The 5 questions your official online bio should answer

In the past decade, I’ve written or edited 2,500 short biographies of interesting people for a general audience. Dear interesting people: Help me out.

I’d like to ask everyone who’s even remotely interesting — and who hopes to share their work, now or someday, with a general audience beyond your field of specialization — to take 30 minutes sometime and rewrite your official online bio.

You probably have an “About Me” on your website, but really, it rarely is about you. What’s actually there is, most likely, a lot of specialized data aimed at people in your field who understand the precise significance of a particular award or grant or professorship or publication or gallery or collaboration. What’s missing is an accessible statement of what, exactly, you do.

A well-written online bio helps the writers, TV producers, conference organizers and editors who want to help you share your ideas more generally. And yes, this isn’t necessarily every interesting person’s goal. But if it’s yours, I hope this is useful.

Your website bio should answer two questions first:

What do you do?

and

What have you done?

These two answers should come before anything else, as the first two sentences of your bio. And they should contain really good verbs.

To answer the first question, don’t use the verb “is.” Use an action verb: makes, runs, teaches, builds, writes about, invents, wants to know why …

The answer to the second question can be another action verb describing how you have earned the right to hold my interest. So far, what did you make, run, teach, build, write, invent, discover?

Note this second question is not “Where did you study?” Your academic credentials are important, but they’re not exclusive to you. They don’t make you interesting. The same year you got your PhD, so did tens of thousands of other people. But no one has done what you’ve done since, what makes you you. Same thing with “Where were you born?” It’s a data point, but it’s not the most interesting thing about you, not the first thing you want people to know.

In other words, if your origin story isn’t as good as “Bitten by a radioactive spider,” don’t put it in the first two sentences of your official bio.

Instead, tell the story of what you do, in the way you’d explain it to a smart teenager you end up sitting next to at a wedding reception.

The third question — not to be mentioned until you answer the first two questions — is where you are: your official job title and the place you work, including city and country. Name your lab or department, your gallery, your latest project or collaboration. This section is for your peers, so use the specialist terms they will be looking for, including your credentials and awards.

Fourth question: What does the world think of you? Share your three favorite links to articles about your work. If you get written about a lot, consider linking to a Google Doc of press clips to show that you’re often in the public eye, and call out three favorites for people in a hurry. Consider adding a media quote to your bio text as well. Nothing too fancy, something like: “As Forbes wrote, ‘Janet Corgi will put a flying car in your garage in this decade.’” or “@Ohio43620 tweeted, ‘After Dr. Corgi’s seminar today I actually believe the future is filled with flying cars.’”)

Fifth thing (not really a question, sorry): Make your collected works work. Your bio should contain a full list of your published or created works, of course, but it helps if you also highlight a few of the works, pieces of software, or projects that are most indicative of the ideas you focus on. (If you publish a lot, your bio should contain a selected list of works and a link to your CV with full publication list, perhaps as a Google Doc so you don’t have to upload a brand-new PDF every time you teach a new seminar.) List every project that has a website of its own. If there’s video of you giving a lecture or being interviewed on the topic of your expertise, add links or embed it if you can.

Boom. That’s a useful bio that serves two key audiences: your peers, who really do need to see all the detail, and a nice intern at a local TV station who’s been tasked with finding three names for a reporter to go interview on your topic.

Finally, some practical tips:

Write in the third person (“Janet Corgi makes flying cars.”) so your text is easy to copy into a briefing doc or program guide without a lot of fiddly edits of “I am” to “She is.”

Make the text of your bio cut-and-pasteable, not an image file, so a writer can copy your book titles and quotes and get them exactly right, rather than retyping them and risking an error, and so a conference organizer can copy-and-paste the text exactly as is in their program guide. Don’t be this guy, whose PR firm sent his official bio as an .rtf with two returns between every line, whyyyyy:

Don’t lose control over your official bio once it appears online. You should be able to personally get in and edit your official biography, or know who can do that for you. Believe me: Too many people’s official bios are missing their latest book (or even their current job!), and sometimes they are years out of date.

If you’re embarrassed or underwhelmed by the online biography your institution, publisher or company puts up for you, start a Twitter account and a Tumblr or a Medium page (or even a Google Doc), and put up a bio that you like. Make it findable by putting in lots of words that you think people will use when they search for you, and link to it as much as you can.

If you’re listed in Wikipedia, keep an eye on that page, because it usually comes up first in search. It should contain an accessible statement of what you do. Don’t turn the page into an exact copy of your official bio, because it will get flagged by editors and conformed to house style anyway. But do add new and pertinent information as it comes up, and make sure your list of works, links and video is up to date.

A handy mailing list to set up is: where are the high-profile places my online bio appears, that I don’t control? Past jobs, all your publishers, big conferences you’ve spoken at— when you have a bio update, email that list and say, hey would you mind adding my new book or changing my university affiliation? Most will be happy to. (Bonus: sometimes at TED, when speakers email us with updates, we end up publishing a blog post about their update.)