[00:00:00] Cold Open
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So I'm sitting at my desk with a cup of coffee in hand and running a website audit for the week. It's a local therapist and working the website through what her voice, workflow, and confidence show up on this outward facing artifact. And I... Deep buried in the website, I find one line of personality that says, "If you-- if I ever ask you if you're fine, you can fire me."
It's bold, it's playful, it's alive. And that best line was buried in a template that looked like it was straight out of the late '90s internet. And this is why a stranger landing on your landing page won't buy. They don't see who you are, just as it was for this therapist. Her voice exists, but it is buried in the website.
So what does she even have a website for? And I-- my read is she's probably successful, she probably has a big referral network, and the website was a, a checkbox, like you need to be online, but it's not really doing anything for her. So she's paying money every month to host the domain, for maintaining the website, for an asset that's doing nothing, and what's the point of all that?
That's why the usual fixes don't repair this, and this f- three-part framework can reveal what's actually missing.
[00:01:31] Show Intro:
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If you've come from a previously successful career, and now you're a year or three or five into your creative career, and the breakthroughs are not showing up, this show is for you. Input/Output runs on one idea: you are the ultimate input into your creator system. Get yourself clear, and the output follows.
I'm Shawn Buttner, and let's get into it.
[00:02:09] What Experts want when it comes to marketing
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So what do we want when it comes to marketing? Experts who are great at what they do would rather focus on what they do great than do admin, especially marketing and sales. And the dream is to have a digital presence or a process where the right people come into your world without doing the whole cold outreach grind.
And you have a presence and a voice that shows why you are different and why you can help them in your expertise. If you think about it as a stand of oranges, right? Every orange looks the same, orange is an orange. And if that's the case, if you're like a commodity like that, then you either win on having a lower price, and nobody in expert business wants to be in the race to the bottom when it comes to pricing, or you have a better display or a better way to communicate.
And so the result is that better marketers beat better experts. But you're not a commodity. You're an heirloom orange. You just can't communicate what's unique and special and amazing about what you do. And if you're able to do that, you will win ties when people are comparing apples to apples or oranges to oranges.
And it's just a communication of a different type of problem at it. It's a communication problem, and it's communicating how you are unique and different and better. And I believe most experts undercut themselves in this
[00:03:46] How Experts Undercut Themselves
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So if we know w- that what we want is that the better expert learns the marketing, and so you have great marketing and you are a great expert, so you can compete on your expertise, then we have to go upstream and figure out why people, uh, or why experts usually fail, right?
And to do this, I've been doing website audits because I think that's a really great way to encapsulate somebody's voice, somebody's confidence, and somebody's workflows, um, be- 'cause they have to communicate it, and so you get a good sense of, how are they as an expert a-a-as a business person. And so most people have these usual fixes, and they fail.
And the fix one is you say, "Okay, I'm gonna throw my website onto AI." It'll be polished, but it still ends up sounding like everyone else 'cause AI just kinda averages messages of everyone out on the internet. Then if they don't do that, or maybe they try this other way, which is to outsource it. I had a coach friend who hired a website person and was in website design for five years.
During those five years, the designer went to jail for a few years and did eventually circle back and finish and credit to that person for that. But five years of paying for hosting, for software, for maintenance, for a site that wasn't generating her any business is a crime, right ? And, and it's not rare.
I know dozens of fellow coaches that have that story, and that's why lead gen pitches for me get an automatic "No, you can't" in my head when they're like, "We can get you all the leads that you want." And it's like, "No, you can't." And it's because of the same flaw. AI or agencies or your team are amplifiers and not sources.
If you don't know your voice and you don't know your process and you're not confident in the thing you're selling, you're amplifying that insecurity. So it's an empty input that generates an expensive generic output. And this is the hypothesis. Marketing is downstream of your voice. No downstream fix repairs that upstream silence or, or problem, right?
If you can't articulate your expertise, how it helps people confidently, then no amount of AI or marketing is going to help you amplify that.
[00:06:25] Reorientation
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So how do I know that marketing is downstream from your voice? Well, truth is, I lived it. You know, I went on a search for how does someone find their voice, and it was actually, how do I find my voice? And here was the setting-- starting condition, right? I had 10 years building YouTube channel. I, at the point of this question, was two-- about two years into my podcast, and I could not tell you how any of my content was different from any other high-performance coach.
And so I did what any respectable nerd would do. I swallowed my pride and got all these beginner podcast courses, you know, about a half-- a year and a half into podcasting. And, you know, so I stumbled on Kevin from Grow The Show, and the big learning there was like, "Oh, you know, your show premise isn't strong."
So I work- reworked the show premise with him, and it was better, but it still wasn't me in the premise. It still was a copy of the high-performance content, generic stuff that I was doing. And in that time too, I also found Jeremy Enns from Scrappy Podcasting Newsletter and-- which is great. And, you know, after working with Kevin for a while I started working with Jeremy, and we really started to develop my voice and premise one deep layer.
And here was basically unraveling the onion. You know, I thought my premise was wrong, but my premise was wrong because my voice wasn't in it. I didn't have any IP or original ideas. It was just kind of regurgitating other things that I had heard. So a year and a half into the work The Input Output rebrand, which was announced last episode officially, is the fruit of all that work, all the, the writing and thinking and talking with people to really get down to this idea, combining the different areas of my career in software and business and coaching.
And so from that, I realized that, people Experts in particular are looking to find their voice, to find their confidence, and to define their workflows overall. And so I developed a rubric to audit these sites 'cause I realized, again, that the website is something that people have produced that is communicating how strong their voice is, how confident they feel in their workflow in general, which could be their process for delivering value or how they handle admin.
It's a little bit harder on the website, but you can get a sense if people are process-oriented or not based on how they present on their website. And so I pr- applied this rubric to a group of coaches and a group of therapists. And what I found is like with coaches, they tended to have a pretty strong voice with more personality, but were less confident, and either they didn't have a way to follow up or sign up, or they had 3,000 million different ways to engage with them.
And so it was confusing, and that to me is a confidence gap of like, here's the one thing I can do to help you. Here's what, you know, my stick in the ground, line of demarcation this is what I do. And they're able to say it strongly, right? And then in general, the coaches that were struggling were not confident.
When I was looking at therapists, they tended to bury their personality, right? Just like I imagined during the cold open.
So in general, you know, there were, three failure modes that showed up amongst everyone, which is they couldn't explain what they do, which is their voice. They said everything to catch every potential person, which is a confidence thing, or they had offer sprawler- sprawl or no offers, which is workflow, right?
And of course, after doing this out in the world, I ran it on myself. I'm a coach, and I had, one of these failure modes too, and that's offer sprawl. Earlier this year, I noticed I had like 420 some odd landing pages before cleaning up, and that also led to then, navigation that didn't have a clear path for different visitor states.
So if you were actively looking for a high-performance coach, you know, you could come to my site and y- that was pretty good. But if you were curious about high-performance coaching or you weren't quite interested yet, I didn't have a way to talk to you. You know, my site still is not 100% fixed, and, applying this framework to myself as I'm going forward, and I've been m- you know, working on the voice, but now it's time to start working on the other areas.
But, you know, I'll report back with that and as I continue to increase the sample size for this audit. But the pattern is already visible, in fonts and headlines before it ever shows in revenue
[00:11:27] The POV Framework
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Everyone says you need a point of view, but nobody tells you what that is. And so I have a three-part framework called the POV framework to help explain what is voice. To me, it's P, perspective, the lens how you approach a problem; O, opinions, the claims and where you break apart from your field or common opinions; and vision, the direction and future you want for your clients and audience.
So perspective, It's how you approach problems, your prior career and all the experiences from that, and not like your like hero origin story, so applicable to your expertise.
Mine's a weird mix of business undergrad, a master's in information systems, five and a half years at Walmart as a business analyst and programmer, and another five and a half years as a quality assurance automation engineer for Apple.
And along that, I have about ten years certified as a high-performance coach. And in thinking about perspective, right, you know, um, for me what I learned at Apple is that the automation principles haven't changed. AI is the newer, shinier tool, but there's a system side and a personal side that need to go into automating a process, right?
You need to be very clear on what the process is and the right parts to audit, and you need to make sure that that process is a reflection of who's ever running it, right? So if you were a quality assurance engineer, you were looking for particular things, and maybe you have, as an experienced quality assurance manual quality assurance person, you might have a couple of specific things that you look out for in your job that should be worked in-into the process.
And so, it-- however you automate that, either with AI or with a digital tool or another piece of software, you really need to have those components, the understanding the process and the nuances to, to-- that are repeatable coded in there. So You know, working that into-- that's part of my perspective, you know, and then pair that in with high-performance coaching, which is a great tool for helping people get clear on who they are and the processes and those little distinctions that make them unique.
It's a very strong part of my voice now. And so let's diagnose for you. Like, how do you approach problems differently from your peers with the same credentials? Is it, I'm more thorough as a, a compliment and not a perspective, but I believe that this is what the industry gets wrong, or from my experience, this is how I would think through a, a common problem in the industry, right?
Like how to automate a business process for me.
The O in POV are the claims. That's where you have strong opinions that either break away from your field's default or are just uniquely yours. So for me, here are three. I think, number one, hustle culture is bullshit.
I think consistent and strategically engaged work time beats a 20-hour workday, seven days a week, any day. I also think generic solutions to specific problems don't work. Your systems should be built to your situation, your strengths, and who you are. Ultra-individualization or ultra-individual customization is the next wave.
And the third opinion that I have is that creating is personal growth. Every time you hit the publish button on your podcast, a video, an article, it changes you a little and forces you to communicate a little bit better in order to, you know, to get your thoughts in order. So those are my, my three. So if you're a therapist, how do you approach your style of therapy differently?
And that answer
And when you can answer that succinctly and with meaning and with your own words, that's how you differentiate yourself. So for you right now, what are three things you believe in that your peers would maybe push back on? And if you're all agreeable, you're an expert without opinions, and that means that when people go to the market, they're gonna see two oranges, and they'll just pick the cheapest one or the one that has the best packaging.
We want you to be the best expert with the best packaging. And then V for vision. This is the direction you are setting for your clients, your audience, and your people. For me, I believe we all need agency to shape our life around us and our personality. You know, we need the flexibility to take breaks, to be with family and friends, and to be fully engaged and effective when it's time to work.
So no 300,000 million dollar or million-hour work weeks, but, when it's time to work, you are fully engaged, fully able to, 100% focus on it, and then when it's time to be with friends, you can 100% focus on that
And this goes back to you are the missing input into your systems. It's your personality, your lifestyle, and it's not borrowing other successful people because they're successful because it's very unique what you need in order to succeed. So very quickly, if you were to write down what do you see for your clients or in your clients that they can't see for themselves yet?
And, you know, if you are not able to articulate that, it's really tough to write a landing page to guide people towards an outcome that you don't even-
The POV again is perspective, opinion, or vision. You can also think of it as lens, claims, and direction. And
Your voice is your POV expressed. And if you're thinking, "But I don't have an audience," the audience is what attracts, or the POV is what attracts your audience, and it's not vice versa. Same as AI, same with hiring a designer, same with a website. If you have these three components, you have something to amplify.
And again, at the top of the episode, I talked about the therapist's fiery line. It would be everywhere instead of buried in a template
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[00:18:22] Wrapping Up
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All right, wrapping up, here is the move you need to make today. Take a piece of paper and write out this three by three, right? First set of three, three ways your perspective is unique to you. And if you need help, you know, you can ask some of your friends or clients, but you should be able to have an idea of this off the top of your head, but spend the time to think this out.
Second, three strong opinions you have about your expertise or space. And I know for me, I struggled with this part the most. I tried to be the person that didn't ruffle feathers, but it's not ruffling feathers. It's just having some discerning and driving opinions about your space, which is how you stand out especially if you believe it and don't do it just to have contrarian views.
So look out for that. And then you wanna write three things you wish for your audience and clients going forward. And when you have that page, that is the core of your POV. It's a guiding light for every piece of marketing you touch or when you're trying to get a team to help you on a particular task, and it's...
will help you diagnose why you've stalled in marketing leads or sales. And if you wanna go a little bit deeper into this process and you want some help, you can book a creator diagnostic with me. It'll be in the show notes. Go to shawnbuttner.com\claritycall, and check that out, and then we can get on a half-hour call.
We'll go through your voice, workflow, and confidence, and I'll look at your website before we talk to see what shows up, the f- you know, and we can go from there. So with that, this is Shawn Buttner signing off.