Welcome to episode 32 of Write with Influence. I’m kicking this week’s episode off with something a little bit different. I’ve decided to start focusing on specific copy examples that catch my eye and using them as lessons to help you, my lovely audience.
Today’s lesson is all about writing biographies. Writing a bio is an important part of introducing yourself to potential employers, clients or contacts to help you make a positive impression. We all want our About page or bio to sound great but sometimes when our intention is to impress people, we embellish things to make them seem grander than they are and end up sounding rather vague as a consequence.
I am going to show you how to create a bold biography that people will believe whilst addressing two of the most common mistakes people make in this area of writing:
- Describing yourself without being specific.
- Talking about the work you’ve done and the people that you’ve helped without being specific.
Putting my cynical customer hat on, I’ll be breaking down the example biographies below to exemplify the shortcomings of ambiguity and telling you what your good friends may not tell you about your biography so that you can make big improvements and stand out from the crowd.
- “I’m an executive with over 25 years’ experience in training, coaching, business, and human resources and this gives me a unique background to support you.”
- “One of Marjorie’s clients was a wellness chain franchise owner who needed a personal brand to motivate and empower people. The results after they had worked together were a strong video and podcast interview ability, which established him as a leader in his industry and generated an unexpected business deal from one of the podcast interviews that he did.”
As always, I have included sketches to lighten the learning. Demonstrating the dangers of stretching the truth to make a good first impression, I’ll be showing you how easy it is to turn being catfished into flying business class to client meetings and delving into the intricacies of scaling a dog food manufacturing business!
After listening to this episode, you will have the tools you need to boost your bio and stand out with authentically and specificity so that people believe what you say and choose you over everybody else. I’m going to be keeping my peepers peeled for more copy examples to share with you but if you do see any feel free to send them my way by commenting or emailing me at hello@writewithinfluence.com. Free copy tips – what’s not to like?
Links:
The Write With Influence Course
AMY HARRISON
EPISODE 32
SICK COPY – ARE YOU A COACH OR CONSULTANT? PROSPECTS MAY NOT BELIEVE YOUR BIO
Amy Harrison:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Write with Influence. I’m back recording in my office which has been recently decorated, and I have to say I’m absolutely loving it. It’s had a lick of paint, I’ve got some prints up, not quite those quote prints of “Live, Laugh, love.” I’ve got some of my favorite books out but not all of them, so it is still a little bit echo-y, you’ll have to bear with me. I’m probably a little bit overexcited because it’s the first time ever that I’ve had a dedicated office. When I first started out back in 2008, my boyfriend and I just had a mattress on the floor because we’d rented out the spare room to two language students, and our bedroom had to double up as a shiatsu studio for him and a copywriting office for me, space is at a premium over here, people. So, I’m really, really happy, and if I can just find out why every morning there is a stray woodlouse at my office, I think my happiness will be complete. Just one woodlouse. I’m not talking about an infestation here and it’s not the same one because, well, I just know it’s not the same one.
Onto today’s episode, but first of all, no, sorry, how remiss! How on earth are you? Are you celebrating spring yet? In the UK we have two options for the first day of spring and this could be as controversial as whether you call a bread roll a roll, a cob, a bun or a barn cake, but I’m not here to start fights. If you’re using the meteorological calendar your spring will, of course, already have sprung beginning on the 1st of March. But if you’re like me and you prefer the astronomical calendar, because it makes you wait just a little bit longer, then hang in with me until the 20th of March for the Vernal Equinox when our spring begins, and we’ll be frolicking like lambs with the rest of the folks.
Okay. Today’s show – I’m going to kick off with something a little bit different on the podcast and perhaps, maybe for the next few shows, perhaps even for the future, I’m going to try and focus on specific copy examples that catch my beady eye, and I want to use them as lessons because I just think it’s easier to hang the hook of a lesson on actual examples of copy. So, as I say, I will be keeping my eyes out for examples, but if you want to send something in by all means do so, you can email it to hello@writewithinfluence.com. Free copy tips, what’s not to like?
Okay, recently I’ve been seeing a lot of biography copy, mostly for coaches and consultants. Now, as a coach or a consultant who you are is almost, if not as important and maybe even more important than what it is that you actually do. We live in a very discerning age where people shop around, and you can’t just stand out anymore by naming your business AAA plumbers so that you show up first in the phone book. The other thing is, when you’re a coach or a consultant, you’re working one-to-one, you’re sharing your knowledge and your expertise and so you need to work hard in your biography copy to show that you know your stuff, but a lot of the ones that I’ve seen recently have been, I feel, left wanting – they just don’t have the meat or the gravitas to convince me that I can trust that person and that I’m going to get good results with them. And here’s the thing. Here’s where I think the problem lies. We want our “About” page or our biography to sound great. Of course we do. We want people to read it and think, “Wow, this person’s got their shit together.” But sometimes when we want to impress people we can embellish, right? We can make things sound a little grander than they are. And how I see this happening in biography pages is a tendency to make things sound good whilst also keeping them a little bit vague. Perhaps this is done in the hope that our reader will interpret what we’re saying as impressive without us ruining that impression by telling them the truth.
[New Scene – Party]
Jeffrey: I’m Jeffrey. Pleased to meet you.
Sue: I’m Sue. Fun party isn’t it?
Jeffrey: The service is just exceptional, almost as good as the service you get when you fly business class from Heathrow to JFK.
Sue: Wow.
Jeffrey: Yeah, I was out there a couple of weeks ago for a client meeting. I had to come back because I was giving a keynote speech at a conference in London.
Sue: Oh, I could never talk in front of people. Do you ever get nervous?
Jeffrey: Not anymore. It’s like when you meet royalty, you learn that everyone is just the same as everyone else.
Sue: You’ve met royalty?
Jeffrey: They’re actually more down to earth than most people realize but I guess, I mean, most people just don’t meet them. It’s the nature of being a Royal – you don’t meet every one of your subjects, do you?!
Amy: Jeffery? I thought it was you!
Jeffrey: Amy? Hi. This is, I don’t know her name.
Sue: Sue.
Amy: Nice to meet you Sue. Oh my God, you’ve got to tell me about New York. Your dad was so worried when he heard that you’d gone over to meet a runway model you’ve been talking to on the internet. I mean, God, you hear all these horror stories.
Sue: Was that your client?
Amy: Client? No, Jeffrey got catfished. He thought he was talking to some model from Victoria Secrets, but it turned out it was just some bored housewife in Queens. I mean, you were lucky her husband didn’t mind you staying for a few days. Your dad said she’s done this before?
Jeffrey: Um, yeah, a couple of times.
Amy: And to come back the very next day to do that talk, you must’ve been knackered.
Sue: Was that your keynote speech Jeffrey?
Amy: Is that what the class was called? That makes sense. Jeff was at the community center teaching the senior citizens how to use applications on their Macs. Mum loved it. She hasn’t stopped singing your praises. If you’re not planning to go back to Mrs. Robinson in Queens, I could probably set you up with her.
Jeffrey: Yeah, well, um …
Amy: Jeff’s ACE. He gets on with everyone.
Sue: Including royalty?
Amy: Royalty?
Sue: He says that when he met them, he found they were just like everyone else.
Amy: are you talking about that time Princess Ann came to open up the leisure center?
Jeffrey: I mean, it was a long time ago.
Amy: Oh, she was lovely though. She didn’t even mind that you messed yourself when you’re handed over the flowers. Do you know what? I suppose they are a bit more down to earth than you realize!
[End]
So, we want a bold biography, but we don’t want one that people aren’t going to believe. So, here’s what I want to cover today – a couple of mistakes.
- Mistake 1: Describing yourself without being specific.
- Mistake 2: Talking about the work you’ve done and the people that you’ve helped without being specific.
Now, if you’ve been listening for a while, it’s not going to come as a surprise that what makes the following examples not work as well as they could is the lack of specificity. Now I want to make it clear that in the following examples, I’m absolutely not saying that these people cannot do what they’re promising and that’s the tragic thing – these people could be brilliant. But if a cynical customer comes along, when there is so much competition, your promises can easily be dismissed if they’re not believable. So, let’s dive into a couple of mistakes and examples.
Mistake number one is describing yourself without being specific. So, here’s an example of a biography from a business coach that I saw. I’m going to call her Norma, and Norma biography reads:
“I’m an executive with over 25 years’ experience in training, coaching, business, and human resources and this gives me a unique background to support you.”
So, that was a sample from Norma’s biography. That all sounds very nice and if you have a bio like that and you sent it to a friend and you ask them what they think, they’re probably going to say, “Oh yeah, that sounds really good. That sounds really professional.” They’re probably not going to tell you the truth. Why? Because the truth can hurt. It’s also going to put a downer on your night out at the pub and they’ll think “Why are you bringing your biography to the pub anyway? Isn’t it your round? Just get to the bar.” Okay. So, let’s just dig into this a little bit. 10, 15 years ago, if you were a business coach, you probably could say that you’d left a corporate executive level position and that might be enough to convince someone that you had relevant business experience, but today it’s just not enough. I’m going to put on my cynical customer hat and I’m going to tell you what your good friends wouldn’t tell you if this was your biography. Let’s break it down bit by bit. First bit, “I’m an executive” or “I’m a former executive.” I see this a lot on biographies, particularly on biographies of consultants, and on its own this just makes me think that you worked in an office. I mean, it doesn’t tell me that you’re any good at your job, it just tells me that maybe you had a direct line and a PalmPilot. “An executive with over 25 years’ experience in training, coaching, business, and human resources”, that’s what Norma’s bio said, and unfortunately, this just doesn’t mean anything either. Let’s look at that length of time. 25 years sounds pretty impressive, except it always makes me think of that saying of “You don’t have 25 years’ experience, you have one year’s experience repeated 25 times.” Now that could be the case, I don’t know how good your experience is. This could simply be 25 years of experience showing up on time every day. Simply saying the number of years of experience that you have doesn’t tell me anything about that experience. It doesn’t tell me that you were any good at your job. You may have just stayed under the radar and they didn’t notice until you retired! It makes me think about when you were little and if you stayed really, really quiet, your parents wouldn’t notice that it was past your bedtime and you could get to watch some pretty good post watershed TV. Well, you could probably rack up 25 years of turning up at a company using the same tactic. There was a guy in Spain who used to turn up at 7:30 AM, clock in, go home and return at 4:00 PM to clock out. He did that for 10 years and no one noticed. So technically he had 10 years’ experience working for the provincial government, but probably just had 10 years’ experience of watching Cash in the Attic. So, if you want to talk about your experience, make it specific. Now this lady, Norma, she does list some areas, i.e., training, coaching, business, human resources, but again, they’re vague. They don’t tell me if she was any good at those things and to be brutally honest, we’ve all met awful trainers and terrible coaches and HR executives, so a title is just not enough to convey the value of what you have to offer. Experience isn’t enough and a title isn’t enough because it doesn’t tell me anything. When I was 15, I had a job supervising children’s parties at the local leisure center. I was awful at it. I didn’t organize games. I didn’t play with the kids. I used to set up the bouncy castle and then wait to see if there was any party food leftover at the end. After that, I worked in the cafe at the leisure center for two years. I was awful at that. I didn’t know how to cook sausages in the deep fat fryer, so I always used to tell the kids that we were sold out! I was awful. It’s terrible, but in those two jobs, I racked up four years of experience in the entertainment and hospitality sector, which I absolutely used on my CV. In your bio, when you talk about your experience and position, give me a flavor of the work and the responsibilities that you had. Otherwise, I may just assume that you turned up somewhere and passed the time. Now, some bios do give a flavor of work that’s been done, but it’s just not specific enough to be believable and doesn’t have the weight required to impress me. And that’s mistake number two – talking about the work you’ve done or the people that you’ve helped without being specific. So, here’s an example from a Social Media Coach, a Business Coach and a Personal Brand Strategist, I’m going to call her Marjorie, and she lists a handful of mini case studies as proof of her work. Here’s one of them:
“One of Marjorie’s clients was a wellness chain franchise owner who needed a personal brand to motivate and empower people. The results, after they had worked together were a strong video and podcast interview ability, which established him as a leader in his industry and generated an unexpected business deal from one of the podcast interviews that he did.”
Let’s go back to our friends in the pub. If we say, “What do you think about this? I’m putting this on my website in my bio.” They’re going to be encouraging. They’re going to say “That sounds great Marjorie, that really showcases your skills as a special person. You really do have a lot to offer the world. You’re amazing … and I’ll have a double gin and tonic please … why does she keep bringing her laptop and her biography to the pub?” But now I’m going to put on the cynical customer hat and unfortunately, this is what they have to say, “You helped a wellness chain franchise owner, but we don’t name them, and the business isn’t named. So, this could be someone who runs a spa or a barbers or a gym. It doesn’t tell me how well it has been run. Is it up market or is it a dive where you turn up to use the spa and you leave with a fungal infection? I don’t know, but the fact that your customer doesn’t want to list the business when you’d think that they would want to plug their business and promote it, that makes me a little bit suspicious. Then if we look at the result of working together, this business owner ended up with a strong video and podcast interview ability to establish him as a leader. There’s just too many subjective terms there. I mean, what is meant by a “strong ability” or “established as a leader”? That could mean that he did two podcast interviews and the host said, “Thanks for coming on.” That could be a strong interview ability. You know, give me something I can get my teeth in. Were you able to get him onto a local news podcast? Did you manage to get him to have such great presence that after one interview, three other hosts asked him to be on their shows? I mean, we don’t have to be super specific if people are concerned about confidentiality, but these are all great results that show that you can get publicity for your clients. The final piece that stood out to me is that “working together also generated an unexpected business deal from one of the podcast interviews.” If we’ve got our cynical lens on, this could be anything – a business deal can range from a billion-dollar merger to an hours’ paid coaching call. I do get what the coach is trying to do by saying “unexpected”, she’s trying to tickle the curiosity creature in all of us, but it doesn’t really work because it doesn’t give us enough to get us curious. “An unexpected business deal”, we are supposed to infer that this was a good thing, but there’s not enough meat for it to be credible.
If you want more details about the elements of using curiosity you can check out episode 20, which is all about the science of curiosity copywriting.
If you’re going to talk about the work that you’ve done, and I want to pause and say, sometimes you genuinely can’t. For larger corporate clients that I work with I’m under a super strict NDA. I can’t talk about the products that I’ve worked on; I can’t talk about the client and I definitely can’t talk about the results that they’ve had. For other clients, I can be a little bit more free with the information that I share, but obviously I have to check and get their permission first. So, what I’d say is that you want to be as specific about the work and the results as you can without breaching any confidentiality. So, for example, with our social media brand strategist, even saying something like, “I helped coach a business owner through his first podcast interview and from there he received formal requests, and now he’s been able to reach 3000 listeners of these podcasts who are within his target market and because he’s been asked on as a guest, he’s able to promote his business to this target market and establish himself as a credible expert.” I would argue that that is better copy than something that’s vague and trying to infer that you had impressive results, but without being specific about the results. This showcases the results, that an ideal client of a social media coach might want AND it sounds real AND it sounds like how you would talk to a real person. So, just be careful when you’re writing your bio about being vague about the results and about your experience, because people are cynical, and they won’t be as impressed. They are looking for that concrete – you are competing with people who will absolutely have those knockout bios written, and you want to sound like a credible, real person who has the experience and the authority to get the results that you’re promising.
I’m going to finish with a good example of a bio that lists specific experience and an approach to work. I saw this on LinkedIn. This is the biography of Carmen Simon. I mentioned her book Impossible to Ignore back in episode 27, which was about some of the elements you need to make your copy memorable.This is her biography:
“As a cognitive neuroscientist, I’ve spent the past decade researching what makes content memorable. I’ve helped businesses apply science-based guidelines to influence their own audiences’ memory with precision. I work with clients in four ways. One, I help them craft their messages and presentations using evidence-based guidelines. Two, I teach a brain science workshop for creating memorable messages. Three, I deliver keynote speeches about neuroscience and messaging during public events. And four, I conduct neuroscience research using EEG technology.”
That’s the end of the bio. Well, it’s the end of the section. It’s a much longer bio on LinkedIn. Look, we can’t all be cognitive neuroscientists, I get that, but the title is much more descriptive than executive. She talks about how she has spent the last decade – she doesn’t say that she has 10 years’ experience, she says she’s used that time to conduct research using EEG technology, developing science-based guidelines and delivering specific workshops. But what’s important to note here is that there isn’t a huge amount of content, but it’s specific. It doesn’t tell the whole story, it doesn’t tell everything that she’s done, it doesn’t have to, but it feels real and it feels credible, and in a sea of vague executives and consultants, it sounds different.
So, in summary, when you’re writing your bio don’t just list your title and experience and expect people to get on board with what you’re promising. Show me your history, show me what makes you qualified to get my attention as someone who can help me. And if you’re using case studies or examples of people that you’ve helped, be as specific as you can be and of course, always get your customer’s permission if you’re naming them specifically or sharing any specific results.
That’s all for this episode, I’m going to be keeping my peepers peeled for more copy examples to share with you but if you do see any feel free to send them my way. In the meantime, work hard to beef up your bio, but do it authentically and with specificity, because if you don’t and if someone does hire you based on their interpretation of your biography, I mean, there could be a massive disconnect between what they think you can do and what you actually do.
[New scene – Dog food factory]
Business owner: Come through. The boardroom is just off the shop floor.
{enter the boardroom}
It’s a bit quieter in here. Thank you so much for agreeing to take this on. We really do need some help. Coach: As an executive coach and consultant, I’m here to help you grow, scale and take your business to the next level.
Business owner: So how do we start?
Coach: Tell me what’s going on.
Business owner: Brexit, pandemic, just a bit overwhelmed by the next steps.
Coach: Are you taking time for self-care?
Business owner: Erm …
Coach: Some days we’re the lion and as Katie Perry sings, “We’re ready to roar!” But some days we’re the turtle and we just want to pop back in the shell and that’s okay. Have a duvet day, just climb back under the covers and rest for a while.
Business owner: We’ve got a shipment coming in from the continent in the next half hour, so I don’t think a duvet day is on the cards today. Erm, we’ve got some big choices about how we find the time and resources to grow considering we’re pretty much a demand-driven manufacturer at the moment.
Coach: Have you joined clubhouse?
Business owner: No. What’s that?
Coach: It’s a talk only social networking app. I could get you an invitation and we could sit down and work on your profile now?
Business owner: How does it help businesses?
Coach: No one knows, but influencers are using it. If they see you there and they like you and promote your business that could be huge for growth. Tell me about your ideal target market.
Business owner: Well, we sell dog food. So, our target market is dog owners.
Coach: How do they feel about their dogs?
Business owner: Well, they would like to keep them alive.
Coach: Oh, that is very powerful. Very emotional – keeping a dog alive. That should be front and center in your marketing. That messaging could be key to helping you stand out and scale.
Business owner: We were thinking about moving to more of a service-based offering, more of a consultancy. So, I mean, we’d still sell dog food, but we could help pet stores offer more products, assessments around dog health, maybe even set up mini dog health centers. I mean, we have the expertise. We could bring that in.
Coach: Here’s what I’m thinking. Baby steps. Let’s get you on some podcasts. They will love this story about keeping dogs alive. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that particular angle before. “Don’t let your dog die – feed it.” Gosh, I’m sorry, I’m welling up. It’s so powerful.
Business owner: Have you had a manufacturing client before?
Coach: My last client patented the bagel shaped burger.
Business owner: Never heard of it.
Coach: Oh, it’s huge in his home country of Naru. I think he’s sold 12! So, ready to set some KPIs? Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of KPIs before, I’ll walk you through it.
[End]
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