How Not to Craft a Professional Bio
In this article, you'll learn...
- What makes for a compelling, descriptive professional bio
- Five real-life examples of ineffective professional bios
In this era of the endangered attention span, the professional bio remains an important tool for cultivating relationships, trust, and profit.
Professional bios offer you a chance to stand apart from the competition, foster a personal connection, and convert prospects into customers
Abstract Advice. Concrete Context
This isn't just another supposedly how-to article with abstract advice. This article will provide concrete context in the form of a side-by-side comparison of five dentists' bios. My intent is to help you craft professional bios that build business and reputation, gain clients, and generate income.
Bio No. 1
We strive for excellence in providing comprehensive dental care for the entire family. Patient satisfaction and comfort are of great importance to our staff, and we work hard to ensure all our patients leave our office smiling. We focus on preventive and restorative care, but we're a full-service practice. Oral and IV sedation are also available.
Critique: That bio could be posted on the site of any other practice, and you wouldn't know the difference. All practices "strive for excellence." That is an archetypal attempt to appeal to everyone, which classically fails to attract the attention of anyone.
Dental care takes place in an inherently intimate setting; our conventional personal space has to be breached to get the job done. Considering such closeness, shouldn't the bio at least speak to the reader, addressing her as "you?" Instead, it's all "we" and "our." No personal connection in the bio might imply similar service in the dentist's chair.
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I love the critique-style specifics in this article. It really drives home the message to have these examples to illustrate your points. Thanks!
Great examples as everyone can relate to a dentist, and I honestly never considered that a bio should end with a call to action so goot tip for me.
The critiques are valuable. But how about creating a Bio that you really like?
Just when I decide we were reading something good, Mike tells us what's wrong. I enjoyed the critique, especially the idea of a call to action in the bio. I agree that a couple of examples of good bios would have been good, too. Thanks for the article, Mike.
I liked the article and the examples but what you are really talking about is a description of (dental) services, not a "bio". A bio would be about the dental practice and practitioners including a little history - not about what the patient will experience.
Thanks for the article, it certainly brings home the importance of putting the end customer at the center.
We ran a seminar on precisely this topic earlier this year, although I think your 5 examples are better than the ones we had!!
Ever heard of the We We test by Future Now Inc? (easy enough to Google).
We found this on the web some time back and now make the suggestion that all our clients run this simple test on their sites to see how often then use self focused words against customer focused ones. We have found that sometimes the test doesn't work, in which case we get the client to manually count "We, our, us" words against "your, you" etc. Might not be as precises but it still gets the point across pretty well.
Great article. Thanks
Insightful but incomplete.
The article explores what not to do accompanied by critiques of common missteps and suggestions for improvement. But like many Marketing Profs articles, this one never provides a soup-to-nuts example of what a successful appeal would be. Therefore, 2/12 out of 4 stars.
Hey Mike,
I always love reading more about your specialty. Your step-by-step critique is extremely useful. Whenever I write any B2C copy for a client, I always try to do what you suggest in your summary: talk to the reader instead of about the company, emphasize specific distinctions between the client and their competitors, and end with a clear call to action. Not listing every service offered is a little trickier. I'll work on that in the future.
Thanks for reminding me! Do you happen to have these tips in a video format? Would love to have you walk me through it.
Cheers.
Thanks for all the compliments and constructive criticisms, folks.
For greater detail, you'll find before/after analyses of professional bios at http://pivotalwriting.com/category/how-to-write-a-professional-bio/. There, I deconstruct different professionals' bios and explain how/why I rewrote them.
Mpursuit and Mr. Gallant, you make an excellent point. I'll ask MarketingProfs if they'd be interested in an analysis of one longer bio.
Amber, you'll find some complementary tips in "How to write a Professional Bio - 1" on the URL above. Best of success!
Thanks again everyone.
I'm looking forward to more comments and conversation.
-Mike