What does your ‘About’ page say about you?
I read a lot of ‘About’ pages in my work as a copywriter. Some are fun, others are stuffy and some seem to have been written by someone who swallowed a textbook.
And that’s understandable. We’ve all been told that we need to build credibility about ourselves and our brands, so we feel have to cram our ‘About’ pages with every single experience we’ve ever had at work.
Unfortunately, no-one is going to read all that.
So, if your ‘About’ page is bursting with details and has no personality, I have something to say to you:
Good ‘About’ pages sell
Your ‘About’ page is the place potential customers go to find out if you have what it takes to do the job they want done.
If they’re reading your ‘About’ page, it stands to reason they’ve already read your Services or Sales pages and are deciding if they want to work with you or buy from you.
A great ‘About’ page can take your customer from ‘I don’t know’ to ‘Take my money!’
Here’s an exercise you can do yourself to see how your text stacks up.
In fact, this is one of my favourite writing exercises – you can do it with any document at all and it’s always a great help.
7 Steps to ‘About’ page success
- Save a copy of your ‘About’ page as a Word document.
- Change the font to one you’d never use in a million years. It still needs to be readable, but don’t choose a standard ‘business’ font. Try something like Papyrus.
- Then change the font’s colour to bright blue or green, again something you’d never usually use.
- Make sure you can still read it, then print it out.
- Once you have your weirdly colourful text in your hand, take note of the words you’re using. Chances are, there is text that is dull, full of jargon or contains meaningless business-speak. Seeing your words out of contex helps you think differently about your working experience.
- Now start circling words that describe the tasks you’ve performed and replacing them with the outcomes you’ve achieved instead.
- Finally, think about who is going to read this document, why they’ll be reading it and what’s the best possible outcome for them. Ask yourself Does this ‘About’ page tell people what problem I can solve for them?’
This exercise can be done on your ‘About’ page, your CV or your LinkedIn Profile.
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