If you run a blog or online business, you’re going to need a professional bio.
A bio helps your readers and potential customers learn more about you and your business. It also helps foster trust, outlines your expertise, and ultimately makes your business appear more legitimate than if you run things anonymously. People need to trust those they do business with and a professional bio is the first step in establishing that trust.
Learning how to write a professional bio isn’t difficult either. As long as you follow a template and don’t overthink the process, you can create a concise, effective bio that helps you connect with your audience.
What Is a Professional Bio?
A professional bio provides a snapshot of someone’s work experience, skills, education, and achievements. Most professional bios are short summaries since they’re written in author boxes or even as social media bios on platforms like Twitter. However, you can find longer professional bios on about pages or Team pages on someone’s website.
Where Do You Need a Bio?
Typically, you want to have a professional bio in an author box for any piece of content you write. This helps explain your expertise and background to both readers and Google. You can also do this for your own blog and blogs where you guest post.
One important blog page you also need is an about page, which is basically a drawn-out professional bio that you can write in first person.
How to Write a Professional Bio – The Six Steps
Now that you know what a professional bio is, let’s dive into the six steps it takes to actually write one.
1. Introduce Yourself
Most professional bios begin by introducing yourself or the person you’re writing the bio for. Third person is best here unless you’re writing your blog’s about page. This is also the perfect place to list your job role and where you’re from.
You can take a look at my about page to see how I wrote my intro.
Related: How to Write an About Me Page
2. Introduce Your Business
The next step in writing a professional bio is to introduce your organization. If you’re a full-time blogger, explain when you started your blog and that it’s your company. If you work for someone else, mention the industry and job role you hold and how long you’ve been in the industry.
This section of your professional bio is an excellent point to highlight your expertise. If you’re a veteran of your industry or have worked with some of the top clients in the space, mention it.
3. Explain What You Do
This section of your professional bio is about highlighting what you’re proficient at. If you want to make money with freelance blogging or find leads from your blog, this is where you hook potential clients.
For example, if you’re writing a professional bio as a graphic designer, mention different types of projects you specialize in, like rebranding or product packaging, and the benefit you provide your clients.
4. Mention Your Achievements
Since you just explained what you do professionally, it’s the perfect time to list any achievements or awards you’ve received.
This could include industry-recognized awards or something more general, like working with specific clients. It might feel strange to write in third person and almost brag about yourself, but the point of a professional bio is to outline your professional experience, which definitely includes your achievements.
If you are struggling to come up with achievements, you're not alone. It seems like the second you sit down to write this you immediately feel as if you've never accomplished anything in your whole life.
So forget about your bio for a moment and on a separate document start listing things you've done. Big, small, work, personal, family, anything from winning the spelling bee in 4th grade to turning around a failing department at your last job.
This will help get the juices flowing and help you find the accomplishments you need.
Related: How to Overcome Writer's Block
5. Add Some Personal Information
You don’t have to be robotic to write a professional bio. Readers like to know the author, so don’t be afraid to sprinkle in some personal anecdotes like your hobbies.
This doesn’t have to be in-depth either; a single sentence or two about what you do in your spare time adds enough color to your professional bio.
6. Have a Call-To-Action
One common mistake people make when writing a professional bio is not having a call-to-action (CTA.)
Chances are, your professional bio is in an author box. This means anyone who reads it has made it down your entire blog post or webpage to find your bio and is incredibly engaged. These are your best readers and potential customers, so direct them to do something!
Examples of CTAs you can use in your professional bio include:
- Booking a consultation with your contact page
- Reading a few of your top posts
- Downloading your freebie or watching your webinar
- Visiting another website, which is useful if you run a hobby blog but want to drive traffic to your company’s website
Picking the right CTA largely depends on what’s most valuable to you. Just give your readers some direction so you don’t miss out on your most valuable traffic.
A Professional Bio Template You Can Use
If you want to write a professional bio but don’t know how to start, try out my template. This is a shorter professional bio template that’s written in third person, and it’s perfect for an author box, employee page, or any PR mentions your company gets.
[Name] is a [occupation] based out of [location.] He/She is the [job role] at [company] and has [x] years of experience within [your industry.] He/She specializes in [your expertise,] and has been the recipient of [insert your achievements or awards.] In his/her spare time, [name] enjoys [list one or two hobbies.] If you want to connect with [Name] or keep up to date with [company,] be sure to [CTA.]
This is a short professional bio, but it quickly informs the reader about your professional experiences, adds a personal touch, and then ends with a CTA.
Tips for Writing a Professional Bio
With your professional bio template in hand, you have everything you need to start writing. Plus, here are a few tips you can keep in mind to make writing that much easier.
- Be Concise: Short and snappy is typically best for writing a professional bio. You want to hook people quickly and explain why you’re a subject matter expert, not bore people with your life story.
- Stick to Third Person: Writing in first person sounds more repetitive and less professional than third person when writing bios.
- Don’t Overthink It: A professional bio is important, but don't spend hours pefecting it. Write something and you can always tweak it later.
Examples of Awesome Professional Bios
My professional bio template is an excellent starting point if you’re struggling to get started.
But my template is just one approach to how to write a professional bio. There are plenty of other professional bio examples, many of which are longer, that you can also look to for inspiration.
Some of my favorite professional bios include:
- Darren Rowse (ProBlogger): A long-form professional bio that outlines how Darren became a professional blogger and wraps up the bio with a very compelling CTA.
- Neil Patel: The perfect example of how to write an impressive professional bio on Twitter.
- Investopedia: If you’re creating a team page for your blog or business, Investopedia’s layout and individual author pages are two excellent examples to learn from.
- Larry Ludwig: A mid-length professional bio that explains how Larry got started with blogging while highlighting some of his media appearances and previous clients.
- Satya Nadella: This professional bio of Microsoft’s current CEO is backwards from most bios and leaves education and where Nadella is from until the end of the bio. Nevertheless, it’s still a snappy, excellent bio with a different format.
- Corey Wainwright: An example of a snappy, humorous bio for a corporate website.
- Mark Levy: An example of how to clearly list your value proposition for potential clients in your bio.
- Megan Gilmore: A snappy Instagram bio with an effective CTA.
These examples have long and short professional bios. Typically, about pages or author pages have longer bios whereas author boxes and social media platforms cater to short and snappy bios.
If you’re still stuck on writing, you can also visit some of the top blogs in your blogging niche to see how they structure their professional bios.
How Long Should a Professional Bio Be?
Many professional bios are short and are between 150 and 250 words since they are for an author box or corporate team page. However, professional bios on about pages are often longer and can be 500 words or more.
The bottom line is you can write different professional bios for different parts of your website and for your social media handles.
How Do I Make My Professional Bio Stand Out?
To make your professional bio stand out, mention any well-known awards of achievements you have. Additionally, if you have an inspiring story that relates to your niche, lean on that story. Anything that cements your position as a subject matter expert helps your bio stand out, and you can sprinkle in personal anecdotes and interests to make your bio more personable.
Summary
At some point in your blogging career or day job, you’re going to have to write a professional bio. But the good news is that you can keep things simple and use existing templates to write a compelling bio with a strong CTA.
Just avoid getting stuck on your bio and overthinking things. Your goal should be to consistently write great content for your blog. If you do that, you can build your audience and brand and even turn your blog into a full-on business.
