Why you need a bio

Highlight what makes you different

Whatever your business, you need a professional bio to introduce yourself to potential customers.

A professional bio could be the most important piece of content that you invest your time in. Whether your business is online or has a front door, whether you’re a solopreneur or a team player, whether you’ve been in business for years or are just getting started, a professional bio is a potent marketing tool.

I sent out a survey asking people whether an About Me or About Us page was important when considering doing business with a company. Fifty-six per cent said very important, 33 per cent said semi-important, and 11 per cent said “other.” Not one single person checked the “I don’t care” response.

Most of your potential customers and clients value getting to know whom they will be buying from or working with. They want and are ready to engage with businesses that have “real people” and a personal touch over businesses that don’t.

Why make it personal?

Chances are that you’re not the only person or business doing and offering what you do. None of your competitors, however, have the unique life and work experiences that you bring to your products or services. Those experiences—your individuality—differentiate you from them and are an invaluable asset—particularly if you are choosing to cultivate your personal brand. Highlight what makes you different.

When people have options about where to buy, they gravitate to businesses that visibly share similar values to them. If I am shopping for a fitness instructor, I’m personally more likely to go with someone who snowshoes rather than someone who loves ice-fishing. Or if I am selling my house and am attracted to the image of a certain realty company, I will investigate each real-estate agent. It turns out that one of them has the same hometown as me. Aha! Something in common. How would I get that info? The short bio. People make relationships not only with the professional you but also the personal you.

Even if you are filling a niche that no one else does and your competition is essentially nonexistent, professional bios are often the first impression potential customers and clients will get of you. If they can sense your particular brand of humour or your unique outlook, for example, they will be motivated to complete your call to action or cross the threshold into your shop. In return, you’ll get to work with the kind of people you enjoy being around. People love stories, and they love feeling not alone.
Although authenticity is always desirable in business and in life, it has even more value in the digital realm. Internet users are inundated with information of varying degrees of quality, and their bogus sensors are honed to efficiently separate the wheat from the chaff. Use the same tone in your bio that you would with from a close friend who calls out of the blue, and you’re genuinely happy to be sharing the news.

Writing your own or working with a bio writer?

The advantages of writing your own bio are that the price is right, no one knows you better than yourself, and your writing voice can emulate your speaking voice so readers get an accurate sense of who you are.

The disadvantages can include difficulties with the technical aspects of writing, challenges with blowing your own horn, and troubles distancing yourself from your stories to get perspective. When you have these challenges, you’re more likely to procrastinate or settle for a bio that lacks personality and doesn’t give voice to your particular greatness.

A professional bio writer will be able to capture your personality by weaving in wording from bios that you’ve written. The interview with the bio writer helps the writer hear the excitement in your voice or see how animated you become when you talk about your work. That enthusiasm is written right into your bio. And, as a bonus, bio writers can produce in a relatively short period of time.

Even if you’re a competent writer, a side benefit of working with a bio writer is that you gain clarity about your vision. Some solopreneurs struggle with how exactly to bring all of their skills into one package. Others wrangle with the idea of specializing. And yet others are ready to refocus, re-niche, and reach further. The power of talking it through with a writer, who keeps asking questions to gain clarity in order to write a bio, can shed some much needed light. The writer will repeat what he or she is hearing from you and, when you hear it, you’ll know—it either sits well with you or it doesn’t. The psychological component of bio writing goes beyond a mere product. It’s a process.

A professional bio will be one of the most used and re-used, most tweaked, and most powerful tools in your marketing toolkit. Enjoy the process.

Some people were born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Coreen was born with a blue pen and a red pen—one for writing, one for editing. As a result, she started Lucent Edits and, two years later, its offshoot Brilliant Bios, which gives her the opportunity to connect with and support inspiring people with their businesses and projects.