Why I Tore Up My Own Free Guide and Started Over

I spent my summer rewriting a free guide, which sounds considerably more glamorous than it was. The reality involved a lot of sitting at my kitchen table with coffee that kept going cold, moving twelve items around, and occasionally saying things out loud to my laptop that I would not repeat here.

The guide is called The Visibility Audit. I built the first version two years ago. It walked women through twelve places their photo shows up in their business and asked them to score each one: Current, Consistent, Credible. Clean framework. Genuinely useful.

It was also, and I say this with all the love for my past self,  boring.

I could tell because of what happened after people downloaded it, which was mostly nothing. It read like a form you get handed at a doctor’s office. Nobody is excited to fill out a form about themselves, least of all a form about how their own face is doing on the internet. I’d built something correct and forgettable, which is a particular kind of failure because there’s nothing obvious to fix. Nobody writes in to say “your free guide was fine and I felt neutral about it.”

So I rebuilt the whole thing, and the entire time I was chasing a feeling rather than a framework. I wanted it to feel like one of those quizzes you take at eleven at night and then immediately text a friend about. Low stakes. A little bit fun. Mildly addictive in the way that finding out something true about yourself usually is.

What’s actually in it

The twelve spots didn’t change, because they were never the problem. Your website. Your email signature. Your LinkedIn, both the headshot and that banner you haven’t looked at since you made it. Your proposal deck. The thumbnail on the podcast you guested on. The graphic somebody made for your last launch. The About page. All the quiet corners where a client meets a version of you before she ever meets you.

Most women can name three of those off the top of their head and are genuinely surprised by the other nine. That’s not carelessness. That’s just what happens when you build a business by being excellent at the work. Your face isn’t the product. Right up until the day it kind of is, and nobody sends a memo when that day arrives.

What changed is everything around the twelve. The old version marched you through them like a checklist. The new one lets you score first and think second, which turns out to be the whole difference between a chore and a quiz. Why the scoring is the good part.

Here’s what I didn’t expect when I rebuilt it.

The scoring became the reason to do it at all.

Current is the easy one. Does the photo look like you, this year, in the business you’re actually running right now. Most women know their answer before they finish reading the question.

Consistent is the sneaky one. It’s not about any single photo being good. It’s about whether your site and your LinkedIn and your email signature are telling one story instead of three. This is where the surprises live, because you’ve never once seen those three things side by side. Nobody has. Your clients see them one at a time, in whatever order they stumble into you, and their brain quietly assembles a composite you’ve never looked at.

Credible is my favorite, and it’s the one people brace for wrongly. It has nothing to do with polish, or lighting, or whether you’re wearing the right blazer. It’s whether a stranger trusts you in the four seconds before she’s decided anything else about you. That’s a much more forgiving standard than most of us apply to ourselves at eleven at night. A slightly imperfect photo that reads as warm and current will beat a technically flawless one that reads as three years ago and a little guarded, every single time.

Almost nobody guesses their own scores correctly.

Some women come out of it relieved, having discovered that the thing they’ve been vaguely anxious about for a year is actually fine, and they get to stop carrying it. Others find one specific spot that’s been quietly working against them since 2023 and nobody ever mentioned it, because who would. Both outcomes are useful. Both are, in a strange way, satisfying.

Why now

Eight years of photographing women has taught me that most of us are carrying around a low hum of uncertainty about how we’re showing up, and almost none of us have ever actually looked at it directly. The hum is worse than the facts. It nearly always is.

The guide can’t make anyone do anything. What it can do is make the looking free, private, and about five minutes long, and make it feel less like an audit and more like something you’d voluntarily do on a Sunday morning. That felt like a better use of my summer than leaving something correct and forgettable up for another two years.

Click through to get to The Visibility Audit It’s free and waiting for you! Grab a coffee and see where you land. Then come tell me your score, because I do actually want to know.