How do I create an effective bio?

Have you just been asked to send someone your bio? The standard reaction to this question is, ‘Sure, quick bio? No problem!’

Unfortunately, that’s usually followed fairly swiftly by, ‘Oh God, this is so painful!’ and a fervent wish that either someone else would write it for you, or the ground can swallow you up because you feel so awkward.

I’m Eleanor Steele and I’m the MedComms Mentor, and today I want to take you away from that horrible feeling of epic cringe to a place where you can genuinely say, ‘No problem!’ whenever you are asked for a bio.

If you have no idea what should go into your bio, I would recommend that you start with my previous video where we cover the 6 elements of an effective bio.

You can download a summary of all of these 6 elements, and use my Notion template to help you keep track of all the relevant experience, and the links to all of this are in the video description below.

But once you’ve got all of that sorted, you actually need to write the thing, and that’s what we are going through today.

Just like the previous video, I’m looking at this from the freelancer perspective rather than focusing on how people in agencies might need to create and adapt their bios. If you’re working in an agency, you’ll probably have a template that you have to stick to, and examples that you can follow, whereas freelancers rarely have this kind of structure.

That being said, most of the basic information will still apply whether you are working as a freelancer or within an agency. So how do you actually create and adapt your effective bio?

1. Review your existing bio

Starting from a blank page is the hardest part of writing, so it’s something that I will always, always try to avoid.

Do you have anything resembling a bio lurking in the depths of your email? Or maybe you’ve saved something onto Google Drive or Dropbox.

It could be a bio from a previous job or maybe even something from your life outside work. Maybe it’s from your CV or a cover letter for a job you once applied for.

To be honest, it doesn’t really matter what you use as your starting point. It’s just to get you over the hurdle of having a blank page in front of you, because it’s so much easier if you can trick your brain into thinking that you are editing and tweaking something rather than writing it from scratch. That always feels much harder, and bios are hard enough to write at the best of times.

If you really don’t have anything that you can use as a starting point, then set yourself a timer for 10 minutes and blast out some basic bullet points of the kind of things you’ll need to include. As long as it’s true, put down anything that pops into your head, because you’re going to be crafting and adapting from this starting point, and you can edit out anything that’s really outlandish.

And again, if you’re not sure of the kind of things that you should be thinking of, I go through it in my previous video exploring the 6 elements of an effective bio.

In particular, it would be good to note down things like how long you’ve been in MedComms and the kind of role you’re currently doing.

Plus you can highlight any other relevant work that you’ve done outside of MedComms, like maybe clinical experience. Then some notes on the therapy areas you’ve worked on, what kind of projects you’ve done, and the roles you did on those projects. That’s the basis of your bio. Just having something to work from makes the whole thing a lot easier.

So once you’ve dug out your existing bio or made those quick notes about your previous experience, read through what you’ve got and look for these three things: anything that needs to be updated, content that you want to keep that doesn’t need to be updated, and anything you definitely do not want to keep.

OK, let’s unpack these a bit more.

If you’re working from an old bio, from an agency job, but you’re a freelancer now, that will definitely need to be updated, and maybe the length of time you’ve been in MedComms might have moved on a few years. Maybe you’ve got new therapy areas or project types that you can add? Maybe the types of support that you’ve provided on those projects evolved as well since you last wrote that original bio?

Jot down some notes about what needs to be updated so you don’t forget. But again, focus on simply getting the information down. Don’t worry about crafting it at this point.

Right, so the second thing to think about was content you want to keep. That’s nice and easy – it’s still accurate, you’re still happy to say it, it’s still relevant. Brill, keep it.

The final thing to look for is anything you definitely don’t want to keep. I mentioned this in my previous video, but I think it’s worth repeating.

Just because you have a lot of experience in a particular therapy area or with a particular project type, doesn’t mean you have to carry on working on it if you don’t like it.

Choosing what you want to highlight in your bio is a good way of guiding potential clients to the kinds of work you want to do, and that will make your freelance career much more fulfilling.

So, if your previous bio was stuffed full of your publications experience, but you want to focus on more strategic work, update your bio so that it reflects that.

As freelancers, we can choose what we highlight and what we play down in our bios. Take out anything that doesn’t reflect the career you want to have, or the way you want to work. If a client really wants to offer you that type of work, fair enough. But you can decide if you are going to agree to do it or not.

And I’ve talked about the decision making process you can use there in my previous video on taking control of your freelance career.

So, now you should have an annotated document that includes the basic information you need to include in your bio, so it’s time to get writing!

2. Create a basic bio

You might be watching this video because you’ve been asked to write a bio for a particular client, which is fair enough. Deal with that priority first.

But I would really recommend having a generic basic bio that you can use as a starting point for whatever tailored bio you might need to draft for specific client requests or whatever. It makes life so much easier. It means that adapting your bio is about refining your basic content, maybe expanding some things and shrinking others rather than having to draft anything from scratch.

So what should your basic bio look like? Well, in the previous video, element five was a clear and simple slide template.

The best format for your bio is a slide. It’s how most people will want you to send your bio over. So grab that slide template and put your name and job title in the title section.

Pop in your nice, neutral and professional photo. That was element four in the previous video, so hopefully that isn’t too much of a shock for you.

You should also include your contact details. Maybe just your email address, but you might want to include your phone number, a link to your website or your LinkedIn profile. It really depends on what you’ve got and what you want to direct people towards.

Now you’ve got these elements on the slide, you’ll know how much space you have left for your bio text, because a bio should fit onto one slide. If it’s longer than that, I’ll be honest, people probably won’t read it. Attention spans are short these days!

And to make it readable, don’t use a font smaller than 16 point. It can also help readability if you use a two column format rather than having text going all the way across the slide and risk readers zoning out.

Also, it should be formatted as a static slide rather than one that needs to be viewed in slideshow mode. This is not the forum to show off your PowerPoint wizardry. It’s really unlikely that anyone looking at your bio will be expecting any animation or builds, so it all needs to be there on the screen as soon as they open the file up, otherwise you are going to annoy people.

So using all those format and style considerations, it’s time to plug in the basic information using your annotated existing bio or the bullets that you developed in the previous section.

For a basic bio, keep it basic.

The convention is to use the third person, so ‘she’, ‘he’ or ‘they’ rather than ‘I’, which can feel rather awkward when you get started, but it can be a useful way of detaching yourself from the content.

You’re not blowing your own trumpet. You are just writing facts about a person who just happens to be you, but you can forget about that part until you finish writing.

It will probably take you longer than you thought possible to get this basic bio to a point that you feel comfortable with it, but that’s OK.

This is the hard bit, getting that basic information down – an overview of your MedComms career and any other relevant work experience, a recap of your therapy area and project experience highlighting the types of work you are passionate about or find particularly interesting, enticing details about how you can add value to projects, and then a little nugget about you as a person to bring it all to life.

Once you’ve got all of that in your basic bio slide, you’ll be able to adapt it quickly and easily for different clients and for different formats, and that’s what we’re going to talk about next.

3. Adapt your bio for different formats

There are lots of places where you might need to include biographical information, and I want to talk about three in particular today, looking at what kind of information you would need for each and how you can adapt your basic bio, so that it’s as quick and easy as possible to put that information in.

The three places I’m going to focus on are LinkedIn, your website, and bios to send to specific prospective clients.

You can use your basic bio to make sure your ‘About’ section on your LinkedIn profile is sending the right message out to your network, but it’s not as simple as copying and pasting your basic bio into that box.

This isn’t the place for flowing, beautiful prose. This bio should be as short and snappy as possible, giving key highlights rather than all the details.

If people are interested in learning more about you, they can look at your experience that’s listed further down your profile.

So you want this section to really be easy to read and to contain key information that will either make them think, ‘Yes, this is someone I want to work with!’ or, ‘Ooh, I want to know more about this person.’

We want to avoid repeating information that’s included in the rest of your profile. Instead, we want to gather together the highlights, the specific things that you want to showcase to potential clients.

Basically telling them, ‘This is what I do, this is how I do it, and this is why you want to work with me’.

And that means, leaving out the things that aren’t relevant for your career as a freelancer, even if you’re really proud of them.

By all means include them in other sections of your profile, whether that’s under ‘Experience’, ‘Education’, ‘Skills’, or ‘Interests’.

You also really need to think about how you are presenting the information in this section. I know LinkedIn doesn’t really have much option in the way of formatting, but we can use spacing to make the text readable.

Keeping the text really short and snappy, and including plenty of white space around it helps you get the message across, and we can avoid paragraphs that are longer than two or three lines to help with this.

Remember when someone clicks on your profile, they’re only going to be able to see the first three lines, so make sure that includes the key message that you want people to take away from your profile.

You can also use that initial text to make them curious so that they will click ‘See more’ so they can read the full section.

But the reality is that most people probably won’t do that. They’ll skim those first couple of sentences and then scroll through your experience to see if anything catches their eye.

You also need to focus on readability and the message you want to get across if you have a website. This isn’t compulsory for freelancers, but a website can be a useful resource to promote your freelance business, especially if you are really focusing on specific areas or want to showcase examples of your work, which you would obviously only do if it’s in the public domain already and you have all of the relevant permissions to allow you to share it.

If you do have a website, it’s pretty standard to include an ‘About me’ section, and this is likely to include the same kind of information as you would include in your basic bio.

You’ll probably have more formatting control than you do on LinkedIn, but it’s still a good idea to keep it short and snappy, because people looking at your website are unlikely to have the time or attention span to read a massive essay covering everything you’ve ever done.

You can include links to different pages or open up additional content if there are areas that you want to expand, and you have the technical expertise to do that, so that anyone who’s interested can explore those details, but they’re not going to be overwhelmed by the volume of content initially.

Your website is definitely somewhere you want to impress people with the clarity of your content and how easy it is to find what they’re looking for.

The final format I want to consider is a slide to send to potential clients. This is something that clients will often request in addition to, or sometimes instead of, a CV.

Once you’ve got your basic bio slide, you can use this as the basis for adapting and tailoring your bio based on the client’s requirements rather than having to start from scratch every time.

So, are they interested in your experience in a specific therapy area or with a specific project type?

Focus on those details and expand out the relevant parts of your general statements.

So in the previous video, I recommended grouping related conditions. So you might have a statement like, ‘Eleanor has extensive experience in oncology, rheumatology, immunology, and rare diseases.’

But if you know the client needs someone to work on abstracts for an oncology congress, you might want to unpack that oncology experience and say, ‘Eleanor has worked across multiple solid tumours, including breast cancer, prostate cancer, and renal cell carcinoma, plus a range of haematological malignancies.’

You can also include your general info with, ‘She also has extensive experience in rheumatology, immunology, and rare diseases,’ and you can take a similar approach with project types expanding out your publication’s experience to highlight relevant congress abstract support.

Hopefully these microtips will help you adapt your basic bio into whatever format you need.

But once you’ve got these done, remember your experience isn’t static, which brings me onto my final microtip.

4. Review and update each bio format at least once a year

When someone asks us to send over a bio, they often need it back quickly, which can make writing or adapting it a rather high-pressure activity. Even if you’ve drafted a basic bio, if you don’t keep it up to date, the updates you need to do when you’re going to send it to somebody can be extensive.

And doing that in a rush to meet a deadline means that you risk missing out important information, or just struggling to fit things in concisely.

If you give your basic bio a quick check every now and then, adding in anything new or maybe taking out something that’s no longer useful or that you just don’t want to highlight anymore, it will make adapting it for a specific client much easier.

The same is true for biographical information in other places like LinkedIn or your website. It’s very easy to post content here and then forget about it. Years can slip by, without adding any updates to this kind of basic information, because it’s not the part of the site that we look at or use regularly.

I mean, when was the last time you even glanced at the ‘About’ section on your LinkedIn page?

When you’ve finished watching this video, go and have a look at it. Is there anything that needs to be updated? You should have all the tools you need to do that effectively now. And once you’ve done that, add a reminder to your calendar to review it again a year from now, or maybe in six months if things might be evolving quickly for you.

You can do the same thing with your basic bio. Once you’ve drafted it, add a reminder to your calendar to check it in a year’s time, and update it so that it always reflects where you are now and is also going to be quick and easy to adapt whenever you need to.

Download the PDF summary

If you started watching this video after staring in despair at a blank screen, convinced that you would never be able to write a good bio, I hope that you are feeling better prepared to tackle it now.

As a quick reminder, my microtips for creating and tailoring an effective bio are to:

1. Review your existing bio if you have one, or draft some quick bullets based on the six elements for an effective bio that I outlined in my last video
2. Create a basic bio that you can use as a starting point for any type of biographical content that you need
3. Adapt that basic bio for different formats and different purposes as needed, rather than starting from scratch each time
4. And then remember to check and update each format at least once a year, adding a reminder into your calendar to help you remember.

If you follow these steps, sending someone a bio will never again be a reason for panic! And to make it easy for you to follow them, you can download a PDF summary from a link in the video description below.

If this video has been useful, please do hit the like button and you can leave any questions that you have in the comments below, and I’ll do what I can to help.

I’d also love to hear from you if you have any suggestions of other topics for videos that would be useful.