Writing a Great Bio

I have mentioned the welcome kits we send to our new clients before. Today, I’m sharing one special part of our welcome kits. I’ll share how you can establish trust by writing a great bio as well as the print source and what I’ve learned from having them printed.

Our standards are high, and there is a lot of content that goes into putting a website together. When you work with Aeolidia, you have a whole team on your side. There’s me, who pops in for strategy sessions and decision-making as needed, Sam, who manages the project (helping gather content, organizing tasks, and keeping everything tightly on schedule), your graphic designer, your web developer, website quality assurance gal, and often, our copywriter, photographer, and marketing consultant.

That’s a lot of people to suddenly have on your team! As part of the welcome kit, I send a pack of “trading cards” to help you get to know your new team. These are held together with a turquoise belly band, and tucked into your bag of treasures.

Trading cards aren’t business cards

These aren’t business cards! They don’t have a URL on them or any contact info. They’re only used in our welcome kits. However, they are the same size as business cards, so our info on print sources will be helpful to you if you’re looking to have business cards printed. It was also important to me to be able to find a printer that would do low minimum business cards. Most printers want you to print hundreds if not thousands, and I just didn’t need that many of these.

Writing a great bio

For the trading cards, I had my team each send me a headshot and some information about them, so I could write a bio. I wanted these bios to mostly show off each person’s interesting qualities, with just a hint of their experience and qualifications. I found this article from Paper & Stitch, How to Write About Yourself, to be a great starting point for asking them the questions I needed to get interesting replies:

1) “What are the things that make you “weird” to other people? Those are the things that make you stand out. Me? I’m fascinated by giraffes, head over heels for a couple of bluegrass brothers from North Carolina and swoon over anything French. These things get me going! They make me tick…I’m definitely going to be sharing them on my bio.”

2) “What makes your heart sing? We don’t need your life story, we need your magic. What do you get lost in? What brings tears to your eyes? Start here and you can’t fail.”

Take a look at your own bio on your website with this advice in mind – could it use some brushing up?

Here is a sample bio (and you can see the rest on our About page):

Kelly is perpetually seeking her next big adventure in the small, quirky towns she discovers along her travels. A former tween bowling prodigy—#1 in the state of Michigan!—she is still quite the champion, though she might go easy on you for a pint of craft beer or a slice of carrot cake. After getting her Master’s degrees in Public Health and Social Work, she decided to focus on mastering web development (ha! See what we did there?). With a decade of dev experience and years of working as an Apple Genius, Kelly is a meticulous communicator who loves empowering clients to navigate their new sites with confidence.

My hope for the trading cards is that our clients will be pleased to have such a creative gang of people on their side and that it will break the ice when we first begin talking with them. Since we work remotely, and can’t all gather together with each client, we do our best to be personable from afar. Writing a great bio is fun and it really helps people to connect.

Sourcing printers and packaging suppliers

writing a great bio - business cards with photos

writing a great bio - print sources for marketing materials

I would like to share which printers and manufacturers we worked with to produce our marketing materials and packaging. In this many-part series, I am also going to tell you about: