Aside from your main headline, your bio is the single most important part of your website. But so many people completely screw this up.
You know the kind of bio I’m talking about… the one that contains many words, but manages to communicate nothing:
“Joe Blow is a passionate, heart-centered entrepreneur and creative visionary who helps bold changemakers live fearless lives and step into their full leadership. His mission is to make the world a better place by helping people align their passions with their purpose, and manifest their dreams through connecting their intentions with their vision.”
The problem with this type of bio is that anyone can say these things about themselves. For example:
–> “Entrepreneur” could mean => took a weekend course on how to be a life coach and the next Tuesday, decided he doesn’t want to “trade dollars for hours” so has just enrolled in his first course in how to create courses. Just last week, he put up his first online course so he can reach “one to many” with his weekend coaching skills.
–> “Creative visionary” could mean => took an ayahuasca journey.
–> “Helps bold changemakers live fearless lives” could mean => helps aspiring coaches recruit other aspiring coaches into masterminds on how to recruit aspiring mastermind leaders into masterminds about creating masterminds.
–> “Helping people align their passions with their purpose” could mean => helping people decide to take his 6-figure yearlong program.
Even when people do have real offerings of value and substance in their business, they often still write useless bios like the one from the “heart-centered entrepreneur” above.
Because they think bios are just *supposed* to use all these puffed-up buzz words like “visionary” or “catalyst.” Because they see other people using them–and who wants to be left out of the fancy-schmancy-word party?
The problem is, even if they have accomplished a lot, and they do have real value to offer, the bios like for our “creative visionary” don’t convey that at all… because they don’t convey *anything* of substance.
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The key to a great bio is to describe a career path that very few other people, if any, could have taken.
There are two main ways to do this.
1. Describe things you’ve done that (relatively speaking) few other people have done. If they’re true, you can say things like:
–> “I spoke in front of an audience of 1,000 people” – as (relatively) few people have spoken in front of audiences that large.
–> “I’ve been featured in X…” if X is something that not everyone gets featured in (i.e., not the Huffington Post)!
–> “My video on Y has been viewed over 100,000 times…” as relatively few videos get viewed that much.
–> “I have given presentations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Miami, Houston, Chicago, Brussels, and Tokyo” … as relatively few people are given stages around the country (or around the world).
–> “My clients have included X, Y, and Z,” if X, Y, and Z are recognizable brands, and will let you use their name.
My own bio uses this method. I’ve written or co-written three books, published by Penguin and HarperCollins. Relatively few people have had their books published by major publishers. I’ve written an op-ed for the New York Times, and have had my writing published in the Washington Post. Relatively few people have done that. Boom. I’ve got a solid bio, with just a few bullet points, for a person who sells writing services.
2. Tell an interesting story.
Perhaps Joe Blow does have a valuable skill to offer, but he wrote his bio the way he did, because he doesn’t have many clear credibility markers yet that few others have achieved.
That’s OK. We all start somewhere. But, much better than trying to hide that fact by covering it up in generic, vague, puffy “visionaryspeak,” is to tell a good story.
The temptation here is to tell a cliched “rags to riches” story like they tell you to do in all the marketing seminars:
“Two years ago, I was broke, sleeping on my sister’s bicycle seat for a pillow. Then one day I woke up, and decided, I was completely done with this bicycle-seat-sleeping scarcity mentality. I took several deep breaths, and recited several mantras. That was it—I created my new reality of abundant abundance, just like that. Since then, through my mantras, I’ve manifested everything I’ve ever dreamed of. Now I’m writing this to you from my third vacation home, on the French Riviera, as I take a break from watching my passive income sales from my e-course roll in. And if you buy my e-course, I’ll show you how to teach people to do the same.”
People tell these because they work (much more than the puffy-speak bios referenced at the beginning.) But I just can’t stomach any more of these: doesn’t the world have enough BS rags-to-riches stories?
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In contrast, a really good story-based bio highlights instances in which you actually used a tradable skill you posses to achieve something exceptional, challenging, and valuable for a client. If you tell the story well, the skill-set highlighted doesn’t need to have occurred in a championship round at the Olympics or on a multibillion-dollar deal.
If you tell the story well, it could be something simple, local and small-scale, that showcases how you use your skill-set effectively.
Weave these illustrations into an overall story telling the development of your career, and you’ve got a great bio story, even if you don’t have high-level credibility markers yet.
The best bios combine the credibility markers of (1), with a real narrative examples and career arc of (2).
Here’s a bio story I wrote for my book-proposal client Annie Lalla. Notice how it hits all the credibility notes, but in a narrative format, with real-world examples, that show the arc of her professional and personal development:
Annie Lalla’s Bio
Annie Lalla’s first career after college was working as a relationship facilitator, in a multinational corporate setting. Graduating with an honors degree in biology and philosophy from University of Toronto, Trinity College, she took a job as a junior programmer in the IT division of Bell Canada, the national phone company. She quickly rose in her position to IT Product Manager, where she became a de-facto liaison between internal business development teams and software engineers for global telecom companies such as Versatel (Amsterdam), MCI WorldCom, Cable & Wireless (London,) Jupiter Telecoms (Japan), and Vonage (Canada & US).
In this role, Annie discovered the values, expectations, and agendas of the business development and engineering teams within companies were often antagonistic and seemingly irreconcilable. Sales teams want new features to sell customers, expecting them to be delivered fast. Marketers, famous for underestimating the time required to design sophisticated software features, would pressure the engineers to deliver. The engineers in turn would feel frustrated and angry, and they would push back, leading to epic and often heated conflicts between silos.
Annie created herself as the bridge and peacemaker among warring internal factions. Holding the relationship between the two teams as paramount, Annie optimized for solutions where both got their basic needs met, while maintaining all dignities intact.
During this time, Annie discovered her real passion was not managing software initiatives, but mediating the interpersonal relationships between the people involved in her projects. She saw how the emotional power dynamics she adeptly facilitated at work paralleled those occurring in romantic relationships.
It was then Annie realized her deepest calling was to help couples in love create evolutionary relationships that would last a lifetime. At this time, Annie parlayed her wisdom in bridging difficult relationships within the high-level corporate sphere, into her career as a professional Love Coach. She invested in an intensive two-year coach training program with Level 7 Leadership, and then opened her private practice as a Love Coach in New York.
Over the last decade, Annie has coached hundreds of singles and couples across a wide swath of cultural niches, from middle-class housewives to household-name pop stars and famous multi-millionaire entrepreneurs. She’s rescued many a cynic from loneliness, saved dozens of marriages, and helped guide numerous couples towards falling and staying in love.
In 2012, Annie appeared as a meta-love coach in the Bravo reality TV series Miss Advised. She has also appeared as a love and relationship expert on Fox and CBS, and her work has been featured in Elle & other magazines.
But Annie’s proudest achievement by far is inspiring the world’s leading seduction guru, Eben Pagan (aka David DeAngelo of “Double Your Dating”) to believe in True Love. Eben had mastered the skills of seducing women (and in fact played a prominent role on the international-bestselling book The Game by Neil Strauss). But despite success in dating, he was a still a skeptic about love, and was unable to maintain long-term relationships.
Annie fell in awe the moment she saw him, and within months of courting, he asked her point blank: “Why are you choosing me? I’m no good at relationships. I’m like Mt. Everest.”
Annie knew she could love this man better than anyone else, and she was willing to do whatever it took—so she put on her emotional hiking boots and got busy climbing. It was not an easy path to win over this man’s heart, and several times during their courtship, she considered giving up this mountain of work.
However, she persisted and they continued their ascent, and within one eventful year, Eben got down on one knee and asked Annie to be his wife. It’s been 9 years since they fell in love, and now they are the proud parents of their five-year old daughter “Love” -named after her hard-won origin story.
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Boom. 638 words.
I can guarantee you, aside from your main headline, those are the most important ~638 words on your site.
Having a great bio on your website can be the difference between clients deciding they *must* work with you ahead of all your competition… vs. being seen as just another generic _______ (whatever you do).
The thing is, for some weird reason, people think this is the one highly-important aspect of their website they should do entirely on their own, with no outside help.
That’s like thinking you should do your own paint job on your car.
Just like there are people who have spent their entire career learning to do great paint jobs on cars, there are people who have spent years or even decades learning the art and craft of honing in on a perfect bio.
Just like you invest in the graphic aspects of your website–which in most cases are far less important than the bio…
Wouldn’t it make sense to invest in a professional writer to do your bio story?
This is an incredibly cost-effective, high-leverage, low-hanging-fruit investment in up-leveling your business or practice.
Get started with your 1,000-word bio here.
I look forward to seeing how awesome your site looks with your brand-spankin-new bio story!
–Michael
