Romance Blog Sales Experiment
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Sam Parr shares a story about a quick experiment he ran with his friend Ramon testing romance story monetization.
"A few years ago, my friend Ramon and I ran a test where we created this book called 'Captivating Claire.' Ramon ran a soap opera website and had this guy on his staff that loved to write short stories - erotic short stories.
We created a WordPress blog called shortbutromantic.com over a weekend. On Friday night, the WordPress blog was made, and he wrote a story. At the bottom of the blog post, we wrote 'We hope you enjoyed this first iteration of Captivating Claire from Short But Romantic. If you want to see part 2, here's a PayPal link - it's $10 a month sign up and we will mail you part 2 of the story next week.'
We used Fiverr and got a narrator to do it. This whole project took $400. We drove traffic to it the next day on Saturday and had like $300 in sales. We were like 'holy crap.' If you look at the blog and go to the comment section, you'll see these people were obsessed. They were like 'Oh my god, I can't wait to read part 2.'
It was mind-boggling. Then on Sunday we were like 'we don't really want to be in this business, this doesn't really fit our interests.' But I think we should have done it."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.