Your Traffic, Your Bio, and A Fun Way to Get It Written

My name is Tinu. And there’s nothing I hate more than writing my own bio.

What’s a bio, you say?

It’s that blurb about all the wonderful things you’ve done in your professional life. But it’s not just one blurb. It’s usually more like three.

One will be made short enough for Twitter (160 characters), another long enough for a guest post (between a clever sentence or a crisp paragraph), and in some cases, the length of an entire web page (perhaps the about page of your blog, or in my case, the front page of one of my sites.)

And why do I hate writing it? Well, despite all the joking about how I think I’m the center of the universe, I may be just a smidgen more humble than that in real life.

Plus, how do you write about yourself in a way that is inviting, without sounding like some kind of jerk?

I’m not the only one who hates writing a bio. Tabitha Hale and her friends hate it too.

I do have a secret though, a sneaky little trick I have been using for years to cheat on writing my bio. One you can use too, in three easy steps.

We’ll come back to that in a minute. First, what do bios have to do with website traffic?

I’ll tell you what. Sooner or later you’ll need them to help you get or keep traffic.

When getting traffic from a guest post, as a featured author or thought leader, or even in some article marketing projects, your bio is what will make people want to click through to your site and get to know you better.

Bios can even help you keep traffic. Sometimes, you’ll get a person like me to your site, someone who reads every word they can find out about you before they even THINK about buying something, until something jumps out and makes them believe you are 1- legit and 2- safe.

For me, it comes down to some connective language, somewhere on their site. I like to leave little easter eggs for people who read my sites sometimes, things like “Mmm, chicken”, for those of you who remember my original blog.

And I love it when people leave little gems for me, like upside down text in the footer, or a really cute bio.

Yes, tragically I am a sucker for a good bio, though I have lots of trouble creating one.

Yes, me, a writer by birth, trade and some would even say talent, I cannot for the life of me, write a proper bio for whatever given occasion is in front of me.

So, I cheat.

Remember the three step process I was going to tell you about?

Here it is.

1. Find someone who thinks you are the bees knees, who you just adore, who also hates writing bios.
2. Write each other’s bios.
3. Trade and edit as needed.

Yep, that’s how I did it. Way back when Rodney Rumfordand I owned a little outfit together, he wrote my blurb and I wrote his.  ( Rodney co-founded TweetPhoto and a bunch of other great startups.)

Can’t remember what it was for, but I have based almost every bio I’ve ever written since on that one. Except my Twitter bio.