A freelance bio is an important part of your freelance profile and is crucial when it comes to introducing yourself to clients. Not only can it help you show up on relevant search results for freelancers, it can also tell your clients a lot about you. Continue reading to learn how to write a good freelancer profile description and find examples that will help!
- How to write a Professional Bio about Yourself
- Tips to Create a Strong Freelance Bio
- Freelance bio examples
- Professional bio template
- Is your freelancer profile description good? Checklist
How to write a Professional Bio about Yourself
Firstly, let’s take a look at what a bio is.
Bios (short for biography) are short texts that introduce people and their lives. Usually, the focus is on their professional lives, accomplishments, and career history.
A bio should help potential clients, or employers get to know you quickly.
A professional freelance bio should provide potential clients with a summary about you as a freelancer, what your achievements are and how you can help them with their problem or project.
In order to catch clients’ attention, you’ll want a professional bio that’s relatively short, concise and contains comprehensive information about you and what you do as a freelancer.
You’ll need to introduce yourself, mention your professional role and achievements, your experience and finally talk about what service you can provide for your clients.
What should a freelance bio include?
- Name
- Role or job title
- Skills, industries and areas of expertise
- Relevant past experiences, happy clients and good results
- Interests and professional goals
- Dreams
- Languages and international availability
- Personal stories and hobbies (personal touch)
Your freelancer bio together with your profile photo will make an impression on the person visiting your profile before they even meet you. This will influence their decision to hire you over other freelancers.
Tips to Create a Strong Freelance Bio
A good professional bio can help you connect with potential clients and so, your freelance biography should be always written with your clients in mind. Ideally, this summary will help the reader to relate to you and your story. This can be done with professionals who can write papers for you; you will only need to provide the technical task for how your result should look.
It’s not only about your skills and experience. If the client can connect with you on a personal level – e.g. your interests match, you studied in the same uni, or you both practice yoga – your chances of being shortlisted and hired will be higher.
Here are a few helpful tips to help you write the best freelance bio for your profile:
#1 Start strong
Begin your bio by stating your name (first and last!). You’ll need to decide what voice you want to use – if you’re going to use third person, make sure you include your name right at the beginning and adjust your voice to represent who you are as a freelancer.
The most important thing to remember is that you’re writing for your client. It’s not about you, but about what you can do to help them.
What is it that you can do to help your ideal client that makes your freelance rate worthwhile?
It’s also a good idea to mention your client’s pain points and how they wouldn’t have to worry about those things with you.
Here are a couple of bio examples focusing on the client:
Example 1: Need someone who will care about your success, communicate clearly, and anticipate options that minimise unwanted surprises? I want to be that person for you. Let’s get started!
Example 2: I am a WordPress developer specialising in high-quality WordPress and Woocommerce development. Bring me in to solve the most difficult challenges that others have failed to deliver.
#2 Talk about your role and your brand
The next step is talking about what you do and what your personal brand is like. If you want to present yourself on a personal level, you can add your name and then something personal that you want to convey to your client.
If you want to portray yourself in a more professional manner, you can include your job title after your name.
For example, your bio could start off as ‘John Smith is the founder of Smith Tech’ or ‘My name is John Smith and I am the founder of Smith Tech’.
#3 Describe your responsibilities
After you’ve introduced yourself, it’s time to start describing what you do on a day-to-day basis and what your primary responsibilities are when working with clients. If you have a resume, this part of your bio could be similar to the description portion of it.
Explaining your responsibilities and job role in more detail tells potential clients what it is you do exactly and what you can offer them.
You can play a bit with this too and a short and a long version of your bio so that readers can choose the best version for them.
For example, you could use subheadings like:
– TL;TR // The Short
– If you have the time // The Long
#4 Mention your skills and achievements
Mentioning your skills and achievements will help your profile stand out and speak to your proficiency and capability.
Take note to avoid jargon though – make sure you describe these skills and achievements in a way that’s understandable to people who are not familiar with specific awards from industries.
It’s equally as important not to overdo it. Highlight the ones that seem the most relevant and important and focus on those.
Here’s also important to highlight well-known brands you’ve worked with if you have worked with any or brands that you support for what they do.
For example: I’ve spent the last 5 years designing for some of the most eco-friendly brands such as Too Good to Go or Patagonia.
#5 Tell readers who you are
It’s not all about work. You have introduced yourself workwise and now it’s time to let readers know about who you are outside of work.
People are social and want to connect and relate to other people.
It’s more fun to work with someone who is similar to you, so let people know that you’re not just John Smith the IT guy, rather John Smith the guy who loves spending time with his kids and volunteered to create an online bazaar to help his kid’s kindergarten raise money to renovate the school playground.
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You can also craft a fun bio that readers can’t forget. Share something funny you did, some unexpected details about you or a personal story to make your freelancer bio memorable.
Here are a couple of fun bio examples and ideas for adding a personal touch:
Example 1: I caught fire, clean code.
Example 2: I’m a desk plant killer
Example 3: Developing is my passion and I’d do the job for free. Aside from software development, I’m unemployable.
#6 End with a good CTA
Conclude your freelance bio by including a call-to-action. You can talk about next steps that the client can take, like contacting you or heading over to your personal website.
The goal here is to get potential clients to come to you and make this easy for them to do so.
Try to leave them wanting more so that they HAVE TO write to you because they really need to learn more about that thing you suggested but didn’t fully share.
Once that first interaction happens, you’ll have to work further on selling yourself to convince the client to hire you.
Freelance BIO Example: A Look into Freelance Profiles
Let’s take a look at examples of good freelance bios found on freelancermap.
Professional bio example for SAP consultants
Anibal highlights his almost 20 years of experience in SAP and mentions the number of implementations, roll-outs and upgrades he’s helped with. He also gets into detail about the MM module (his specialization) and lists some of his most exciting projects.
Bio example for web developers
For developers it’s important to list the programms and tools that they use and have experience with and in this profile these programms are listed within different sections such as JS frameworks, databases, interfaces, and so on.
Freelance profile description for IT architects
Amador decided to highlight his certification and educational background as this is an important assets as an IT & Cloud Security specialist. He also mentioned his global working experience and speciality working with remote teams.
Graphic designer summary for freelancers
Creatives and designers bios are “not that important”. For them, it’s their visual portfolio what better sell themselves as this is the best example of the work their provide. However, as a graphic designer, you can also use this space in your profile to tell about your skill set and career development.
Professional bio template
[Your name] is [job title]. [Pronoun] has been in the [your industry] industry for [number of years] years now. Throughout [prononun] career, [pronoun]’s [include skills achievements].[List experience and tasks you can help with]. [List what you bring to the table and what makes you different from the crowd]. [Skill and project completed list]. [Client pain point solution and trigger]. [CTA]
Here’s a profile description example using the previous freelance bio template:
Jose Perez is a Full- Stack Web Developer, who has been in the tech industry for 18 years now. Throughout his career, he’s created over 60 successful web applications for different clients as a freelancer.
He specialises in PHP and Symfony and has experience with the entire process of creating a web application (from planning stages, to architecture design, automated deployment and testing or infrastructure work).
Jose was born in Mexico and raised in San Francisco, and as such, speaks both English and Spanish fluently. He can work in teams that communicate in any of these languages.
He’s highly motivated and delivers the highest quality he’s capable of. You can expect solid communication and regular progress reports, as well as excellent documentation.
Skills:
✓ PHP
✓ JavaScript
✓ CSS 3
✓ HTML5
✓ Git
✓ Linux System Administration
✓ MySQL
✓ PostgreSQL
✓ Symfony
✓ jQuery
Past projects:
Need dev results that reflect your ROI, UX and release goals? Need someone who cares about your success and communicates clearly? Jose would love to be that person for you. Let’s get started!
Check more about his and his work here and get in touch! He usually replies within 24 hours.
Is your freelancer profile description good? Checklist
You can use this checklist to make sure your profile bio has all the information you’d like your ideal client to see.
- Name
- Role or job title
- Industries and areas of expertise
- Skills and achievements
- Important past experiences and results
- Interests and professional goals
- Languages and international availability
- Personal stories and hobbies (personal touch)
- CTA
Remember, once you have your profile description ready, your work is not 100% done. You will need to update this regularly to show clients you keep working and gathering experience.
How often should you update your freelance bio?
Ideally every time you finish a project or there is a notable change in your career, that way the information would always be up-to-date.
You can also consider updating your profile when a big milestone is achieved (also personal achievements are ok) or simply when your old bio feels odd somehow.
