How To Write A Bio That Does Some Work

Your bio is read by people deciding whether to keep paying attention. On LinkedIn, on Instagram, in a speaker listing, at the bottom of an article.

Most of them read the first line and stop. So the first line has to carry the whole thing.

What most bios do wrong

They start with a title. "Founder and Director of a performance marketing agency." True, and it tells the reader nothing they can use.

They list credentials in order of how proud you are of them rather than in order of what the reader cares about.

They use words that could describe anybody in your industry. If your bio would still be accurate with a different name on it, it is not a bio, it is a job description.

The structure that works

Line one: what you do and who for. Specific enough that the reader can picture the work. Not "I help businesses grow" but "I run paid and organic content for trade and construction businesses in Sydney."

Line two: the proof. One number or one named thing. Not a list. The single strongest piece of evidence you have, which is the same thinking as where to put your proof.

Line three: the thing that makes you different. A position, not an adjective. A guarantee, a method, a constraint you work under. Something a competitor would not write about themselves.

Line four, optional: the human line. One detail that is actually about you. It works because everything above it was about the work.

Then a call to action if the platform supports one.

Write the short version first

The 160 character version is the hard one, and writing it first forces the decision about what matters.

If you can say it in 160 characters, you can expand it to 500. If you start at 500 you will never cut back to 160, you will just trim adjectives and keep the structure.

Do the short one, then the medium one, then the long one. Three versions, written down, so you are not rewriting it from scratch every time somebody asks.

Different platforms, different jobs

LinkedIn headline. The highest leverage 220 characters you own, because it appears next to your name everywhere on the platform. It is not your job title, it is what you do for whom. The post strategy that sits around it is in how to write a LinkedIn post that gets read.

Instagram bio. Short, scannable, one line per idea, with the link doing the work.

Speaker or podcast bio. Third person, which feels strange to write and is the convention. Include the thing a host can introduce you with.

Article byline. One sentence and a link.

Your own website. The longest version, and the only one that gets to be a story rather than a summary. What that page needs is covered in what your about page should actually say.

The test

Give the first line to somebody who does not know what you do and ask them what you do.

If they can tell you, it works. If they repeat the words back without understanding them, the words are doing the talking and the meaning is missing.

Keep it current

A bio written two years ago describes a business that has moved on. The number is stale, the focus has narrowed, the position is sharper now.

Put it on the quarterly list with everything else, which is what how to run a quarterly marketing review is for. Five minutes, four platforms, and the thing that represents you everywhere is accurate again.

What this unlocks: every profile, byline and introduction starts selling instead of describing.