Hello Friends,

My good friend and founder of Expertnaire, Toyin Omotosho, made a post on X (Twitter) almost 3 months ago. It says:

A money making formula that never fails:

STEP 1: Build a list of people who are highly passionate about a topic and who spend money on their passion. E.g. Digital marketing content.

STEP 2: Find very interesting offers related to their interest and promote to them.

I’m compelled to share it with you because it’s the not-so-secret formula that has and will always work.

And it’s not just simple in saying, but also simple to execute.

Million-dollar and billion-dollar companies have been built off this simple formula. And more successful companies will continue to be built using this formula.

Heck, it’s basically my “secret to success” summed up in one post.

It’s how I got started as an online entrepreneur — sure you know the story of my advent into information marketing, which set the stage for all the “successes” I’ve enjoyed so far.

It’s also how I launched NairaBet and it became an immediate success – and pioneered the billion-dollar Nigerian sports betting industry. It’s how I’ve launched several other things. A list of people who are highly passionate about a topic and who spend money on their passion!

Toyin can make that post authoritatively because it’s the foundation of his successes too, including Expertnaire itself. And there’s no royal way to success than to learn from those who have succeeded.

Now let’s break this formula down and explain each step in detail.

STEP 1: Build a list of people who are highly passionate about a topic and who spend money on their passion.

There are a lot of things to unpack in this simple sentence.

First and most prominent is to build a list of people. That is an audience willing to hear from you. They don’t just know you; they’ve given you the permission to contact them and/or communicate with them.

This is very important. But unfortunately, most business owners these days just go straight for the money and don’t bother with building an audience that they own.

So if they have a very good offer, they make a lot of money upfront and are happy with it. Unfortunately, two things are happening: they will always spend money to reach customers, and they won’t have an audience to test and launch new products, services or offers.

They also would lack a life-saving audience that they can fall back on if things go south. Imagine someone depending solely on ads and has no audience, and someday Meta bans their ad account and they are unable to advertise. Or someone whose social media account gets blocked and has no other audience to fall back on.

Whether it’s an email list (which is the best) or social media following (which also works in this age, though has limits) or contacts list (some people are making a killing on WhatsApp), whatever you do, just make sure you’re building a list for your business.

But don’t just build any list or a list of any type of people; the second part of this step says these people must be highly passionate about a topic.

That’s the essence of building a list in the first place. You’re not building just to have a crowd and feel good about yourself; you’re building an audience of people interested in a topic that you can sell around.

I already had a fairly big list of people interested in making money, many of which already paid me for related information in the past.

So when I gave them the opportunity to make money through sports betting, they were not just happy to pay me for the knowledge; they were more than happy to become my first set of customers.

But take note of what I wrote, because it's the third part of this first step: I wasn’t just playing in a niche where people spend money (make money online), some of these people were in my list and had already paid me in the past for information.

Some of them also paid me specifically for information on sports betting – validating that it’s another lucrative topic.

You don’t just want a list of people passionate about a topic; you want those who already spend money on this passion.

It makes life easier for you as an entrepreneur, especially when you’re just starting out, to stick to a topic with passionate people that are already spending money on it. There’s an abundance of such topics – I can list a thousand of them.

So instead of trying to start a new movement, just stick to one of those established, lucrative ones. At least for now.

That’s easy money for you…especially if you follow the second step:

STEP 2: Find very interesting offers related to their interest and promote to them.

So it’s established that you found a topic people are passionate about and are willing to spend money on, and you’re building a list of these people. Fine. But they won’t just bring money to you and start spraying you for no reason.

The only sustainable way to make money is still to sell something.

You must find interesting offers related to these people’s interests and promote these offers to them.

Whether you create this offer from scratch by yourself or source existing products to offer them, the only way to make money from this list is to offer them something in exchange for their money.

The more interesting and useful the offer is, the more money you can make from this list.

Let’s take influencers for example. A whole lot of people follow them because they like them or like what they do.

But people merely following them doesn’t automatically translate to money. They have to sell something to make money. It’s either they “sell” their audience to platforms or people by helping them to advertise, or they promote their own products or services to their audience.

Hilda Bacci is a good example. Fame and a huge audience fell on her in a short period of time, due to her Guinness World Record attempt and eventual success. But that didn’t automatically translate to wealth.

She announced an upcoming cooking class shortly afterwards, and some sources say she made over N70 million from it; other sources say N187m. Whatever the true figure is, it didn’t fall on her lap until she created an interesting offer for people passionate about cooking and willing to spend money to learn it professionally.

That's just an example; you would most likely not become an influencer or celeb overnight, so social media might not be the easy route for you.

An email list however makes this very possible and way easier for you.

This is indeed a money making formula that never fails.

One more thing I’ll add to it however is that you don’t have to wait and first build an audience before you start making money from it. You can (and should) do both concurrently; build an email list and make money while building it.

I’ll share exactly how in my next email – this one is already long.

Talk later,