A good ABOUT ME page should help your visitor reach the decision that you are the best (if not the only) person who can help solve their problem.
If you struggle with the concept of having a USP, thinking that the product you sell or the service you provide is no different to that everyone else, then your About Page is your opportunity to prove yourself wrong.
Because you are your USP. No one else will do the service that YOU do, and your About page is how you demonstrate how YOU are the person that your visitor is searching for.
We achieve this by viewing YOU through the eyes of the visitor, rather than making it about you. It is less about you and more about how you want your visitor to perceive you and what you can do for your visitor.
Where do we start
I always think that a good starting point is the maxim “People buy from people that they know, like and trust.”
There are four elements here :
- We need to show that we are a person
- We should tell the visitor what they want to know about us
- We persuade the visitor that they like us
- We show the reader that they can trust us.
Of course most of what we want to say will fall into more than one category, if not all of them. Adopting a structure likes this helps to remind us that we are looking at this page through the eyes of our visitor. We often forget this angle of view when we are writing our home page and other pages of our website, so it is even more important to remember it when we are allowed to write all about ourselves!
I am a person
How best to show that I am a person?
First of all, let’s adopt a conversational tone in the language we use. Imagine that your visitor is not in front of a screen perhaps thousands of miles away, but is standing right in front of you face to face. You would not refer to yourself in the third person if you are engaged in a conversation
Your visitor needs to see you, so we need at least one good quality photograph of you. And not just a boring headshot. We should use a photo that is relevant to the needs of our visitor, perhaps one (or more) showing what it is that we do. Our imagery should always support our brand, particularly when we are writing about ourselves.
If you do not have any appropriate imagery, now might be a good time to think about having a conversation with a brand photographer. It could be a comparatively expensive exercise if you are thinking of just one or two images for your About Page, so consider having a series of images taken for using on your website, your social media, maybe a business card and anywhere else you can think of.
Do you have a story about how you came to be doing what you doing, or rather how you came to be helping people like your visitor with what you are doing? Keep it short, just a few sentences. People like stories, but they also have short attention spans.
If you are thinking about structure, you might consider how you flow from I am a person to the next stage: know me.
KNOW ME
Your core values should feature quite quickly in your About Page, perhaps even in your Person stage. The benefit of sharing your core values quickly is that those values will either resonate with your reader, and make them more interested in you, or deter them. We talk a lot about qualifying our potential customers, making sure that they are able and willing to do business with us. Equally important is the need to disqualify those with whom we don’t want to do business. They just take up time and give nothing back.
What sort of businesses do you like to work with, who is your ideal client? And how do you help them?
LIKE ME
This is perhaps the most difficult section to write. How do you get someone to like you?
Not by talking about yourself.
We ended the last section by talking about how we can help our ideal client. We could therefore start this section by telling a story of how we actually helped someone. We all like helpful people, don’t we?
Perhaps we have completed a charity walk, or have signed up to a sustainable business challenge. If we can show how that sustainability challenge can help our ideal client, so much the better.
It is perfectly acceptable to inject a little personality, a hobby, the football team we support, our pets, whatever, and the place to do it is near the end of the Page, not at the beginning. If the visitor is still reading, they are now more interested in knowing a bit more about you.
TRUST ME.
The two best ways to earn trust are through expertise and testimony. This section can include details of qualifications, awards and achievements. Testimony or social proof is important but in this section it should be tailored to what we are trying to achieve on the page, that we are a person/business that the visitor can know, like and trust. We are not trying to sell our products or services here.
It is very likely that your visitor will do more than just visit your About page. They will want to know as much as they can about you. They will probably look at your Linked In page, your Facebook page (personal and business). They might look at any online reviews. Consistency is important in building and maintaining trust, so if your About page paints a different picture to the rest of your online persona, the trust that you have carefully built up through your About page could be blown away.
Maintaining a consistent online brand persona is a huge subject and far too important to approach in this post, so if nothing else, google yourself and see what comes up. Does it fit in with your About page?
Have you written a Good About Me Page
Your About Me page will be one of the most visited pages of your website. The paradox is that people visit to find out more about you, but just as with the rest of your website, they are more interested in how you can help them.
If the copy on your Home page and perhaps your goods/services page has been effective, your visitor does now want to learn more about you. If your About page is repeating what is written on your Home page, it is perhaps time to have another look at what you are trying to achieve on the About page.
And finally, good copy should always seek to persuade the reader to take an action. An About Page should be about helping your visitor to become your customer, so is it the place to have a Buy It Now button?
Perhaps not, but you could certainly consider a link to a page or section where your visitor could buy from you, or perhaps subscribe to your email list, or a link to another blog post.
It is always good practice to finish on a link, so on that note, here is a link to my services page. https://travellingcopywriter.com/services/
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