Building a 70k+ Subscriber Newsletter by Word of Mouth

Rachel Meade Smith is the founder of Words of Mouth, a weekly newsletter focused on finding meaningful work. In this episode, we discuss how she built and monetised a values-driven newsletter to 72,000 subscribers over 10 years without ever running a single ad. Preorder Search Work now: https://orbooks.com/catalog/search-work/ __ Rachel Meade Smith Words of Mouth: https://www.wordsofmouth.org/ Website: https://www.rachelmeadesmith.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelmeadesmith/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stormcloudsmith/ Book: https://orbooks.com/catalog/search-work/ __ Timestamps 00:00 Introducing Rachel Meade Smith and Words of Mouth 01:38 10 years of values based curation 07:17 Growing to 70k subscribers organically 13:03 72% open rate, 22% clickthrough rate 14:07 Monestizing while maintaining strong ethics 20:07 4 ways the newsletter is monetized 37:29 Developing beyond purely aggregation 43:21 The art of aggregation, curation, and editing