The About page on your blog is one of the important core pages of your site. Most everybody has one, yet a majority of bloggers set it up in the completely wrong way.

In this installment of Coffee Break Blogging, I talk about the most important mission of the About Page. I also share the exact layout that will make your About Page truly convert and grow your business – and essentially do what it was made to do.

Welcome to Episode #51 of our podcast. 🙂

The About Page is one of those pages that most people have but I find that they undervalue its importance and therefore they treat it wrong. And so, I want to talk about that because it is one of the important core pages of your site. Your site needs to have an About Page. But not only that, it needs to be treated in a particular way that it will actually maximize your opt-in opportunities which is what the About Page is really all about.

Communicate Simply

One of the first things I want to mention about the About Page is that when you link it up in your top navigation, I do not think you need to get creative with the title. I think you should simply call it “About” because that is what a lot of people tend to expect when they are looking for it. Here is the other thing: We need to take into account the mindset of the person who arrives on the site and this is “key” to why we are going to treat the About Page the way we are going to treat it. The purpose of the About Page is to clearly communicate the value of your blog to a brand new person. And hence, convince them that you are the thing that they need to be reading and they need to be a member of your community and opt-in to your list. That is the purpose of the About Page.

See, when somebody arrives on your blog they are immediately going to size you up. And they are going to be like, “Should I care?” And that is the thing. They literally couldn’t care less about you. They are going to make that judgment call based on what they see on your site. And so therefore, most people are going to come in to your blog and they are going to land on a piece of content. And therefore, they are going to make a judgment call based on the blog post they land on.

But very often, the second click is going to be, possibly your About Page because they want to find out what it is you are all about. And so, often the About Page is not going to be their entry point but it is going to be their second or their third click on the site. And the mindset of them is they are going to try to find out who you are and why they should give a crap about you and your site. So for that reason, your About Page needs to be in a predictable location which is going to be on your top navigation. It also needs to be called something to where they immediately know what it is. And I think it should be called simply “About”.

They Don’t Care

Now when they get there, they need to be “sold” on why they should become a member of your community and a regular reader. Now, contrast that with what most bloggers are doing with their About Page and that is that they literally write about themselves 🙂 And it is almost like, you know… “Why?” Nobody cares about you. They don’t care about your life’s story; they don’t need your resume. They certainly are not going to read a big, 10 paragraph story about where you came from. They just don’t care. They don’t care about you.

And so they need to be sold why that blog matters to them. They care about themselves. They don’t care about you. Okay? So that is probably the biggest mistake that I see a lot of bloggers are making with their About Page is they are making it all about themselves. They literally think “Okay, well this page is about me, so I’m going to write about me” and that is not what they want. That is not what is going to work. What is going to work is about your blog but specifically how that blog is going to benefit the person who has got their eyeballs looking at the screen right now, reading that page and trying to figure out why they should care about your site.

So with that, let us talk about how you should layout your About Page.

The Layout

Headline

The first thing is that I think you could start off the About Page with a headline just like a sales letter. Now, it might be that it just simply says “About”. And if yours does that, that’s fine because again, that is predictable, that is what people are going to expect; at least they will at least know that they are on the right page. But if you know how to set it up to where you can actually have a headline at the top.. go ahead and do that. And this doesn’t have to be a real “sales-y” headline. The whole purpose here is to clearly communicate the value of your blog and why it should matter to the person who is reading it. And you can do that with a headline at the top of your About Page.

A Quick Copy

Now, blow that; you are going to have a little bit of copy, a little bit of text, a little bit of content. But the entire purpose here of it is to clearly communicate why your blog is going to make the person on the receiving end make their life better in some way.

So what I would like to do here is to clearly communicate the value proposition of the blog; clearly show what the blog is all about and then maybe have a few bullet points because bullet points are easily scannable. People will just gravitate to those bullet points, so have a few bullet points there that just communicate some of the value that they are going to get by being a reader of your blog. Just describe it like the real hot points that they are going to get by being a reader and a subscriber and a member of your community.

Opt-in Opportunity

Now, if you have got a little headline there and you’ve got some copy that is communicating the value then it is like, “Okay, maybe I should give this person a chance.” So what should go underneath that? An opt-in box; an opt-in form and complete with a lead magnet and everything. So you need to put an opt-in box on your About Page. The About page is actually a pretty good page to have an opt-in on. It is going to convert better than an opt-in form in many of the other pages of your site because it is just natural. It just taps in to the mindset of the person who arrives there. They’re like, “Okay, I’m not giving this person a chance. Why do they have to offer me?” They click on the word “About” and then when if you’ve done your job right, you clearly show to them “Okay, yeah, this blog might give me some value” the natural next step is to give them an opportunity to become a regular member of your community. And you do that by getting them on your email list. Not by RSS feed or any of these other stuff; get them to your email list. Get them a lead magnet and give them an opportunity to become a real member of your community.

Relevant Info About Yourself

Now a lot of times below that, that’s where you can get into a little bit of information about yourself and your background and things like that…But here is another thing that people often get wrong… First of all, many people get too long winded about their background. It ain’t that important so don’t do that. And the other thing is that they bring up aspects of their lives that have nothing to do with the target market of your site. You know, for example I talk about online marketing, blogging; things like that. Now, if I went to my About Page and I started talking about parts of my life that have nothing to do with blogging and content marketing; I might bore the snot out of people! And it is not like I’m uni-dimensional. I do have other things in my life besides just blogging and online marketing. So I just do not talk about them because they are not relevant. So my point here is that you need to bring up the aspects of yourself that are related to your target market.

Now if you want to have a much more involved life story, put it on a different page. I have a page at the Blog Marketing Academy which is just dedicated to me. I think it is just literally called “About David Risley” and the whole thing is a story. Now again, when I right that story, I write it particular to the market that I am. I am not bringing up every little thing. But the thing is, I do not want to put all that on my About Page. The About Page is pretty focused on communicating the value of the Blog Marketing Academy to a new reader and then trying to get them on to my list. I think another thing that I have on my About Page are some social proof; some places that I have appeared other than my own site, things like that. So it is important to think about your About Page as a landing page for your site; as a sales page for your site. And you are not selling anything that involves money. You are literally selling them on the prospect of becoming a reader of your site. And that is what the About Page is all about.

Another Call to Action

Now like any good sales page, you end it off with a call to action. And so we talked earlier, up in the middle area of the About Page you are going to have an opt-in. Well, at the very bottom of that About Page, you should also repeat that same opt-in. Give them another opportunity to opt-in.

So let’s review that real quickly again…

You are going to have some type of a headline there. You’re going to have some quick copy that gives them the bullet points on why they should read your site and then you are going to give them an opportunity to opt-in and become a member of your community. Underneath that, you can have some information about yourself but you want to lean it in the direction of only those things that are most relevant to your target market. And then below that, once again you want to cap it all off with the final call to action which is to opt-in to your list.

That is the structure of the About Page that will actually convert for you and it is going to work a helluva lot better than what most people do with their About Page which is just write all about themselves and usually it is just boring and you just want to go to sleep and you probably won’t even read it to begin with because it is so darn long. Don’t do that to your readers. They won’t care. And they will immediately back the hell of. They just will. They just won’t care.

So don’t write from inside your own. Do not assume that you think your blog is awesome that the rest of the world will, too. And that they care enough to read about you and your story. They don’t. They have got to be convinced why the blog matters. Okay?

…

So that is your About Page. Go back, revisit yours and put a little bit of work into actually making that About Page something that will convert. It will be a minority of your overall traffic that will actually visit the About Page; that’s true. But in terms of your core pages, this is one of the more important ones. And you want to make it so that when those people who do click on it, you want them to maximize that chance to becoming a real reader. That is the entire point of that About Page.

Put it to use and I will see you on the next episode of Coffee Break Blogging.

Coming up on 52 we will be talking a little bit about “How To SEO Your Blog Post”

I’ll see you then! 😉