How One Huge Gamble on a Newsletter Ignited a Digital Empire

Jim Banks [00:00:00]:
It seems like every digital marketing expert is now a podcaster. I'm not sure what has given everyone the itch, but I'm delighted to see so many of my peers doing the same as me and sharing their knowledge with their guests. I'm super happy to have you listening in to this episode of Bad Decisions with Jim Banks, which is the digital marketing podcast where Jim and his guests share stories about bad decisions they've made, how it impacted their career, and what to do to avoid making the same bad decisions with other digital marketing podcasts. Everything is rainbows and unicorns, but on this podcast we discuss uncomfortable topics in the hope that we can steer you away from costly errors, both personally and professionally. Today we're talking to Emmanuel Sinker or Manu to his friends. Manu is a twice failed university student and former professional poker player who co authored a best selling poker book. Thankfully, he failed university the first time, which led him to try business administration at university in Vienna, Austria. And even though the degree didn't work out, he loved Vienna enough to call it his home.

Jim Banks [00:00:59]:
Now, Manu started Stacked Marketer as a free, expertly curated digital marketing newsletter in 2018, and since then he has grown his audience to over 100,000 marketers who read at least one of the free newsletters Stacked Marketer publishes every week. So good to have you on the show Today Manu, how have you been?

Emanuel Cinca [00:01:17]:
Hey Jim, thanks for having me. Great to be chatting again. It's been a while.

Jim Banks [00:01:21]:
It has. So what have you been up to since we last spoke? Because I tried to have you on as a guest on my elite media Buyers podcast that I tried to get off the ground. So what have you been up to since then? It's probably about just over a year ago, I guess, maybe.

Emanuel Cinca [00:01:35]:
Yeah, I guess the biggest thing is so still Stacked Marketer, definitely the only focus that I have when it comes to business still. But the biggest differences are kind of in what stock marketer is, I would say we used to be back when we first talked about it, or like when we last talked about it, we were one newsletter focused on digital marketers. Now, since then, we're three newsletters. So two more newsletters broke the 100,000 marketers subscribe to one of our newsletters mark as well this year. And just recently we had a pretty major upgrade, launching in terms of like website user experience, email templates, complete revamp of everything that we've used that we were using to try to make content consumption more enjoyable for our readers. But yeah, so it's, it's been a busy couple of weeks for me, but I guess it's great that we managed to find the time to chat here. And as the podcast is called, bad decisions. There's definitely quite a few bad decisions that were happening both in this past year, but also even before that we can talk about.

Jim Banks [00:02:43]:
So obviously you've transitioned from failing university poker player. What was your route into digital marketing? And obviously now basically publishing, I mean, I guess for all Taunton ten supersedes. You're a publisher now, right. So what was your kind of journey?

Emanuel Cinca [00:02:56]:
Yeah, so back in high school, I was pretty much interested in computer science programming. So programming was the thing that I was most interested in high school. That went pretty well overall. So I thought that I want to study programming in university. Didn't like it that we were kind of going back to basics. Like, it felt like I'm wasting my time because I already know more. So like, for some reason, even though I was studying in like intensive computer programming high school, when going to university, even though it was engineering and it and programming, we kind of went back to square one of like basics. So if someone comes from a non programming high school, they could still follow through.

Emanuel Cinca [00:03:35]:
And I'm like, yeah, this is, this is not what I want to do. So I quit that. And then just at the same time I was playing poker, so I quit that. Focused more on playing poker professionally, making some money, meeting some people, some of which are still business partners with me to this day. So that was a major benefit of poker for me. And I thought, okay, let's try business administration, see how it goes. Didn't like that quite much either, because you kind of get the theoretical side of things. And I was like, again, okay, but you've not started a business.

Emanuel Cinca [00:04:05]:
How you can teach me how to start a business or like run a business if you have, you're just teaching it from theory, right? So that those kind of aspects made me more entrepreneurial in a way. Like I just wanted to be more hands on with things. And then when moving to Vienna, we started a software development company based on a little bit of my history in high school with programming with other poker players. But as you can imagine, business doesn't go as you expected. So we had some pivots, we had some attempts of this, and that one thing led to another one of which ended up being digital marketing. Right. So the good thing with digital marketing, especially when you look at the affiliate marketing space, you can, if you learn how to do the marketing side of things, you can promote other people's products get paid a commission. So that was my introduction to the marketing space.

Emanuel Cinca [00:04:50]:
I would say, for the biggest part of things, of course, you kind of try to learn some marketing for your own startup, but that's the main one.

Jim Banks [00:04:57]:
And, I mean, what sort of timeframe when was that that you first started dabbling with affiliate marketing?

Emanuel Cinca [00:05:03]:
Affiliate marketing was 2015. Wow. It's been a while because I'm realizing we're 2024 now. So it always felt like just a few years ago, maybe, but, yeah, that was in 2015, like summer 2015, approximately like that timeframe. So some things didn't work out within the team, had to look for different things to do, like pivoting a few things, and then that was one of the things to test out and work out pretty well. It's kind of how I started, you know, attending some of the conferences that you also went to. So introduced me to this affiliate marketing and then digital marketing space as it expanded.

Jim Banks [00:05:35]:
Yeah. So how did you eventually then transition into becoming a publisher? So what was, what was your route to doing that?

Emanuel Cinca [00:05:41]:
Yeah, well, if you're an affiliate, you promote other people's products, and then you don't really have that much control of how good the product is. What happens after. It's a very, like, it's a very narrow part that you do. And I really, really thought that I want to just, I want to create a product myself where I can control the user experience as much as possible. So, like, create a great product overall. And then that's kind of the mindset shift when it's like, okay, yeah, affiliate marketing, that's, you know, that's nice and all, but I want to have my own product. And then to reach stacked marketer, took a while in terms of, took a few months. I just went to the drawing board, literally made a list of things that I can try out, and then ran traffic to that.

Emanuel Cinca [00:06:26]:
Right. So let's say essentially doing the whole thing where you don't create the whole product and then you launch it, but more like, you know, you have the concept of the product and you pre launch waiting lists or like, let's say lead magnet that you could build. That's the initial step into your product, things like that, and saw what works best at the same time. Also, when doing this research, I ran into a newsletter called Morning Brew, which back then was very much focused on finance. I still enjoy business. I enjoy finance. So I was like, oh, this is cool. Is there anything like this for marketers like us? Like for myself.

Emanuel Cinca [00:07:00]:
Googled it, tried to find, nope, there was not something in that concept back then. And then I just thought, okay, let me try to make it opened up a Google Doc, try to look for news, what would be relevant to me, try to put it into a nice format, try to put it into a nice tone, then hit up friends in the digital marketing space, hit up affiliates and telling them like, look, check this out, let me know what you think. Implementing their feedback and within like, you know, three, four weeks of getting this feedback, implementing some changes, we've launched it publicly and it went well. Just sharing it within some communities and groups. And we got a few, like, I think like four to 500 subscribers within the first week of launching it in, you know, the usual groups that, you know, like some Facebook groups, some paid communities sharing on socials, a few friends sharing it as well. So that was a really promising start that, that's kind of how we saw that this has the most promise and it's the product that was the most, where I could contribute the most because it was a topic that I know and I still like a lot. Right. So if you think of, let's say.

Jim Banks [00:08:03]:
Anyway at the level that you were doing it or plan to do it. Right, so.

Emanuel Cinca [00:08:08]:
Yeah, exactly. So that was one of the hurdles back then where talking to other people when saying like, hey, I'm doing a newsletter, they're like, no, I don't want these spammy things like list of links and spam anymore. Like, what do you mean? And I was like, can you just read this? It's like, oh, I don't have to necessarily link out. I don't have to go out of this. This is fun. Like, oh, it's interesting. Oh, you get it. This is how I, like, the whole point was to create it in the tone that's kind of like talking privately to, with a friend from the industry.

Emanuel Cinca [00:08:36]:
So that's kind of like our guideline to begin with. Like, you're not talking. We don't talk to everyone. We talk to the person reading it. So that adds a lot of personality to it.

Jim Banks [00:08:47]:
Yeah. So I've got to say. So one of the things I really, really like about your business and your business model is you've kind of adopted this ethos of building in public. Right? So, you know, it's amazing that the fact that you're quite happy to share so openly all of the challenges, pitfalls and everything else, but also the revenue growth and I mean, the revenue growth has been phenomenal for your business. Why did you decide that you wanted to kind of share those revenue stats and everything. So publicly, what was it that kind of made you think, well, that's a good idea, I'm going to go public and share all that information?

Emanuel Cinca [00:09:24]:
Yeah, there's a few reasons and even some people said like, yeah, you shouldn't share because it's private. But the main reasons I thought about doing it is I think that the marketing space is definitely one, it's not the only one. And don't get me wrong with that, there's every space has its bad actors, but I think the marketing space specifically has a lot of people selling dreams and such where they get rich quick type of promotions there. And that makes people skeptical about anything that has to do with marketing. And I wanted to show, yeah, look, we're not trying to sell you the dream or anything. We will try our best to get you knowledge that can improve your marketing results. But sounds selling a dream and also go to kind of say that we walk the walk as well. We're sharing our results.

Emanuel Cinca [00:10:10]:
So you can see like where we're coming from, what we managed to do, you know, and then kind of taking it from there. So this transparency part was kind of brought up by that. I thought it can create more trust within everyone who reads and like everyone who's part of the community in the digital marketing community, which is quite large. So that was one reason. Second reason is we noticed that our readers in general can give us some very productive feedback. So we made things like, we did things that were not as good as it can be. Like we made some mistakes in the early days that people were like, hey, you know, I don't appreciate this, I don't like that. And here are the reasons why.

Emanuel Cinca [00:10:48]:
And I noticed that people are, you know, very like you. Even though it's negative feedback in some way, it's a critique. But people probably took like half an hour of their day to write, like some really serious critique with some, some actions to take. So it's like people care about what we're doing. At least some of people care a lot about what we're doing. So it's worth being more transparent because as time goes by, they will be able to give us even more constructive feedback. If they know the inside details to some extent of what we're doing, they will be able to give us even more productive feedback, which also was true. And then one.

Emanuel Cinca [00:11:24]:
Yeah, these are the two main reasons, I think so, like those two things helped a lot. Another benefit is that because we're so transparent, kind of on the trust things as well, you know, more people hear about us, right. So yes, not everyone is a marketer, but because we post our results, like every year we post our results in public, that gets shared quite a bit. There's a new newsletter sponsor or potential partner for some other things that we do. So it kind of helps with just the awareness side of things as well. But yeah, still some downside, of course. But I think overall that. I think that overall is still a positive decision, like a good decision that we made.

Jim Banks [00:12:00]:
Yeah, it's funny actually, in the kind of the creator community on YouTube. I mean, I really kind of first, it first came to my mind when I saw Pat Flynn, who runs a site called Smart Passive Income. And he's been a very kind of prolific podcaster, video creator. And he made a kind of a whole bunch of videos. And I always remember watching this video once and he was sharing his income and basically said, this is what we did this month. And he would say, we made this money from courses, this money from this, this money from this, this. So I think he had about maybe six or seven different streams of income, right. And one of them was he'd made like.

Jim Banks [00:12:34]:
So there's a company called Bluehost who do hosting. And he was basically, I think this video was like maybe six or seven minutes long. And the video showed you how you could register a domain, create a website, or like set up a hosting account and create a website in five minutes using WordPress. Right. And he was making something like $50,000 a month. Right. In affiliate commissions from Bluehost by recommending their hosting platform. Because basically everyone was just copying what he was doing in the video.

Jim Banks [00:13:05]:
So he'd made a video, showed you how registered domain. I think he was using Godaddy. So he made commission on domains registration. He made money on the Bluehost. Right. You know, and he was also helping people. So that's the thing that's always kind of bothered me when people talk about affiliate think it's like grubby and everything else. And the reality of it is you're helping people.

Jim Banks [00:13:25]:
I mean, ultimately this is somebody who's got a burning desire to create a business. They want to get something off the ground. And this is somebody who's providing a kind of like an a to z. Like this is step one, do this, step two, this. And the end result is you have a website. Doesn't necessarily mean it's a good website. There's a whole bunch of marketing stuff you need to throw into the mix as well, but at least you're up and running. You're off to the races at that point.

Jim Banks [00:13:50]:
And then from there you can kind of watch other YouTube videos of other people helping you on your journey towards where you want to kind of be as a digital marketer. Right. So for me, it's like, again, I have no issue at all with anyone that makes their money from recommending other products that they don't sell. But again, if people own their own products, great, fair place to them as well. I think the most important thing is it's got to be a value exchange. You've got to provide them with value and get, you know, get, give, give something back in return and then, you know, there's kind of no issue. So, Manu, one of the things that I always try and ask my guests is what is it that makes you think makes a good publisher? What, what's, you know, you've got some really amazing brands, right? Household name brands as your newsletter sponsors. Right.

Jim Banks [00:14:39]:
So I'm curious, one, you know, what makes a good publisher? And two, how did you kind of get those brands like Salesforce and HubSpot, what was it that persuaded them to kind of come on board as sponsors for the newsletter?

Emanuel Cinca [00:14:53]:
Well, I can start with part one with what, what I think makes a good publisher. And so of course it's the content itself, but I want to go a little bit deeper into that because just saying it's the content, it's kind of vague, like, of course that's the obvious answer. But what would good content be? And I think there's two things with content, especially depending on the format. But for something that's free, for something that's supposed to be kind of like easy to digest, it has to not be too lengthy. Like, of course we have some things that are deeper, but those we provide for people who are more, they want to learn something more in depth. So those are more like courses, research, reports, things like that. So for the free publish, for the free newsletters, it has to be easy enough to digest. And two things, one is with length and then just the tone of it, right? So that's probably the hardest one that you have to practice more.

Emanuel Cinca [00:15:48]:
Like what kind of tone do you use to write? The typical advice is, oh, just write like you speak. I think that's very incomplete and very often plainly wrong because not everyone is a good speaker. Not everyone is a good public speaker. Not everyone is a good, just speaker in general. So then if they write as they speak, it would be awful. But what that, I think what people try to say with that is be more informal. Be talking to one person like one to one rather than one to many. And then from my point of view, I think most of the good content out there these days, especially written one, does a good mix of educating, informing, but also entertaining.

Emanuel Cinca [00:16:28]:
So like the entertainment part of it is still useful. Of course, you don't have, you should not do like the thing where you just try to make puns within every sentence. So that's the skill, like you have to practice and see where the right balance is. But you know, having some insider jokes about, let's say the marketing industry in our case or what's pop culture references that are still relevant for people in our readership, right? So we know that we don't have readers. Like most of our readers are still within like I would say 25 to 45 years old. So if we do references for that kind of generation, people get it. We don't do references for people that are super young or super old. Like we don't do like for, you know, it's not going to be for my grandparents that are like 75 towards 80 years old.

Emanuel Cinca [00:17:17]:
Doesn't make sense. So we try to be very much aware of that. And then lastly, aside from the good content side of things, is something that I feel strongly about, especially for email, is being honest with yourself and cleaning your list properly so you want to have the data as real as possible so that you have real people with real intent. It's obvious that for the web in general, that's an issue. But also for email, there are still bots, right? Apple Mail Privacy opens newsletters, appoints emails all the time. It's not real people. There's corporate firewalls that click links to check for any sort of malware and phishing links, whatever. And those, if you're not careful, they get recorded within your stats and you think you have an engaged audience, but you have to clean that up and see what are the real people with real intent.

Emanuel Cinca [00:18:07]:
What's that looking like? So work on the content side of things. Try to be entertaining and educating and with your information, then be honest with the data that you're kind of analyzing to not fool yourself. So I think with those two combined, iterating with it, that's what makes a good publisher and makes good content. And I think that's what ended up getting us those kind of sponsors. And because you kind of said like how did we get them? And the lucky thing for us is that it was all inbound. They came to us, we didn't go to them.

Jim Banks [00:18:43]:
So take it right so that's the thing.

Emanuel Cinca [00:18:45]:
Like we just have a link of saying advertise with us in the newsletter and then we have a page where we explain a few more details and the contact form and then, you know, Salesforce contacted us, HubSpot contacted us, Semrush, they were also inbound for us. So all of these things people came to us. Of course, then we tried our best to provide a good service when it comes to what content we publish and the results that they get. But it wasn't us going to them and saying like, hey look, we have this great newsletter. It was them coming to us. Of course we do some outbound and there are some good sponsors from outbound efforts as well. But the biggest wins were just the fact that these highlights would like, some of the biggest sponsors came to us, we didn't go to them. So I think that's kind of a sign that made me positive that we're doing, we're on the right path with the content side of things and we're creating the right impression.

Jim Banks [00:19:41]:
And obviously your portfolio of publishing titles if you like, has increased from just being Stacked Marketer. You now have three, you have tactics and psychology of marketing. And again, we were talking in the green room and I understand that tactics is kind of like its homegrown, you built it yourself and psychology of marketing, you acquired the business. So again, what was the process for that? How did you go out looking for an acquisition and what was the criteria that you had for doing that? Just in case there are other people that maybe have a similar thing that maybe theyre looking for either to kind of sell, right. So they may go manual. I want to talk to you, or looking to kind of, you know, to acquire others, maybe you can kind of provide some helpful insight into that.

Emanuel Cinca [00:20:29]:
Yeah, of course, around a year ago, a little bit more than a year ago, we thought like how do we expand? Like how do we grow our business? And one clear decision was that we want to stay within the marketing space, so we don't want to expand within other industries or other niches. We want to do more within the marketing space itself. And then one way to do that is like, okay, what are other marketing newsletters that are, that complement the daily newsletter that we have right now? So content that the same people might want to read. So just having, you know, more interesting content for the same type of audience, or at least a very big overlap for the audience and just looked around, looked at what I was reading within my inbox and psychological marketing was one of the newsletters I was reading, I reached out to the founder. We actually did some cross promotions before I saw that the audience is nicely engaged. So it's like, the numbers that he was talking about were real. So, like, it was real people with real intent as much as possible. Like, there's always some room for error there, but much better than the average newsletter.

Emanuel Cinca [00:21:31]:
So I reached out after a few of these collaborations and asked, you know, what's your plans in the future? Would you be open to selling the newsletter? Like, just starting that conversation pretty straightforward in that way. One thing led to another, and then when looking into, you know, what kind of, you know, what kind of plans he had, how would we want to do just things fit well together? So we decided to acquire it. So this was more based on, like, it's complementary content to what we have already. And then another reason we might acquire a newsletter is if it's exactly the same purpose of what we have now. So let's say if there's another daily, like, Monday to Friday newsletter that provides news for marketers, but the person who owns it, I don't know, can't monetize it well and they want to sell it, we might also be interested in acquiring that. So those are, like, the two reasons. Like, one reason, extra content, like the concept and the content that we think is useful for the audience that we have already. And kind of a reason to acquire is like, yeah, we could build it on our own and try to grow it, but why not start it off with, you know, 25,000 subscribers and, you know, a good library of content that exists already? If it's the right price, why start from zero? Or it's never zero in our case, now, but why start from so much, so many steps back and, yeah, and that's also, sorry, did you do any.

Jim Banks [00:22:54]:
Fundraising for that at all, to kind of make the acquisition, or was it something that you just kind of bought from?

Emanuel Cinca [00:22:59]:
No, no, no. So it was something we could afford to do ourselves. So that was not something that we raised money for. We kind of felt like, yeah, we would just have less profit for the year, but that's fine. And because this kind of acquisition won't be like, won't pay off in two months or anything silly like that, it will take a little bit to pay off, but we're pretty optimistic. We were pretty confident about it. I think we also, in, now that it's one year later, we were pretty accurate in that assessment of how things would go. So, yeah, pretty happy about it, but we didn't have to raise funds.

Emanuel Cinca [00:23:31]:
So since it was a newsletter with around when we acquired I think like 25 ish thousand. So I would have to check exactly, but let's say around 25,000 active subscribers, the price was something we could afford directly, so that was pretty good for us.

Jim Banks [00:23:50]:
Cool. And what do you see as being the next big challenge for kind of digital marketing? Publishers or digital marketing? Just generally, I mean I'm always looking at the press and again, I mean, Stacked Marketer is one of the emails. I get it on a daily basis. I love getting it because it's like it just pulls out, sucks out all the salient points from all. Again, I could probably set up Google alerts, but for me it's much better to have one in one place. And as you say, you add your own kind of tone and opinions to it. So for me in some respect, it's great to kind of get that digest on a daily basis, comes in around that right sort of time in the middle of having a break for coffee or something like that and just kind of skim through it, look at the articles, click through, read them in more detail if it's appropriate, and then go about the rest of my day. So for me that's great, but what do you see digital marketing and publishers specifically? Kind of like what do you see the challenges for the next three to five years?

Emanuel Cinca [00:24:49]:
Three to five years is hard to say. I would be able to guess more like the next one to two years. So a lot of publishers, yeah, a lot of publishers are still ad supported, like including ourselves. Most like 90% of our revenue or something around there is through ad revenue. And I think, I would say it's not secret. Some people disagree on this, but I think it's not a secret that a lot of marketing budgets are lower, advertising budgets are lower compared to, you know, like a year ago, or at least they haven't grown enough compared to other things that other expenses that have grown. Essentially people are more limited with how they spend money. So ad supported businesses, I think they have to, they have to provide better results to get the same amount of revenue, better performance, better results, whatever might that might mean.

Emanuel Cinca [00:25:36]:
So that's something they cannot really control. But I think it is a challenge to navigate. I'm pretty sure a lot of non marketing publishers as well have that challenge and you probably hear it in the news that their Buzzfeed, I think is one example where, yeah, it was like the sweetheart of the content publishing space a few years ago and now it's like will it survive? Type of scenario I haven't checked like in detail, but it's just, it's not looking great for them.

Jim Banks [00:26:02]:
Yeah.

Emanuel Cinca [00:26:02]:
So everyone has these sort of challenges. They have to navigate them well and then something that maybe is a little bit more within their control for publishers is the fact that they have, they will have less tracking and data on their readers, their users. That's something that has been a trend for a few years, but that's still continuing, right? Like that's not, that's not done yet. We're not over with. It's not over yet for email. I obviously mentioned already that the Apple Mail privacy protection opens all emails. Therefore you, like, you have inflated open rates. So you kind of, you're celebrating things that are not real.

Emanuel Cinca [00:26:39]:
Yeah. So the metric rates as well bot.

Jim Banks [00:26:42]:
Clicks is using to measure your success may well change kind of in the next twelve to 18 months.

Emanuel Cinca [00:26:48]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you probably have to, yeah, you have to look deeper into your overall like funnel, like can you get, you know, like what's the revenue that your audience is generating for your sponsors or things like that? Of course you cannot know that for sure, but from that abstraction you can look like what's, what's the cost for a real click? Things like that. So I think that that's going to be a challenge in general for, for publishers as well. Just making sure that they're not lying to themselves. It's like they need to get more details of like what's, what's really happening, what's true intent, what's real people? What, who are real people? What are they doing? Yeah, that's kind of how I see it now and then every, depending on what kind of publisher you are, you'll have different solutions or different extra challenges.

Jim Banks [00:27:29]:
Yeah. Because I always remember way back in sort of 2009 when I went to work, I sold, I sold my affiliate network to an ad sales house and they were representing some really significantly big brands and they were basically their job was to help maximize the return on selling the ad inventory on the site. And I mean ultimately email was a big chunk of the kind of deliverability on that. We would obviously have a lot of banner ads and everything else, but email was also one of those things where we had a big, big email database and we would send out a certain number of emails. What would happen is that there would be some advertisers would be disappointed with the results they got. And I've always kind of said, well, in some respects you could argue and say, well, the onus is on the advertiser to kind of write good sponsored messages in emails that are going out. It's not for you to kind of like dictate what actually happens. But there would be a certain amount of deliverability that we would give them.

Jim Banks [00:28:29]:
They would get certain amounts of results. Sometimes we'd be unhappy. So we would end up like maybe throwing another million impressions on banner ads to kind of compensate them for, to try and sort of make the numbers up. Right. So it was always one of those things that in some respects I always kind of said it was a little bit like juggling chainsaws, right. You had all these different kind of obligations that you were trying to fulfill. You had to try and maximize the return for the publisher, but also give the advertisers a good return. So it was always kind of like you're trying to sort of provide a good environment for the relationships to thrive.

Jim Banks [00:29:03]:
Right. And it wasn't always easy as it, as it could have been. Right. So, you know, again, sometimes there would be a poor brand fit. So people were concerned about brand can, brand concerns, brand safety, that type of thing. I mean, that's one of the challenges that, you know, I guess probably in the publishing space, you know, let's say for argument's sake, you get like an adult porn network that wants to kind of run ads on your newsletter. You might go, sorry, that's not, that's not going to be a good fit for our audience. Even though you're turning away, you've got to be respectful of the people that are in your database.

Jim Banks [00:29:37]:
Otherwise you'll get the biggest number of unsubscribes in a day going, really?

Emanuel Cinca [00:29:43]:
Yeah, exactly. It's that. And actually one of the points that you mentioned is something that we try to solve because you said, hey, maybe it's your offer that's not presented in the best way possible. One thing that we do, something we do differently because a lot of publishers try to do that, especially for email publishing these days. For newsletters, we write the copy for the sponsors and then they just make some final adjustments. But we write it in a way that we know, like we learn from all the experience, which is kind of hard to put into a checklist to give the sponsor. Like within our experience we know some things. So some things are just a feel now.

Emanuel Cinca [00:30:19]:
But also we have some guidelines that keep the copy clear. It keeps it clear, concise, it keeps it on point for our readership and keeps it in tone with the newsletter. So a lot of people find the sponsor placements as well. They find them interesting. It's not like a banner ad that or like an interstitial that just pops up when you don't want it. So it's part of the experience. Of course, not everyone likes them. That's fine.

Emanuel Cinca [00:30:45]:
But for some people, it is just a normal part of the experience to also read about interesting sponsors, interesting tools, and they like the way we present them. But if we let the sponsor only do that in their tone, in their voice, I'm 100% certain, because we've even let some sponsors do that, it won't perform as good as it does when we write it.

Jim Banks [00:31:07]:
Yeah.

Emanuel Cinca [00:31:07]:
At least on average. There's always going to be exceptions.

Jim Banks [00:31:10]:
Yeah. And it's funny, I mean, in the podcasting world, I think it's quite interesting that a lot of the ads that you'll hear, they call them host red, in other words, like, so if somebody wanted my podcast, right, then they would basically get me to read their ad for them, right. Rather than them reading the ad, because I think sometimes that's what people are looking for. They're looking for, you know, they're looking for you to. To provide that. That kind of, you know, you read it and then that way, kind of like, it builds more trust. Right. The thing I like about your newsletter is you've got kind of a combination of the, you know, it's almost like a information sandwich.

Jim Banks [00:31:47]:
So you've got information, information that's of relevance, the ad and then information at the bottom. So it's kind of like a nice, easy. It kind of goes through. So, Manu, again, we could probably talk for absolute hours, but I'm going to kind of wrap things up now. Thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast. If there was one thing that you want to kind of talk about specifically maybe for my audience that they might be interested in kind of learning more about, what would it be?

Emanuel Cinca [00:32:20]:
Sorry, can you repeat the question a bit? Because I didn't quite get what you meant.

Jim Banks [00:32:24]:
Yeah. So obviously, I want to try and give the audience something that they can go, oh, based on that conversation, that's what I want to do next. It might be to kind of obviously subscribe to the newsletter. Right. So where can they do that? I mean, it'll be in the show notes, but just maybe kind of talk about it just in case they don't read the show notes.

Emanuel Cinca [00:32:43]:
Sure. Yeah. So to subscribe to the newsletter, you just have to go to stackmarketer.com, so it's free to check out if you don't like it. Unsubscribe not a problem. So that's all good for us. I know that, you know, different people have different tastes or different needs, so that's totally fine. No hard feelings there.

Jim Banks [00:33:01]:
And then I promise people will like it. Right? Again, I've been like a subscriber, you could probably check on your database, but I've been a subscriber on the stack market database for an awful long time. Right. And I don't necessarily click through to stuff, but I read it every day it comes through, so it's definitely worth subscribing if you haven't already subscribed.

Emanuel Cinca [00:33:23]:
That's awesome to hear. And yeah, I agree with you. Like, I, like, I still read it, right? So I'm still a user or a reader of the newsletter as well, not just the creator of it. So. So just the founder. And then yeah, if people find these kind of publishing newsletter type of businesses interesting, they can follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. In both cases, if you search for Emmanuel Cinca, so just my name, you should be able to find me. And I have my profile picture there, so it should be easy to recognize if there's any like another person that shares my name, which not so common though.

Emanuel Cinca [00:33:56]:
So there. On social, I mostly share things like, you know, let's say behind the scenes or learnings that have happened over the recent time from the newsletter space, from just being an online entrepreneur. And yeah, that if you are interested in these kind of things, I think you'll find my posts interesting as well. But yeah, it's been great to be here. Really appreciate you having me. And of course, if any of the listeners have specific questions, they can reach out with them. I tend to answer within like 24 hours at least, to be like, hey, I have to get back to you later if it's too detailed of a question, but usually if you reach out to me with a DM or something, I'll be happy to answer any more specific questions that you have.

Jim Banks [00:34:44]:
That's brilliant. So that's the episode kind of in the can. Thank thanks for you for listening into it. They can obviously support the podcast by following subscribing on your favorite podcast platform. And for bonus, thanks. If you wouldn't mind leaving a review and sharing the episode with a friend or colleague who you know that this episode will vibe with, that would be amazing. All of Manu's details will be available in the show notes along with the transcript and any resources that we discussed on the episode. If you are watching this episode on video, there is a playlist here where you can watch or listen to other episodes of the podcast, and you can do the same thing, but without the pictures over on Apple or Spotify.

Jim Banks [00:35:31]:
And that.