Even if you are a writer by profession, the hardest thing always seems to be writing about yourself. If you want to market yourself as a brand, you need a professional sounding biography.
Biographies are exceptionally useful sources of information for online search.
Most employers want a short biography to add to your profile on their website; your own websites also need a bio, any contributions online often require a short bio, eBooks need bios, your biography is essentially a big part of your brand.
So, considering it’s so complicated, how do you write a biography that sells you or your product?
Identify Your Purpose
The main purpose behind a biography is an important consideration for deciding what needs to be included. If the biography is designed to support your product sales, it needs to identify your knowledge of the product and your degree of integrity as a seller.
If the biography is intended to support speaking engagements or personal services, it needs to highlight your abilities and your results. If you are writing a biography for someone else, it’s important to ask them questions related to the above.
Identify Your Audience
Who is the intended audience for your biography? Is it to be read by customers, employers, or followers? What types of customers, employers, or followers are they? Are the readers mainly men or women, what age group, and what level of education? What are their interests? Knowing your audience leads the purpose behind the biography.
Highlighting experience in a biography which is interesting to your readers allows them to connect better with you and get to know your better as the subject. If you know your target audience’s interests, you are more capable of making the biography enjoyable and useful.
Review the Writing Style
Writing should be third-person for biographies. Once you have established the audience and purpose, it’s relatively easy to decide on a writing style that suits. If a profile is for a business publication, it should be very formal. If it’s for personal interest, emotionally driven content can be focal. If it is academic, it needs to contain detailed information and references. To get some ideas of writing styles check out other people’s biographies and determine which voice suits your needs.
Establish a Key Feature for the Introduction
The introduction of a biography should sell someone on reading further, so this is where you need to drop the bombshell about who is featured. If it’s your own biography, search for that key moment that defines the purpose of your writing. Start with your name and add a few sentences that sum up exactly what you stand for, what makes you, YOU?, what unique achievements make you stand out? If the biography is a full-length book this introduction may span the first chapter.
Review Which Items Need to Be Included Chronologically
The next part of the biography should form a roughly chronological walk through from early childhood (or as far back as is relevant), education, to career, experience, and achievements, up to the present day. How much of this information to include will depend again on the length of the biography and its specific purpose.
There may be certain cases when a non-chronological summary is more suitable. This may be the case when an event later in life is the focus of the biography; then you may choose to begin with the lead up to the featured event.
Review Additional Information To Include as Support
The remaining part of the biography includes events or facts about a person that matches the purpose of the biography, and help support the main chronological events. This might include philanthropic activities, hobbies that define your character, as well as awards, and projects.
Plan the Material Based on the Length
If a biography is full-length, it will include a chapter on each achievement or event. If it’s an ‘About’ page on a website it will need a paragraph on each event. If it’s a paragraph for guest posts, it may only need a sentence on each event, and some facts need to be left out. If the bio is very brief, then stick to three key points.
Sum Up With a Call to Action or Endnote
Most bios need a call to action (CTA) or endnote. This may not be traditionally considered a CTA, but it is none the less what it is. CTAs may be an invitation to click-through to samples of your work, or your website, a link to sales pages featuring your best books, or an offer to connect on social media.
If the bio is for employment, this will be a chance to ask the employer to contact you for more details. An endnote may simply sum up where you are right now and where you are headed.
Get Feedback
Once you’ve finished the biography, and had the language, grammar, and the spelling checked, ask a colleague or friend to read it through and check it for you. Does it meet the purpose effectively and importantly, is it engaging?