Are you ready for your close-up?
If you want to connect with your audience, they need to be able to connect with you. Thankfully, there are many ways to do this.
You can relate personal experiences, you can solve common problems, but you can also remind them that you are more than just a keyboard warrior. You’re a human being. So, show them you are a human being!
While reading Kristina God’s e-book, The Ultimate Medium Checklist, I was reminded of the importance of adding an image of yourself to your Medium About page.
It is sound advice, but there was a reason why I hadn’t already done that.
Although Medium gives you all the formatting options you might want for your About page, the image options are a little limited. You can’t resize an image, and you can’t wrap text around an image.
The result? When I added my headshot to my About page, it was huge!
Nobody wants to see an image of themselves that big, so I figured I had two options. Take a new picture, or head over to Canva, my favorite design tool, to see what other options I had.
The Perfect Canva Template
If you’ve used Canva before, you’ll know about the fantastic templates they have. Templates are the quickest and easiest way to get professional looking results in a matter of minutes.
I wasn’t sure what template to look for, so I started off with the business card templates. I thought I could find something here that I could riff off to give me the result I was looking for. That didn’t turn out as well as I hoped.
After a couple of failed designs, I stumbled across a category of templates I might never have considered before. There was variety, color, and bold, eye-catching designs. They were the YouTube thumbnail templates.
If you think about it, these are the perfect template for your About page. They are designed to catch your eye and grab your attention. If you want people to stick around and actually read what is on your About page, then this is exactly the kind of image that you need.
Customizing Canva’s Templates
There are literally thousands of YouTube thumbnail templates to choose from, so don’t get too hung up on the perfect one for you.
And remember, everything you see can be edited. You can tweak the colors, change the fonts, and add your own headshot.
Here’s the image I started with:
And here is the final version with some tweaks I made to make it my own:
To get a nice cutout of my headshot, I used Canva’s Background Remover. It’s a quick and easy way to replicate the same style you get in a YouTube thumbnail, but it is only available with a Canva Pro account, (affiliate link).
If you don’t have Canva Pro, you can try a free tool like erase.bg, but if you love using Canva, you will love the extras you get with a Pro account!
I didn’t make many changes to the original template, but I liked what I saw, so I kept the background design, changed up the fonts, and added my profile picture. I also changed the orange to green so that it matched the green that Medium uses on all its buttons, (#0F730D).
This literally took five minutes of editing. I spent more time looking for templates than I did editing the one I ended up with.
Editing My Medium About Page
Once I had the finished image, I uploaded it to my About page and began updating my bio to give it the fresh new look it deserved. It’s a work in progress, but you are welcome to check it out.
My goal was to create a welcoming, eye-catching image, and I think I achieved that. But, I would love any feedback that you have on the finished product. You can add that below.
What Will You Create?
Now it’s your turn. Head over to Canva, search for those YouTube thumbnail templates, and create something magical!
If you love what you made, drop a link to your About page in the comments. I would love to see what you came up with.
