There is a version of growth where the work you’ve spent years refining reaches the right people every single day, steadily, without you spending your best hours creating endless content just to feed the algorithm. 

It sounds like a dream and it’s a conversation that we explored on a recent episode of the Soulful CEO podcast with paid ads strategist Marie Nyman. 

What came out of this conversation was less of a tactical lesson in advertising and more of a new way to think about how to get your thought leadership into the hands of the people who could really benefit from what you have to say.

For a long time, the equation was simple. Strong work plus consistent visibility was enough to grow. That equation is shifting in 2026 and people are feeling it. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve spoken to that tell me what’s been working for years isn’t working in the same way anymore and they need to shift strategies.  

Ads Amplify What Is Already True

One of the most important things Marie shared is also a bit of a buzz kill for those who think paid ads is the silver bullet that will solve all of their problems. 

Paid advertising does not create demand. It amplifies what already exists, for better and for worse. When an offer sells well to a warm audience, ads can carry it to strangers at scale. When an offer does not sell warm, paid traffic will not rescue it. It will simply show you that truth faster, and charge you for the lesson.

This reframes advertising from a growth hack into something closer to a mirror. The businesses that scale paid traffic well are rarely the ones who found a clever loophole. They are the ones who did the deeper work first. A clear offer. Genuine demand. Language a stranger can understand without a translator. When those foundations are in place, ads become a multiplier on real value. When they are missing, ads become an expensive way to confirm what’s been happening behind the scenes.

For an established expert, this is good news rather than bad. It means the work that earns paid traffic is the same work that builds authority anywhere. The discipline transfers.

Cold Traffic Is the Most Honest Audience You Will Ever Write For

The place Marie sees capable people stumble is the move from warm to cold. Most expert businesses are built on relationships and referrals, on audiences who already know the founder and have likely bought before. That warmth is an asset, and it quietly shapes how the founder writes. Copy fills with insider language that lands beautifully with people who already understand the world, and means very little to someone meeting it for the first time.

I’ve had this exact experience in my own ads journey. I have a masterclass called Codify Your Brilliance.  Running this to a warm audience has been a hit. The content inside of the Masterclass is so so valuable and the feedback from people who have joined has been incredible. So I thought, ok let’s put some ad spend behind this to get it in front of more people.

Well…long story short that didn’t work out to well.

Turns out ‘Codify Your Brilliance’ as framing is too abstract to a cold audience.  The name asked a stranger to understand my language before they could want the thing. 

Cold traffic doesn’t extend that grace. No one is sitting at home deciding they need to codify their brilliance. The masterclass itself did not need to change. The way it was named and positioned did, so that a person who had never heard of me could recognize their own problem inside of this solution.

This is why cold traffic is so valuable beyond the leads it brings. It is the most honest audience an expert will ever write for. It tells you immediately and without any sugarcoating whether your positioning communicates to someone who owes you nothing. That feedback is worth having, whether or not a single ad ever runs.

The Reach Problem Is Usually a Distribution Problem

There is a number worth sitting with. Across many accounts, fewer than five percent of an expert’s existing followers see any given post. People who chose to follow, who raised their hand once, mostly never encounter the work being made for them. As Marie puts it, you did not start this business to become a content creator. You started it to do the work you genuinely love to do.

When reach plateaus, the instinct is to create more content. Post more frequently, try different formats, create better hooks. 

But often the issue is not the volume, it’s the reach. The plateau is a distribution problem wearing the costume of a content problem. Seen that way, the solution is not to create more. It’s to find a way to leverage what you’ve created in a way that you can get it in front of more than 5% of your audience. 

This is where paid traffic earns its place. Not as a louder microphone, but as a distribution system that frees an expert’s attention for the work only they can do.

A System, Not a Switch

The most grounding part of the conversation with Marie was around expectations and timelines. Marie was clear, ads are a long-term strategy, not a switch that turns sales on overnight. For some clients with proven, in-demand offers, turning on ads does produce fast results. For most, it takes testing, refining, and a willingness to learn the data before the system performs.

A few principles make that path more navigable. 

The first is the break-even idea. When an entry-level low-ticket offer covers its own ad spend in full, every qualified lead beyond that point comes into your world essentially for free, already holding the mindset of a buyer rather than a freebie seeker. 

The second is a realistic testing floor, somewhere around thirty to thirty-five dollars a day, enough to learn what converts before scaling anything. 

The third is the shape of the system itself. It runs on two engines working together. One brings new ideal clients in continuously. The other retargets the people already in your world so you stay top of mind when they are ready to decide.

Treated this way, paid advertising looks less like a gamble and more like any other asset an expert chooses to build. It asks for patience, a clear offer underneath it, and the willingness to learn a skill. In return it offers something rare, which is consistent reach that does not cost you your best hours.

What This Makes Possible

The deeper invitation here has little to do with advertising and everything to do with how you want to grow. 

Being visible and being found are not the same thing. Visibility can be exhausting and temporary, tied to constant output. Being found is built on a body of work that reaches the right people, whether or not you posted today. Paid traffic, used well, is one way to close that gap, so that the work you have already earned the right to share finally meets the people it was made for.

This post is inspired by Episode 44 of The Soulful CEO Podcast. 

Listen to the full episode here: