Filling out your About Me page on your website might feel like a necessary box to check. It’s more than that. Whether for you or for your business, your “About” page is one of the most misused tools for branding. In today’s hyper-connected world, branding is a big deal!
Why Your About Page Matters
The About Me page is a marketing document. It’s purpose should be to attract people who are searching for you. They want to pay you money in exchange for a service or product. Your competition is fierce. You can’t afford to lose their interest if they’ve made their way to your site. Grab them and sell them on you and your business with this page.
How To Rock It
Begin with purpose
Before you write your content, answer these questions:
- What’s the most exciting offer you have for customers?
- What’s your purpose? What do you stand for?
- Why are you the best person to offer these products or services?
- What do you promise your customers?
Understand your audience
Know who they are and write for them. Whether you’re promoting yourself as a freelancer or your business, you can only build your brand well if you understand who you’re talking to. Start by understanding basic demographics. Do you cater to a specific age? Gender? Socioeconomic status? Now, dig deeper and pull out meaning for why the above persona wants to work with you. What quality are they attracted to in your business? How does it make them feel or look?
Make it about your customer
The easiest mistake to make writing your About Me page is to make it a list of your accomplishments. “Work with me because I’ve done this…” Don’t do that. Instead, turn it around and make it about your customer. What do your customers gain from working with you? Why should they buy your product or service instead of a competitors? Then, don’t simply list it, but explain it. Is your service “faster”? How? What does faster mean for the customer? Be specific. Try to imagine yourself as your customer, reading your site, and picture what questions come up. Answer those.
Share your story
We connect with stories. They grab our attention. Tie in strong visuals to your story. Use pictures of you and/or the real people in the company. Keep it relevant, though. If the number of pets you own isn’t pertinent to the business, leave it out.
Tell them what you want them to do
Give them a call to action. Give them clear instructions with what you want them to do. Tell them to check out your portfolio, contact you for a free consultation, order the latest product on sale, and so on.
Make it easy to connect
Provide your preferred ways to connect, whether through email, phone, or social channels.
Keep it brief
Last, remember to keep it brief unless you’re incredibly talented at keeping their attention!
Have you ever been to one of those sites that threw copy after copy at you, putting certain phrases in bold, and reiterating how life-changing their product is? I went to one of those the other day to sign up for a fitness challenge. I wanted something to give me a little spark as I prepared for the onslaught of newbies at the gym in January. However, getting through all of the junk text was such a turn off. DON’T DO THAT!
If you search “attention span” online, you’ll find a number of links referencing a Microsoft study that determined our ability to focus had dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds in 2017. Clever copywriters compared that to the average attention span of a goldfish, which is nine seconds. The article headlines were great, comparing our social media obsessed world to tiny, scaled vertebrates swimming around in glass bowls.
But, when you dig a little deeper, there’s an excellent story by the BBC that busts this myth. What it comes down to, really, is whether you CARE to spend your attention on the site in front of you.
Referring back to the fitness challenge I wanted to sign up for, did I care about all of the stories of the others who tried out that program? Did I care about whether I had “bigger and more important things to do with [my] life than worry about the size of [my] thighs”?
Guess what? I totally didn’t.
Guess what else? I had to scroll through 21 paragraphs of that before I found the “next steps” section. Did I read any of it? No! Not until I started writing this article and went back to see what kind of stuff they filled those paragraphs with.
And then, get this! Do you know what the next steps were? I’m not even kidding here, people. Step 1: watch your inbox for “an email introducing the day’s activities.” Step 2: Have somewhere to write it down. It was 31 paragraphs total in order to tell me: “The challenge starts within the week and get yourself ready by having a place to write things down.”
If you create an entertaining About Me page, with clever graphics and relevant information, people will read through the end, whether it’s four paragraphs or 31.
This article originally appeared in our SPRING 2018 Issue — read it for free here!
