Category: Growth & Discovery

Most operators trying to grow a newsletter run into the same wall around 1,000 subscribers. Organic search drips a few signups a day. Social posts spike traffic for 24 hours then go quiet. Paid ads on Meta or X cost $3–$8 per email when they work, more when they don’t. Referrals — actual reader-to-reader forwarding — are the gold standard but slow until you have enough subscribers for the math to compound.

The piece most operators miss is mutual recommendation: appearing in the recommendation list of newsletters whose audience overlaps with yours, and showing those same newsletters to your readers. It’s how Substack’s “Recommended by other writers” works inside their platform; it’s how SparkLoop and Beehiiv’s recommendation marketplaces work as a paid layer; and it’s the single channel new operators consistently underestimate.

The “Other newsletters you might like” widget in One Two Three Send Pro is the same idea — free, and built into the WordPress plugin.

What the widget does

The plugin runs a central directory at onetwothreesend.com — a registry of newsletters built on One Two Three Send Pro. When you install the plugin and opt in, two things happen:

1. Your newsletter appears in other publishers’ widgets — both on their websites and at the bottom of their daily emails. A reader who’s enjoying their newsletter sees a card with your name, your one-line description, and a Subscribe button.
2. Your widget shows other publishers’ newsletters — the same way, on your blog posts and at the bottom of your emails.

Four cards by default. Each Subscribe link routes through a tracked redirect, so both sides can see how many clicks each surface produces.

Why mutual recommendation outperforms most other channels

1. The intent match is excellent. Someone reading another travel-newsletter operator’s post is, by definition, a person who likes reading travel newsletters. They’ve already qualified themselves on the medium and the topic. Conversion from that audience is typically 2–10× a cold paid ad on Meta, because the reader is already doing the thing you want them to keep doing.

2. The cost is ad inventory you weren’t selling. The bottom of every blog post and every email is real estate that, if you’re not running the widget, is empty. Trading that space for similar inventory on someone else’s newsletter is free. The “cost” is showing four other newsletters to your readers — and if you’ve curated the network well, that’s a feature, not a leak.

3. It compounds with size. A widget with 4 newsletters in it is mildly useful. A widget with 50 newsletters in the registry (where the algorithm picks the 4 most-relevant for each impression) is a small Times Square billboard. Each newsletter that joins makes the widget more useful for everyone. Networks of this kind typically hit a tipping point at 30–50 members where the rate of new subscribers from the widget overtakes referrals for new operators.

What you actually see on each surface

On every blog post: the widget appears at the end of the article body as a labelled section — Other newsletters you might like — with four cards. Subscribe buttons go to each partner newsletter’s signup form.

At the bottom of every newsletter email: the same four newsletters, rendered in email-safe inline tables so it works in Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, and the rest — not just modern browsers.

No widget on: admin pages, RSS feeds, REST output, the home page or category archives, your own newsletter posts (those build their own widget already), and any post where you’ve placed the shortcode manually so we don’t duplicate it.

The 60-second setup

Once you have One Two Three Send + One Two Three Send Pro installed:

1. Go to Newsletter → Network.
2. Click Join the network.
3. Confirm your newsletter name, description, and signup URL. The description is what shows up under your name in everyone else’s widget — keep it to one line and lead with the value.
4. Save.

That’s it. The plugin starts publishing your listing to the central registry within a minute. Other sites’ widgets refresh their cached recommendations every few hours, so you should start appearing on partner sites within a day. Your own widget activates once at least three other newsletters have joined — otherwise the widget hides itself rather than show a barely-populated panel.

To override the default count for a specific page, drop the shortcode in manually:

		

			
Other newsletters you might like
			

									

						
Local Edinburgh
													
Local Edinburgh is a website that is dedicated to the promotion of Edinburgh as a travel destination. Edinburgh is Scotland’s capital city renowned for its heritage culture and festivals.
												
							Subscribe						
					
									

						
My Local Dublin
													
Dublin Ireland - Explore the city and find things to do, places to see and food to eat.
												
							Subscribe						
					
									

						
Love Italy
													
Love Italy is a comprehensive online platform and Newsletter that is devoted to showcasing the beauty, charm, and allure of Italy as a premier travel destination.
												
							Subscribe						
					
									

						
Love Netherlands
													
Canal towns, hidden villages, Dutch stories — a slow, loving look at the Netherlands, written by the people who love it most.
												
							Subscribe						
					
							
			

				Newsletters via the One Two Three Send network.				 · 
				Want your newsletter featured here? Click here
			
		
		

Cap is 10 cards.

What to put in the description line

The line under your newsletter name is the entire pitch. People read eight words and decide whether to click. Bad descriptions look like this:

“A newsletter about productivity, time management, focus, and getting more done in less time with proven techniques.”

Good descriptions look like this:

“One small experiment to get unstuck. Mondays.”

The first one is a list of topics. The second is a contract: what you’ll get, when you’ll get it. Lead with the benefit, name the cadence, stop.

A few patterns that work:

• The benefit + the cadence: “Smarter ad copy. Every Tuesday.”
• The audience + the value: “For solo SaaS founders. The one growth tactic I tried this week.”
• The hook + the proof: “The newsletter that made me $40k. Free.”

Avoid adjective stacking (“the best, smartest, most insightful…”), listing every topic (“…covering marketing, sales, retention, hiring…”), and generic claims (“trusted by thousands of readers”). They all eat your eight words and say nothing.

Honest expectations

The widget is not a button you press to get subscribers. Real numbers from running this on a small travel-newsletter network:

• First 30 days: 5–15 new subscribers per week if you’re a small site with 200–1,000 weekly visitors. Roughly 0.5–1.5% click-through rate on widget impressions; about 30% of clicks convert when the partner newsletter and yours overlap topically.
• Once your daily email goes to 3,000+ subscribers: 20–80 new subscribers per week, mostly via the email-bottom widget rather than the blog one (email gets read; blog posts compete with everything else).
• The network effect kicks in around 30 members: below that, your widget might only show 4 partners and reader fatigue (“oh, those four again”) shows up. Recommend the plugin to other operators in your space — every additional member makes everyone’s widget more useful.

The widget will not turn a newsletter nobody wants into one people want. It amplifies whatever signal your newsletter already has. If your retention is poor and your open rate is 12%, the widget will bring in subscribers who will also unsubscribe. If your newsletter is genuinely good and you’re stuck below 1,000 because nobody knows about you, the widget is one of the best free channels available.

Click tracking and stats

Every Subscribe-button click routes through the central registry’s click endpoint, so both sides see where their clicks come from. You can read your own outgoing-and-incoming click counts at Newsletter → Network → Stats. Useful for two things:

• Spotting which partners send the best subscribers — open rate of subscribers from each source, after 30 days. Bad-fit traffic shows up as a 60% open-rate drop in the first week.
• Spotting when you’ve outgrown the description — if your CTR (Subscribe clicks ÷ widget impressions) drops below 0.5%, you’ve either changed audiences (the description no longer matches what they’ll get) or the partners on the widget no longer overlap with you. Time to rewrite the line.

What the widget is not

• Not a paid placement. Nobody’s buying recommendations. The network is mutual — you appear if and only if you also show others.
• Not Substack Recommendations. Substack’s system only works inside Substack and lives in publication settings. This widget is your own real estate, on your own domain, in your own email.
• Not affiliate-driven. No commission. The point is reader exchange.
• Not curated by us. Every newsletter that joins appears. Spam protection is automated (failed delivery rate, complaint rate, listing takedown reports). If you find a partner that’s a poor fit, you can hide specific listings from your widget without leaving the network.

The minimum viable test

If you’ve never used the widget before, this is the smallest test that tells you whether it’s worth keeping on:

1. Install One Two Three Send + One Two Three Send Pro.
2. Join the network (Newsletter → Network → Join).
3. Leave it on for 30 days. Don’t change anything else — no new lead magnet, no new content cadence, no new referral push.
4. After 30 days, check Newsletter → Stats for incoming subscriber count from the widget vs. your usual weekly average.

If you got more than 50 new subscribers from the widget alone, it’s a permanent channel. If you got 5 and the partner newsletters were a poor fit, your description is the issue (rewrite it) or your topical neighborhood is thin in the network (recruit a few peers).

Either way: the widget costs nothing to keep on, and the first 30 days will tell you whether to invest in better description copy or recruit more partners. Most operators discover that “a small percentage of every email and every blog post” turns into their third or fourth largest acquisition channel after a few months.

Someone forwards your newsletter to a friend. That friend loves it, forwards it to three more people. One of those people screenshots your best bit and shares it on Twitter. Suddenly you’ve got reach you didn’t pay for.

Sounds brilliant, right?

It’s not. Or at least, it’s more complicated than the growth-hackers-turned-newsletter-gurus would have you believe. Because every forward creates a reader you don’t control, can’t measure, and—most importantly—can’t convert.

The ghost audience problem

Here’s what happens when your newsletter gets forwarded: you get phantom readers. People consuming your work without appearing in your subscriber count, your open rates, or your engagement metrics. They’re invisible.

That might sound like a victimless situation—free exposure, right?—but it creates three specific problems. First, you’re making editorial decisions based on incomplete data. You think 40% of your list cares about topic X because that’s what your engaged subscribers click on, but you’re missing the forwarded audience that’s actually more interested in topic Y.

Second, you can’t build a relationship with people you don’t know exist. They’re not getting your welcome sequence, your occasional subscriber-only perks, or your asks for feedback. They’re just… there. Lurking in someone else’s inbox.

Third—and this is the one that actually costs you money—you can’t convert them. Can’t sell them your course, your consulting, your premium tier, your anything. They’re permanently locked outside your business model.

Why “just add a subscribe link” doesn’t work

The standard advice is to stick a subscribe link at the bottom of every email. “If you were forwarded this, subscribe here!” Done, problem solved.

Except no one clicks it.

Think about your own behavior. When someone forwards you a newsletter, you’re reading it in a specific context—usually because the forwarder said “thought you’d find this interesting” or “this reminded me of you.” You read that one piece. You don’t immediately stop, scroll to the bottom, and subscribe to a publication you’ve seen exactly once.

The conversion rate from forwarded reader to subscriber is abysmal because the friction is enormous and the trust hasn’t been built yet. They haven’t opted in to hearing from you. They opted in to hearing from their mate Dave, who happened to pass along your work.

The economics of forwardability

Here’s the uncomfortable bit: making your newsletter “forwardable” and making it valuable to your business are often opposing forces.

Highly forwardable content tends to be standalone, evergreen, and broadly appealing. It’s the stuff that works out of context. A great essay, a useful framework, a properly funny observation. But that’s not usually what builds a sustainable newsletter business.

What builds a business is specificity, continuity, and insider value. It’s the running jokes, the callbacks to previous issues, the stuff that only makes sense if you’ve been paying attention. It’s the “you had to be there” quality that makes subscribers feel like they’re part of something, not just consuming isolated chunks of content.

The more forwardable you make each individual issue, the less you’re rewarding the people who actually subscribed. You’re optimizing for the wrong audience.

What to do instead

Stop trying to engineer virality through forwards. If it happens organically, fine—but don’t structure your editorial strategy around it.

Instead, focus on making your newsletter talkable rather than forwardable. Give people a reason to say “you should subscribe to this” rather than “let me send you this one issue.” That’s a small shift in language but a massive shift in outcome. One creates subscribers. The other creates forwarded emails that go nowhere.

Build continuity into your structure. Reference previous issues. Create throughlines. Reward people for having been there from the start, or at least for having read the last few editions. Make your newsletter something that benefits from context.

And if you’re worried about discovery—about how new people will find you if you’re not optimized for forwards—focus on your archive strategy, your SEO, your partnerships, your literally-anything-else. Because forwards feel like free growth, but they’re growth you can’t compound.

If you found this useful, you’ll probably want to read the rest of what we publish. Subscribe to One Two Three Send for more operator-level thinking about what actually works in newsletter publishing—no fluff, no growth hacks, just the trade craft.