Find your reader
How to Optimize Your Medium Bio (and Why It’s Important)
Last November, we published a post to the Creator’s Hub titled “A Guide to Making the Most of Your Medium Profile.” In it, we detailed a number of ways for you to add some shine to your profile. One of the sections in that post focused on your Medium bio. It’s that section that I want to expand upon today. Here are three things every bio should do, and why.
Tell us who you are
Getting readers to feel like they know and trust you as a writer is an important prerequisite to building a deeper relationship with them. Your bio is an important space to help you do that.
Fun fact: One page people often visit on Medium after reading a great piece of writing is the author profile, usually by clicking on the byline at the top of the post. A reader, naturally, wants to learn more about you: Who wrote this? Do they write about this topic often? Do they have expertise in this area? Do they have a voice or perspective that appeals to me? Can I relate to them in some way that would make following them worth it?
Those are some of the questions going through a reader’s head when they click onto your profile page, and those are the elements of your bio you should be putting front and center.
Here’s are a few good examples:
- Ashleigh D. Jay: #Aquarius astrologer finding the logic behind your instincts. I talk about business, self-mastery, and pop culture.
- Katelyn Burns: Political journalist. The first openly trans Capitol Hill reporter in U.S. history. Writing about more than just trans issues. Follow her on Twitter @transscribe.
- Lance Ulanoff: Tech expert, journalist, social media commentator, amateur cartoonist, and robotics fan.
Tell us what you write about
Not only is including what you write about important to help readers understand the value in following you, but adding a few keywords into your bio also helps make you more discoverable on the Medium platform. People often use Medium’s search tool to find writers that publish along a certain topic, so including what you write about in your bio increases the likelihood that you’ll be served up the next time someone searches your expertise like “marketing” or “poetry” or “advice” or “artificial intelligence.” Keep it to between one and four keywords, be specific, and work them organically into your bio.
Here are a few good examples:
- Dave Gershgorn: Senior Writer at OneZero covering surveillance, facial recognition, DIY tech, and artificial intelligence. Previously: Qz, PopSci, and NYTimes.
- Allie Volpe: Writes about lifestyle, trends, and pop psychology for The Atlantic, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Washington Post, and more.
- Julio Vincent Gambuto: Writer/Director. Creative. Thinker. Weekly: where the personal, pandemic, and the political meet / juliovincent.com. Twitter:@juliovincent.
Tell us where else we can find you
Have a Twitter account? First, make sure you connect it to your Medium profile so your Twitter follows can find you on Medium. But also feel free to put your handle in your bio. It’s another way for people to get to know you as they weigh entering into a reading relationship with you.
