I talk a lot about the ability of a good content marketing strategy to attract, engage, and convert online leads, and yet I have somehow missed talking about one of the most crucial pieces of content when it comes to closing the deal: your bio.
Your bio is a must-see for anyone who is considering hiring you, whether they’re exploring your website or checking out your speaker sheet to see if you’d be a good presenter for their organization/meeting.
At the same time, writing about ourselves can be incredibly difficult. Ask us about the accomplishments of anyone we work with, and we can talk all day, but ask about our own accomplishments, and our minds tend to go blank.
It’s really just a matter of being too close to the subject. We have a hard time figuring out what about us would be interesting to other people because, while most things we do are interesting to us, we tend to assume no one else would find them interesting. But if that were the case, people wouldn’t be seeking out your bio looking for information on you.
To make the process of writing your bio less intimidating, I’m going to tell you what you need to do to write the perfect bio that gets attention and helps you close the deal.
Table of Contents
- Identify Your Target Audience
- Check the Requirements
- List Your Credentials
- Your Goals and Dreams
- Brand Yourself
- Do Your Keyword Research
- Get Personal … But Not Too Personal
- Check Out the Competition
- Don’t Forget the Images
- Conclusion
1) Identify Your Target Audience
Knowing what to say about ourselves that is both interesting and engaging can be difficult, but it can help to go back to the building block of any marketing strategy: know your target audience. What matters to them? What qualities/credentials are they looking for in someone who provides what you provide?
If you’re not sure how to identify your target audience and the things they care about, check out this post where I go over everything you need to create a marketing persona.
2) Check the Requirements
Your bio should highlight different things based on the platform on which you’re publishing your bio. We can see this even in social media platforms: someone’s LinkedIn bio is likely to be very different from their Facebook bio because they’re different platforms with very different purposes.
Likewise, if you need to write a bio of yourself for a professional organization, chances are good that bio will be different from whatever you wrote about yourself on your About page, and both of those will be different from whatever you put on your Speaker Sheet.
Much of those differences depend on the platform the bio will be published on and the target audience of that platform, but it could also depend on the rules of the platform. Most places where you put a bio will have requirements for what can and cannot be included in the bio (at the very least they’ll have a word count, which will differ from platform to platform), so be sure to check the rules of the platform before you start writing your bio to make sure you’re not accidentally violating any of the rules.
3) List Your Credentials
Regardless of the platform, people will want to know your credentials, so you should absolutely include them, but don’t ever start your bio with your credentials unless the word count for your bio is extremely limited.
Instead, start with something that will hook the reader. How did you get into this business? Why did you choose this business over all your other options? What do you love about your job? That’s the kind of information that’s going to draw them in and make them want to know more about you. Then you can talk about your credentials.
4) Your Goals and Dreams
People need to know what you’ve already accomplished in order to make a purchasing decision, but they want to know about your goals and dreams. Your credentials might be impressive, but it’s what you have yet to accomplish that will help bring that human element to your bio that people so desperately crave.
Besides, there’s the old saying that you never get that for which you don’t ask, and by putting your goals and dreams out there, you’re letting people know how they can help you achieve those goals. You never know who might be looking at your bio – it might end up being someone who can connect you to your next big client or ideal referral partner.
5) Brand Yourself
Your branding needs to be an integral part of everything you do, so make sure your brand is as present in all your online bios as it is on your website. This may or may not mean including your logo, but at the very least it should include your professional tagline.
Don’t think this doesn’t apply to you if you’re an employee rather than an entrepreneur, because there’s a little something called personal branding, and if you want to become known for being excellent at what you do, you’ll need to develop and maintain a personal brand.
6) Do Your Keyword Research
Hopefully you’ve already done your keyword research and you know which search terms people are using to look for your products/services. If you haven’t gotten around to it yet (or if it’s been a while since you last did your keyword research), now is a great time to dust off that keyword research tool because that can be a great way to drive traffic to your bio, but it’s not essential.
Most people aren’t conducting Google searches for bios. They’re more likely to come across your website or social media profile, and if they’re interested, they’ll make their way over to your bio from there, so I tend not to stress over the SEO of bios.
That said, if you’re writing a bio for a platform or website that’s not your own website, remember that some of those platforms have categories, so make sure your bio is in the right category. Someone might not Google your bio, but they might use the search engine on that site to look for particular product/services directly from that website, or they might go straight to a certain category to find what they’re looking for, in which case you’ll want to make sure your bio shows up in the right category.
7) Get Personal … But Not Too Personal
There are always going to be other people who sell what you sell, and chances are good there’s at least one other person out there who’s more qualified than you are, so why should someone buy from you over one of your competitors?
Your credentials and qualifications will certainly be considered (especially if you provide certain professional services, such as accounting or legal advice), but that’s not the only thing people will consider. They also want to get to know you, personally, partly because that’s just how we’re wired, but also to make sure you’re a real person who will provide what you say you’ll provide and not take their money and run. The more digital our lives become, the more we crave human connection and your bio is a great opportunity to include that human touch.
So get a little personal. Instead of making it all business, talk about your family, your hobbies, your favorite story when you were growing up (your favorite story now). You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) give them your whole life story, but give them enough to provide a sense of who you are as a person, not just a professional.
That said, don’t make it too personal, because there are people online who will use whatever information you provide to take what they can, so don’t give out your exact birthdate. You can talk about your kids, but I don’t recommend sharing photos of them, and if you want to be really safe, don’t mention their names or even their genders.
8) Check Out the Competition
Finally, there’s no better way to see what people want in a bio than to check out what your competition is saying about themselves. If you’re writing a bio for a professional organization or certain social media site, see what other people on those platforms are writing in their bios (especially if they provide the same products/services you provide or something similar).
If none of your competitors happen to be a part of that professional organization or on that social media site, see what other members of the organization are writing in their bios. That will give you an idea of what you are and are not allowed to say in your bio on that platform, as well as what people on that website are looking for in a bio.
9) Don’t Forget the Images
Any website that asks for a bio will likely provide a space for you to include a picture of yourself, and you should absolutely make sure it’s a photo of what you really look like, not just your logo. If you’re worried about showing your actual face online for privacy reasons, have an avatar made that looks like you. Avatars are fun and give people an idea of what you look like (or at least how you see yourself, which can be even more revealing than a photo).
The point is to show people there’s a real, live person on the other end of the screen, not just a robot or a con artist. We are visual creatures, which means whatever images we include in our bio is at least as important as the words we use to describe ourselves.
10) Conclusion
Writing a bio is not rocket science, but it does seem to be much harder for us to write about ourselves than to write about anyone else. Some people tend to blabber on and on, while others have a hard time coming up with anything to say. Hopefully these tips will help you overcome whatever hurdle is standing in the way of you writing the perfect bio to help you close the deal.
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