Povolni (48:42.422)
that might not wanna be a part of your movie. And so we've got to honor that.

Holly (48:47.145)
And I think especially cautionary to parents because of what I did for a living, being a mom, blogging about stuff, and partially homeschooling and all this kind of stuff and writing about it, is people ascribe some sort of parenting expert status. And I'm like, oh no. First of all,

Paul Povolni (49:11.278)
Yeah?

Paul Povolni (49:14.786)
Ha ha ha ha

Holly (49:17.169)
Like that's pressure on me that like is not not like no. And then like think of the pressure that puts on my children. If someone should find out like down the road like like that like life is hard like especially for these kids that have been online their whole life. Like the judgment and all that kind of stuff then to put a layer of and your mom it you know, how come you turned out that way? Your mom did you know is such an expert? Yeah, no.

Paul Povolni (49:44.411)
Right. Yeah.

Holly (49:46.905)
no, no, no, no, like, this is where like, don't like, it's, yeah, it frightens me a little bit when one of the reasons that I will think that, try to finish that thought, it frightens me with short form content, because you can't put anything into context. And so you see that glimmer of a moment, and you have no idea the chaos that surrounded it.

Paul Povolni (50:07.672)
Right.

Paul Povolni (50:14.136)
Yeah.

Holly (50:14.185)
And that is why my heart is with the writing, the long form podcast, the long videos, the books, the things that actually can set the stage for reality and not just put something out there that fades quickly, but leaves like the wrong impression.

Paul Povolni (50:36.556)
Right. I love that. Now with, with kids activities.com, you know, obviously you've, you've figured out the monetizing part of it. how, when did that first happen and, and how is that happening now?

Holly (50:50.121)
So I would say like kind of a heyday of blogging, mate, and I'm trying to remember my numbers, but probably we started monetizing pretty significantly about starting about nine years ago and then, it it started, you know, slowly but surely and you know, 10 years ago, at first I was kind of covering the costs of hiring some help here and there. And that was amazing because

Like remember, I started this as a hobby to save money with my scrapbooking. And then I used all that money to buy a website. And so I had always like, I had never put money into any of the projects. I had always made a little bit, like, you know, done a little bit of this or, you know, consulted with Chevy or something, you know, like done, I had never wanted it to be a drain on my...

Paul Povolni (51:22.828)
Right, right, right. And then you saw pajama jeans and that was.

Holly (51:47.357)
family's resources. I still have that mindset of a stay at home mom type thing. I want it to be an asset. And by the way, my husband would not let me post anything about him for the first four years. So the fact that he lives off the blog now is really, really just perfect. He is. He's joined the company. So early on it was just like,

Paul Povolni (51:49.026)
Right.

Paul Povolni (52:03.67)
Yeah. So he's retired from doctoring or is he still doctoring? Yeah. Yeah.

Holly (52:15.299)
of bits and pieces, like, I can do this with it. And I was always reinvesting it, know, buying another website, selling. I had listened to a radio show about like investing and somebody had talked about how they were like flipping websites versus flipping houses. And I'm like, well, I can like, flip a website way easier than flip a house. And then, you know, thinking about, if you're going to beat the stock market, you only have to do like 8 % or whatever.

So I was like, okay, so I was doing like kind of that, you know, I was building things up and selling and that's kind of why when Rachel said, you know, I, you know, I want to sell my blog, was like, actually know what that, you know, what I could buy that for and stuff like that. So I was kind of in that space of looking around.

Paul Povolni (52:57.112)
So where did that skill come from? I mean, you mentioned that you started off downloading emails or asking your husband to do that. So how did you get the skills to flip websites?

Holly (53:02.514)
Yeah.

Holly (53:07.589)
Yeah, well, see, back then it was still very rudimentary. It was like a WordPress site. know, I and one of my best friends that I met through, you know, the internet was here locally and she was a designer. So I had the she was able to like put my vision actually she was way better than my vision. I'd be like, I'm in this pretty and she go do it, you know, so we work together on some of those projects. In fact, several of the websites that I that I acquired or created, she was a partner in.

So I had her tech skills on my side. My dad, as a economist, a professor in economics, so my whole life was always about supply and demand. And in fact, when I was a little kid, I would help him grade papers, and in fact, he would offer the challenge to his class that anyone who did worse than his.

Paul Povolni (53:54.06)
Yeah, yeah.

Holly (54:05.545)
daughter in third grade on the test was gonna fail, know, stuff like that. So it was always a part of kind of like my mentality was always like, and we were very, very lower middle class, you know, I hadn't eaten at a restaurant until I was a teenager, you know, we didn't ever stayed in a hotel, like we didn't have money, you know, like it was just, but we had a good life because, you know, we were together and stuff like that. But so like,

Paul Povolni (54:09.314)
Wow, yeah.

Holly (54:30.569)
that kind of mindset went forward as being frugal and reinvesting the money. When you make something, like the pajama jeans, take it and invest it in the next thing. And so that's kind of where this all went. And so I was just open to it. And I think that's one of the reasons why it even was available to me because back then there wasn't that many people doing it. So like...

Paul Povolni (54:55.694)
Yeah.

Holly (54:56.937)
people would say, oh, heard Holly, you know, Holly knows about that. Why don't you go talk to her? Or like she might buy it, you know, I like, so a lot of times it was just because I made it known or I said, hey, I'm doing this. I took a lot of flack also from the traditional blogging community, because in the early days, monetization was a dirty word, like it was selling out. And I kept telling people and teaching through these videos that like, if you

Paul Povolni (55:18.198)
Hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Holly (55:25.603)
are turning down monetization, then you are creating an unsustainable future. Like you have an expensive hobby. Whereas if you can bring that money in in a way that you feel comfortable with and then use it for your next level, that's where we're going to build actual businesses, assets. And at that time, I was just thinking assets. we were buying selling things for a few thousand dollars. It's not like today when you're

Paul Povolni (55:48.792)
Right.

Holly (55:55.701)
you know, that's going to cost you. There's venture capitalists coming in. So that that went up. And then all of a sudden, it started getting really good and the sponsorships because I was making really good money on sponsorships. I was working with top companies. And and in the early days of sponsorships, it was so much fun because they didn't know any better. We didn't know any better.

Paul Povolni (55:57.966)
Right, right, right.

Holly (56:20.945)
They would listen to us and so I would pitch back what I would want to do. They would be like, that sounds amazing, you know, and and then then, you know, fast forward five years, you know, they get like the interns are running everything, everything has to go through legal. It just got nightmarish and I stopped doing it. But in the early days, some of my favorite writing that I did was with sponsorships because it was almost like a creative writing prompt. You know, like, you know, it pushed me out of my

Paul Povolni (56:27.64)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (56:48.118)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Holly (56:50.569)
out of my comfort zone. So that went, and then all of a sudden, as the sponsors, it was kind of interesting, as the sponsorship started to die down a little bit or get taken over by corporations, is that the image ads that you see on the sites started going up. So in the early days of the image ads, it was like Google ads, and then there's this thing, here again, I'm no tech, but I had to figure this out, or I was making money, but.

Like there's Google DFP, which was a way that you could insert your own ads and manage the bidding. This is so long ago. And so like I would be on the phone with some dude, I don't know where he is, in his basement somewhere. And he'd be like, will give you that for a dollar, CPC or whatever.

Paul Povolni (57:26.784)
Yeah. Yeah.

Holly (57:40.369)
And I'd be like, okay, well, I can do it for 125 because I have this other one right here that, know, and it was really super rudimentary, but it gave us the ability to kind of like pit people against each other for that space on the blog. And so then, and I was relatively good at that. Like you didn't have to be great at it to make more than Google ads. so I would, but I was spending a lot of time on it. And then the first...

company to do ad management was AdThrive. I happened to, a friend of mine was one of the first bloggers with AdThrive. And what AdThrive was was a husband who was managing Google DFP for his wife's blog realized that this could be ad management is a thing.

And so he started bringing on other bloggers and I was one of the, in that first group of bloggers that had an ad manager and that changed my life because there was somebody who was way smarter and better at that. you know, like the CPMs at that point, we were getting like up to $5 CPM, which we like was like what I was getting my myself was like a buck.

So I 5x my income with just that one change and then CPMs today are 40 to 100. So you can see that segment just going. So then it's a numbers game. If you have this that's collecting money on day in and day out, all you need to do is then drive the traffic. And so that's where.

Paul Povolni (58:55.213)
Bye.

Holly (59:21.733)
my emphasis on driving traffic came from because I was like, all I need to do is get more people there. Just get more people there. And so that's how that went.

Paul Povolni (59:27.222)
Yeah. Yeah. So what would you tell for the person that is like, I need to start blogging. I've got an interesting kids. I've got interesting life. I've got interesting pets. I've got interesting hobbies, whatever it might be. What would you tell them now? Because obviously it's evolved from, you know, when, you did it all those years ago, what would you tell them now for somebody that's wanting to, you know, do something like that?

Holly (59:41.513)
All right.

Holly (59:54.003)
So interestingly, because nothing stays the same, this last year, the internet has taken a free fall because of AI and because of how Google Now handles your quest. So if you go to Google Now and say, hey, I want a birthday party game for my five-year-old, it's going to answer that question.

in the reason why it knows. The reason why it knows what to suggest is that I have 13,000 blog posts on Kids' Activities blog that it trained the AI on. And so the way that I would have said a year ago, I would have been like, let's get this blog going. Definitely tell your story in that way. Today, I would rewind it. would say, let's.

Paul Povolni (01:00:19.958)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:00:29.155)
Wow.

Holly (01:00:45.563)
get that blog going, but put it behind a paywall. because I'm not gonna be able to get millions of readers every month from all these social media and Google anymore. I'm gonna be able to get thousands and tens of thousands and hopefully hundreds of thousands. Whereas if you're working at like a sub stack or some sort of paywall content creation,

then you're able to actually monetize that in a way that you don't need millions, you just need handfuls. So that's where I would go with that. And it's something that I have had, like a part of my site that was a subscription. And I'm not making any sweeping statements, but I wouldn't be surprised if in the future you'll see a lot more of that, of my site behind a paywall.

Not because I don't love my readers, because I can't, know, it goes back to sustainability. I can't keep the free going when I'm not getting the clicks from everywhere else. And you go back and look, is for a really long time, Facebook was my largest referrer, and then Pinterest and Google. And then when Instagram came around, no links. So we couldn't drive traffic from Instagram. We can't drive traffic from TikTok.

Paul Povolni (01:02:07.415)
Yeah.

Holly (01:02:11.913)
So all of the social media networks that have come in the last few years are basically link free. I mean, you can add a link to your, you you could get a handful of people through, but you can't get tens of thousands through to get what you need to make it worthwhile. So if.

Paul Povolni (01:02:28.866)
Right. even Facebook doesn't like links off of their site. yeah.

Holly (01:02:31.529)
No, so like, yeah, it was about a year ago that my Facebook traffic dropped over a million page views per month. Yeah, that's a lot. It was a little, yeah, and so like up until recently, you know, I've always had multiple streams of income, know, pillars of, you know, income. And so if anyone got kicked out, which happens regularly, I've learned my lesson on that.

Paul Povolni (01:02:41.848)
Wow, wow, that's a lot. That's a lot. Yeah.

Holly (01:03:00.969)
But it wasn't until this last year. It's been really eye-opening that all of them could get kicked out at the same time, which is why you need an email list. And so my email list is now my largest referral. And I over 200,000 on my email list. I email them at least once a day. And those are the people that are coming to the blog on a regular basis and anyone else that happens to come across it from these other places.

Paul Povolni (01:03:09.59)
Yeah, yeah.

Holly (01:03:29.061)
the magnitude of the change is pretty significant.

Paul Povolni (01:03:32.546)
And when you say kicked out, you're talking about your account being suspended or your account being killed, right?

Holly (01:03:38.215)
No, nope, have my, my quirky mama is still in good standing.

Paul Povolni (01:03:44.108)
No, no, you're no, when you said that, that you had the potential of getting kicked out or whatever. So have an email list. You're recommending you're, you're warning people that your Facebook account or your Instagram or whatever you could get suddenly lose that account. Yeah.

Holly (01:03:48.617)
Yeah.

Holly (01:03:59.696)
you need an email list, even when everything's going well, because the algorithms are not for you. The algorithms are for the platform. So the algorithm uses your content to keep the users on the platform longer. This is very fine if you understand that and you can create a win-win situation to use that visibility that they're allowing you to have to keep those people on the platform to figure out

how to get them off the platform. But because you could put out the most genius content on Instagram today, you could have someone follow you, be excited about it, and then literally never see you again. And this happens even on Facebook so often. Even if you had alerts set up or something like that. Those platforms are there for themselves, and those platforms are going to do what's best in the.

Paul Povolni (01:04:30.914)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Holly (01:04:58.121)
platforms in interest and you building traffic to your site or you building an email list is not in their best interest. It's in your best interest. And so you've got to control your own destiny because you have like, mean, quirky mama has 3.5 million fans on Facebook and any given post reaches anywhere between 2000 to a million.

Paul Povolni (01:05:25.964)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Holly (01:05:28.221)
but most of them on the lower side. like we built that over years and years and years of like literally putting work into Facebook and at their behest, they can take it away. They can leave it online and just not show it to anyone. And that's basically what's happening now. And so it's just the way the internet is. And so as long as you go into that with open eyes and leverage,

Paul Povolni (01:05:46.583)
Right, right.

Holly (01:05:57.617)
whatever you've built on those, on other people's lands for your own benefit.

Paul Povolni (01:06:03.662)
Yeah. And if you don't think that's true, you need to look at your data and statistics. And it's a rude awakening. You know, even for me, you know, I don't have near those numbers, but when I've gone into and seen how many people that my post was actually showed to, you know, and how many people actually saw it. And I'm like, that's kind of sad. That's kind of a little frustrating because, you know, you've, you've created this audience and Facebook will only show it to a few people.

And, and that's the reality of it that you need to be aware of that you might think you've got the most awesome content and you've got thousands of, I've got thousands of followers. And each time I post something, thousands of people are seeing it. No, you know, like you said, you've got millions and 2000 people see it. So imagine scaling that down to you only have 2000 or 5,000 or 6,000 of how many people actually see your content on social media. And when you think the, I post that they will see it, or if I build it, they will come.

Holly (01:06:49.349)
It's crazy.

Paul Povolni (01:07:02.686)
The reality is they won't. so building a platform that you own, like you mentioned, the email marketing is definitely a way to make sure that your content is being seen by the people you want to see it.

Holly (01:07:13.641)
Yeah, and I mean, think about, so like my email list, I sent out an email and have an average of 35, 40 % open rate to 200,000 people. So I put the same, let's say I put the same thing on Facebook, I have 3.5 million and I'm, you know, like I'm getting 2 % to see it. So like, it's not about the content.

Paul Povolni (01:07:24.952)
Right.

Paul Povolni (01:07:37.507)
Yeah.

Holly (01:07:42.085)
It's about the connection you have with and the ability to talk straight to the people. That's where we are building up other people's houses. And quite honestly, we're building up their mansions and then like asking and begging at the front gate. believe me, like Facebook helped me build my business and I'm really thankful for that on most days.

Paul Povolni (01:07:42.231)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:07:59.586)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:08:03.683)
Yeah.

Holly (01:08:11.337)
But like if I had gone, you know, if I had gone in just like, I just want followers, I just want followers and not, how can I monetize this? Then I would not be on the internet today. I would not, you know, I would have, I would be at a job.

Paul Povolni (01:08:27.788)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it is, like you mentioned is, they, they want, they want you to pay to play or pay to be seen. It's like you built a store and you got all these people interested in your store, but the only way that people can see your store is if you pay them. And even though you put on all the work to get all these people interested in what your, your, your store, it's almost like they hide the store from.

all the people that you got interested in your store. so, yeah, it is a little bit of a crazy thing. Now you had mentioned, you know, the next, you know, with AI that you've had to pivot into subscriptions, which I see even social networks are paying, you know, Twitter or Twitter X Instagram, they have, you know, paid subscriptions for content. And so it is a model that is prevalent. mean, we don't own movies anymore. We don't own our music anymore. We don't own a whole lot of things anymore. We, we subscribe to them.

Holly (01:09:00.169)
Thank

Paul Povolni (01:09:22.07)
And so with, with the subscription thing, how do you still get people interested in subscribing if they can't see anything? What give, give some tips in that area.

Holly (01:09:30.727)
Yeah, so this is where, like in my mind, this is where you leverage that short form, you leverage the platforms that you don't own, you even leverage the platforms you do own and you create, it's kind of the VIP experience. In my space, there'd be different things for different spaces, but like you think about like if I'm creating,

like content today and I'm just giving it out for free, like is that sustainable down the road? so there can be different levels to this. There's always, I think there's always gonna be a level of freeness because you've got to, someone has to see your heart and they have to understand that you're real and that what you're about to even opt into that next level. So.

I think about it as kind of like the VIP situation where you're like, hey, this is the free pot. Here's something free, come grab it. by the way, if you want this nicer, better, more fun thing, you're gonna come to that next level. And then what will happen over time. And this is kind of sad for me because I love the free model and we've been able to do that because we have so many apps.

image ads on our sites and sponsorships and stuff like that. We've had the luxury of being able to do that. But that, but because of that, and because it was relatively easy, and I'm throwing myself into that, is why a billion people did it. And anytime a billion people do something, it's gonna have to be clamped down. And so you're gonna have to go to the next level. And so this is just a progression. And you saw this like TV when I was a kid.

Paul Povolni (01:11:12.76)
Right.

Holly (01:11:24.873)
You turn it on and it was free, you know? And then HBO came in and some people would pay for that. And then now, there's literally everything is some sort of subscription, a complicated web of content. We're going the same way on the internet. Like, look at what has happened to TV and media. That's where the internet is headed. partially because...

Paul Povolni (01:11:27.171)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:11:40.256)
Right.

Holly (01:11:53.479)
The next level of free internet is a dystopian universe. And what I mean by that, if I could just paint, is that one of the things that's happened over the last 10 years is because of monetization and creativity and originality and content was rewarded. So I threw myself into this. I threw my money. I had a full staff at one point.

to just create the best things that the internet didn't have already. And when we were rewarded by money and security and all this kind of stuff, and then AI comes in and trains on all of that. And then takes away the monetization ability of those sites. So what is next? What does the next 18 months look like? Well, there's not nearly as much.

new content created by humans. In fact, that's pretty much dropped off a cliff. There's still people who, you know, who will do that for a little while longer because they have hope. But as far as mass producing content from original minds onto the internet, that ship has sailed. And so what you're going to get is a bunch and not just a little bit because AI is so much better at

Paul Povolni (01:13:03.309)
Right.

Holly (01:13:18.503)
batching and creating massive amounts of content is that the next level of content is just a whole layer of AI content. And so what does that look like in a year from now when AI is training on itself? like, don't know, like, I don't know what that looks like. It's, it seems really not like a place that I, you know, like,

Paul Povolni (01:13:28.035)
Yeah.

Holly (01:13:45.829)
not like a really warm, friendly place that you can connect with people. Because this is what you have to remember about the internet, like when you're talking blogs, when you're talking about social media, is people are there to connect with other people. Like if they wanted to see A Glossy Life, they would go watch on Netflix, Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The reason why they follow Kim Kardashian on Instagram is they want to connect with her. So like when...

Paul Povolni (01:13:57.537)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:14:04.258)
Right, right.

Holly (01:14:12.761)
you are on these platforms and then all of a sudden the human connection gets pulled out. And like I'm on X and one of the things that I've asked Grok a few weeks ago is what should I post on X? And it gave me 42 things to post on X. And then I thought, no.

Paul Povolni (01:14:38.892)
Yeah, yeah

Holly (01:14:40.699)
No. So what are we going to do? Are we all going to grok?

you

Paul Povolni (01:14:53.657)
Right, right. Yeah. And I've, I've even unsubscribed from e-newsletters from marketers that said they have AI write their newsletters. I'm like, I don't, I don't care about an AI newsletter from you, you know, you might've trained it on some of your stuff, but I kind of feel like I'm just, you know, getting junk mail at that point. It's not personal. It's not written by you. You've, you've automated so much that it's, you're not even in it a whole lot.

Holly (01:15:20.423)
Yeah, well, and I'll take this even a step further, is I recently went to Chatjbt, I said, this is what I wanna write, write it in the style of Holly Homer, and it wrote it exactly like I would've written it. then you're like, what, like, so like, does that mean that I need to, well, I'm not far from moving to like a commune and,

Paul Povolni (01:15:42.349)
Yeah.

Holly (01:15:49.321)
you know, raising vegetables off the gland. But like, like, is that really the next step where we're because one of the things that happened over over the last, you know, 20 years is we all lived offline. And then we we would tell we would put a little thing about what we were doing offline online. And then as all of these things happen, then all of a sudden, well, we're now living kind of

Paul Povolni (01:15:49.654)
Yeah.

Holly (01:16:17.703)
with one foot in each place. And then, well, now we're online. And then we're doing things in real life so that we have content for online. And then, like, and now, like, you know, that next step is, like, I mean, I'm opting out of it. But like, I it's scary for my children and my grandchildren, and which I don't have any. But but like those generations beyond there. And I don't know, I do see the pendulum, I am a pendulum swinging kind of girl.

Paul Povolni (01:16:27.598)
Wow.

Holly (01:16:47.443)
So I do see the pendulum swinging a little bit in that younger generation. Like my son right now, my youngest is at a summer camp as a counselor where they put their phones in a box at the beginning of the summer and they will not get their phones back until the end of the summer. And I feel so blessed for him because what a vacation from his life to be able to go just hang out with people in real life and not even worry about what that looks like to anyone else.

Paul Povolni (01:17:00.29)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:17:05.976)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:17:15.274)
Right. Right. Yeah. I recently, as I mentioned at the side of the podcast, went, went to the ocean to celebrate my anniversary. And one of the things that I noticed is even people sitting by the ocean were on their phones. And I saw teenagers walking by the ocean with these big old earphones like I have right now. And I'm like, you should be enjoying the sound of the waves. You should be enjoying the visual of just being out there and enjoying the scenery and what you're doing. But I think we've

Holly (01:17:27.177)
Thanks

Ugh.

Paul Povolni (01:17:42.686)
You're right. We've started going so online. And if you look at your phone usage, you would be amazed of how much time you spend on that little box in your hand. And so I think the next phase, even for marketing, even for blogging, for content for that, is finding a way to humanize it and bring that humanity back.

Holly (01:17:47.922)
It's frightening.

Holly (01:17:59.879)
Yes, stepping through that veil and reconnecting and connecting in a way because they're there to connect. That's why they keep scrolling. They haven't found the thing to connect with. That's why they're scrolling, scrolling, scrolling faster, faster, faster. So we've got to step through it and get some sort of connection.

Paul Povolni (01:18:10.222)
Yeah.

Holly (01:18:25.769)
And I am to the point where I think at some point that has to be, there has to be some more of the offline, online situation. Like we have to balance that a little bit. And I had the exact experience on the beach recently. We've been going to that same beach over 20 years. And there's a pool right next to the beach that I sit at and usually read a book and or just.

Paul Povolni (01:18:37.579)
Right.

Holly (01:18:52.957)
like stare at the ocean. like, like years ago, we would sit there and we get to know the people that had the same, know, that would claim the chairs early in the morning next to us and stuff like that. And then this year, I just looked around and everybody like, like even if they were reading a book, it was on a candle, you know, I mean, like, I'm just like, I'm, I'm, really old and grumpy.

Paul Povolni (01:19:03.616)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (01:19:12.899)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:19:18.085)
But I think, I think as humans, we're kind of wired for other humans. I think we're wired to have the desire for community and for connection. And I think we've been distracted for, you know, 20 years, almost 20 years. You know, Facebook came out in 2007 ish, you know, for the public and Twitter did as well. And I think, I think we're kind of the younger generation. see them wanting more community. see them wanting.

Holly (01:19:45.073)
Yes.

Paul Povolni (01:19:46.616)
You know, like you'd mentioned, you were doing tweet ups. think, I think that's, that's going to become a new thing is these in-person face-to-face, you know, Me to meet, you know, human to human, you know, flesh to flesh type meeting meetings where it's no longer just this online thing that we need more. And I think that's what COVID was so tough for a lot of people is the isolation that we had online more than ever, you know, we,

Holly (01:20:00.392)
Yes.

Holly (01:20:05.417)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (01:20:15.095)
We were expected to be online, but what we craved most was the humanity and seeing a smile.

Holly (01:20:22.441)
I know, I know. And I mean, the COVID was even harder because you couldn't even see other people smile. And it was, and I think, like, I mean, it was kind of a blessing because it was such a, you know, it was a time period that just opened my eyes to so much around me that I was like, you know, on one hand, like you can't unsee it once you see it, but then like, you can unsee it once you see it. And I think,

Paul Povolni (01:20:27.863)
Yeah.

Holly (01:20:51.273)
there's a lot of changes that have happened since then because people were so uncomfortable with how that went down and not just kind of a political way or a spiritual way, but just a human way, like how we changed as humans from an external source. I don't know.

Paul Povolni (01:21:00.803)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:21:17.698)
Yeah. But I think definitely humanizing is, and, you know, like you'd mentioned, even dripping out content, even though you have a paywall, even though you have a subscription is dripping out content, being real, you know, creating these, these real, videos of yourself or content about yourself just retains that human connection and gets people like, like Holly. I like who she is. I like her personality. I want to be a

Holly (01:21:20.393)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:21:44.076)
more part of her world and therefore I want to subscribe to the things that she's saying because I see her as a real person and not this AI generated avatar.

Holly (01:21:44.723)
Okay

Holly (01:21:54.663)
Yeah, and you think about like, why does someone, you know, buy from me? Or, you know, like, I might be selling something that's available in Amazon or something like that. And the reason is, is because they know my heart. They know, you know, that connections. It's just, you know, like, if I have something to sell, that is available somewhere else, if you know me and like me and are connected to me that it's a no brainer, you're to buy it from me. And I think a lot of

especially small businesses, we think about influencers, coaches, anybody with a program selling anything online, is a lot of times they give that away. And it's so ridiculous because that's our superpower. Target can't compete with me if I had the thing. you know, and

Paul Povolni (01:22:42.69)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:22:49.56)
Right.

Holly (01:22:51.529)
And that, so don't give away that superpower. One of the things that we learned when we were doing LulaRoe is, LulaRoe was a network marketing company that the buy-in to start was between six and $10,000. So, I mean, you're talking like a high ticket buy-in. And within a few months, we had recruited over 120 people into our downline.

at that price tag. And we supported them. Everybody in our downline made money. weren't supposed to be on the, there's a Netflix documentary out about the company that we were supposed to be in, but I'm glad we weren't because we actually made money. We made a lot of money from it. But so we didn't fit their like sad story. But one of the things that we realized is why did these people buy

Paul Povolni (01:23:35.297)
wow.

Paul Povolni (01:23:40.236)
Yeah.

Holly (01:23:51.097)
a business opportunity from two silly girls, my partner, Jamie Harrington and I, two silly girls that were just doing silly videos every night. Like what about that makes them think that we can make them money and so much so that they would give us that amount of money. So I started looking back at the content because I was teaching them to run businesses because we had all these people in our down way.

And I started realizing, you know, like, if I had gone out to put out content on the internet to recruit people for my high ticket, you know, business, I would have gotten it all wrong. I would have thought I needed to be like kind of professional and I needed to explain the pros and the cons and overcome objection and all that kind of stuff. What we realized, and this was like a hugest light bulb moment, is that

Paul Povolni (01:24:35.298)
Hmm, well.

Holly (01:24:50.771)
So before we started selling Lularoe, in fact, the reason why we started selling Lularoe is we were running a show on Facebook Live called Craft with Crap. My husband would give us two sets of like four crap items, and then we had 20 minutes to craft them into something else and then basically go head to head on which had the better craft.

Paul Povolni (01:25:03.819)
Hahaha

Holly (01:25:19.921)
and then the people watching could vote in emoji form only. And then we would do it all over again. So it was an hour long show of just stupidity. people would watch it because I would cut my finger open with a raise. mean, we're hot messes. And so that craft with crap. And so one day after one of our sales, we'd been doing LulaRoe for about a year.

Paul Povolni (01:25:24.521)
Hahaha.

Paul Povolni (01:25:31.351)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:25:35.854)
Hahaha

Holly (01:25:47.913)
My husband put our first episode of Craft with Crap up, was because we saw a Lula Rho as a way to monetize, you know, Craft with Crap. So put our first episode of Craft with up on the TV as we were kind of winding up, winding down like the evening. And we sat down, we started laughing at how silly it was and how ridiculous it was. And then we started noticing the people commenting on our first Craft with Crap episode.

were the same people that had bought into a six to $10,000 business opportunity within the year. So when you go out and you think, no, I have to do it this way, that is a lie that somebody's telling you because the reason why they trusted us wasn't because

Paul Povolni (01:26:29.347)
Wow.

Holly (01:26:47.537)
we had some glossy brochure that would not have worked is because we were like, yeah, hot messes. And if we, and we were having fun and they're like, well, if Holly and Jamie can do this, we can do it. So like literally opening the door for your next customer's like vision of what is possible for them does is actually fancy is a bad way to go.

Paul Povolni (01:26:49.998)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (01:26:56.151)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:27:02.573)
Right.

Holly (01:27:16.425)
But being like that person that they can connect with and realize that, you know, realize their heart is so much more important. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:27:16.738)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:27:26.87)
Yeah. The authenticity. Yeah. Yeah. It makes a big difference. This has been an amazing conversation. I can't believe how quickly time has flown. Now this is also fantastic. And, we haven't even talked about, you mentioned that you're into software development now and, we didn't even get into page wheel at all.

Holly (01:27:34.216)
Sorry.

Paul Povolni (01:27:45.07)
Um, so just briefly, is there a brief version of sharing a little bit, a little bit about that? Cause I want to your time and, so share a little bit about the software development and page wheel and what you're doing there as well.

Holly (01:27:47.113)
A brief. Yes.

Holly (01:27:58.545)
Yeah, so on the websites, and Rachel and I have several that we own together, we thought, let's put in some low ticket items for different things so that we could kind of offer that, get some monetization to the people, offer a second level. Like, hey, if you want a guide that goes along with this content, like I started with a camping guide, a cleaning guide, that kind of stuff. And we were looking at

launching about 20 of these on different verticals on the blog, anywhere between seven and $20, you know, things. And so we started putting together funnels. And by we, I mean, Rachel, because I am not I'm terrible. I was in like Russell Brunson's mastermind for two years, still cannot build a funnel to save my life. And then so she was putting it together.

Paul Povolni (01:28:36.374)
You

Holly (01:28:48.253)
was taking our hours and hours and hours. We were launching them. She was cloning them, doing the next one, hours and hours and hours. I was doing the customer service. Things were breaking. then I realized we're using a software that costs like $300. So like, do the math. How many guides do I have to sell before this even comes? And then there was a month when everything was broken. So I had to refund all the people. And I was just like,

Paul Povolni (01:29:09.464)
Pays for itself, yeah.

Holly (01:29:17.577)
this is like at that time of 2023, like there has to be an easier way to give something away or to sell something for, you know, sell anything. Like this is ridiculous. And so Rachel at first was like, well, we could do, you know, she was thinking about automating like the different funnel softwares that are available. And then she came back and she goes, I think we just need to build it. And so that's what we did. And PageWheel is that where

You can, we were really lucky because we were on the early stages of AI came in right when we needed it. We were using AI behind the scenes to create digital products and stuff like that. And then we realized, let's put that forward facing for our customers. And so you can build what you can do a digital product if you want to, like a workbook or a planner or a checklist or something like that in page wheel. In just a few minutes, you can use AI to create that content.

You can then, and then it knows what you just made. So it's gonna write the sales page, delivery page, connect it all up, the delivery email. And there's no tech. Like you say, I have this idea, you follow the steps and then you can launch. And so now you don't even have to have a digital product. You could do a mini funnel and you can build this instead of spending five and six hours or 10 hours or 12 hours in.

Paul Povolni (01:30:24.728)
Hahaha

Holly (01:30:38.569)
I mean, I could launch one in probably three minutes if you had the time. So taking that tech piece off, and because so much of what we do every day is limited by obstacles of tech, and that's what I had to get that off my plate to be able to get that. So it's kind of a funnel builder, digital product launcher, creator, but just simple. It's not techy at all.

Paul Povolni (01:30:41.496)
Wow, wow.

Paul Povolni (01:30:53.858)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:31:05.292)
Yeah. And how do they find that? it page wheel? What's, what's your page wheel.com? And then also be sure to check out kids activities.com. how, what are some other ways that people can get a hold of you and be a part of what you're doing?

Holly (01:31:07.334)
Paytobel.com. Yep.

Holly (01:31:17.961)
Yeah, so if you have kids then definitely get on kids activities, get on my email list so you hear from me again. And you can do that by downloading any of the coloring pages or any of the opt-ins, know, any of the paper things that you would get on that. And then Pagewheel, if you're interested in, you know, looking at that, we also have a Facebook group that's free on Pagewheel. Just look for the Pagewheel Facebook group and you'll see what people are doing in there. And you can always reach out to me if on Pagewheel.

Paul Povolni (01:31:22.7)
Yeah, yeah.

Holly (01:31:47.849)
The whole website, there's a little chat, kind of the help desk, I'm on the other side of that. So if you have a question, you want to have a question for me or you want to connect in any way, just use that chat on pageville.com.

Paul Povolni (01:32:00.618)
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Holly. This has been a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful conversation. Have enjoyed it so much and, you know, proud of you and all that you're doing. And I appreciate you coming on.

Holly (01:32:11.453)
Thank you so much.