Pay to speak or pay for Meta ads? What actually grows your online business

There's been a lot of chat online lately about people paying big money to speak on a stage, & a lot of people getting pretty sniffy about it. I don't know the details of the event everyone's talking about, so I'm staying well away from that bit... but it got me thinking about the 2 ways a lot of us end up paying to grow an audience. Paying for a stage, & paying for Meta ads.

And honestly, I'm not sure they're as different as people make out.

So here's what we're going to go through...

• how build, buy & borrow actually differ (& where they blur)
• which one gives you consistency, & which one gives you warmth
• the order I'd do them in for most online businesses

Build, buy & borrow, quickly

First of all, I don't think build, buy & borrow is mine. It'd be great if it was, because I really love alliteration, but I'm pretty sure I didn't create it.

Build is your own platform... your Instagram, your email list, your messaging. Buy is ads, where you're buying access to an audience. Borrow is podcasts, workshops in other people's groups, stages & PR.

At the top level it feels really clear-cut, & then it gets murky. Ads build your own audience, even though you're paying for access to it. And speaking for free, being paid to speak & paying to speak are all borrowing, just at different price tags. If someone asks you to run a workshop in their mastermind, are you doing it for free for the access? Are you allowed to pitch? And if they pay you, does that change?

Consistency & control

Borrowing means waiting on other people. You have to find them, get on their radar, fit around their schedule & then you're at their whim.

I had a client who did really well going into other people's groups to run a workshop, then giving the people in that group a big discount on her offer at the end. It made her good money. But there are a lot fewer free Facebook communities & big memberships that let you come in now, & towards the end she'd turn up to a "500 member, really engaged" group & find 3 people on the call.

You have far less control over that than you do with ads. Once your ads are up & running, they run day in, day out, & they're fairly templated from there. Pitching yourself into other people's spaces is never one & done... you have to keep putting time aside to do it, again & again.

How warm people arrive

This is where borrowing wins. After an hour with you in someone else's room, people are really in your world. The growth is slower, but it's warm.

People who find you through ads arrive slightly cooler than that, which means there's a real job to do getting them engaged & buying. That's the whole SuperFans piece I work on with my clients, & it's where your time goes once the ads are running... being visible, doing stories, running your own workshops & nurturing the people coming in.

Your energy & how you want to live

I paid to be on a stage once, if you break it down. It was a 6 month speaking mastermind where we worked on our signature talks, & at the end the host ran an event where we all spoke.

I stayed over the night before so I could be there early, spent the whole day at the event & was absolutely exhausted afterwards. I don't enjoy small talk (I find it really hard) & big events drain me.

So I asked myself... do I actually want a strategy that takes me away from home more often, & that I find really exhausting? It doesn't fit with how I want to live my life or run my business.

I'll be honest though, there's still a bit of ego in there. I see people online being asked onto a panel or a stage & a little bit of me goes "ooh, yeah, I want to be asked to do that".

What you're really paying for

Whoever hosts makes or breaks it. How much time & energy did they put into getting people there, promoting it & making sure it's actually right for the people in the room, rather than ticking a box?

With ads there are 2 sets of people to think about, the audience & you. With a stage, a podcast or someone else's workshop there are 3, because there's the host as well, & I think that's why ads feel simpler.

At my own speaking event, everyone on the stage was a client of the host, & we were all running really different businesses, so the room wasn't the right room for most of the speakers.

So before you pay for any stage, ask... will the room actually be full, & will the people in it be listening, rather than sitting through pitch after pitch?

Which one's right for your online business?

If you only want warm growth & you're happy for it to be slower, start with borrowing.

For most of my clients, it's the other way round. They want consistency underneath first, so they've got the capacity for everything on top. Build your platform, then buy (ads for steady growth), then borrow on top of that, which is the real scaling stage.

I did loads of borrowing alongside ads in my early days... masterclasses, other people's podcasts, being really proactive about getting in front of other people's audiences. I think I got paid for one of them. Most were free, & you put a lot of time & prep in to turn up & find 2 people there. Without ads running underneath, that can feel really inconsistent & really disappointing.

For context, in 2025 my business made £270k with £4,702 of ad spend, which is about £391 a month.

And fair warning, anyone who does PR will be shouting at this that you don't have to wait, you can do PR straight away. That's fine, any strategy can work... this is just the order that works for most of the women I work with.

Which one are you doing most of right now... build, buy or borrow?

If you want consistent growth running underneath everything else, that's exactly what we build in the SuperFans Sprint: SuperFans Sprint

If you'd like somewhere lighter to start, my free private podcast In Demand walks you through how to build an audience of people who are excited & ready to buy from you: In Demand

And if you want to hear the whole conversation, it's episode 17 of Should I Care?: Episode 17