I’m almost finished writing my three articles for an upcoming National Speakers Association newsletter. Of course, I need to provide an author box to accompany my articles, so I looked to see what I had. I have author boxes for a variety of uses. I have one I use for my IVAACast articles, which I frequently update depending on what I want to highlight that month. And I have one I use for the promotional articles I post online.
Combine this with needing a professional bio for my website, one for my book, one for press releases, etc., and you end up having multiple, though necessary, versions of basically the same thing. My full bio is a whole lot longer than the one I’ve used in a press release. It’s a matter of editing, editing and editing.
It’s easy to just include your author box at the end of an article and then forget about it. A time-saving tip is to copy it and paste it into another document and name it “authorbox 10-20-06″ or something similar and create a folder with “promo materials” or some other title that makes sense for you.
You really need to customize promotional writing materials for your audience…both the topic and the length.
In writing, one size does not fit all.