I’m going to take all the pressure off of you immediately.
Your About Me page is not really about YOU.
It’s about your readers and what you are going to help them with. Do you feel like a giant weight has been lifted off of your chest already?
You’re welcome.
With that out of the way, let’s see how writing an about me page doesn’t have to be the most difficult thing in the world of blogging.
Who Is Looking at Your About Me Page?
Before we get too far into writing the perfect About Me page, let’s think first about who is visiting your About Me page.
If you look at Google Analytics you’re probably going to see that practically no one is visiting your About Me page.
You might have done this already and decided not to worry too much about your About Me page since no one really looks at it anyway.
But, unless you actually have 0 views of your About Me page, then there are at the very least a handful of people who are clicking on it to find out more about you.
So who are those people checking out the About Me?
If you put yourself in your reader’s shoes, then you probably arrived first on a post. You read through the post and you liked what you read. It was informative and, also, kind of entertaining.
You want to know more.
So you look around and see that About Me link and decide to click it.
And now they are there. On your About Me page.
It’s kind of like the second date.
Ok, not really like a second date.
But, you’ve got someone who is interested in what you have to say. Your About Me page needs to keep that feeling alive and capitalize on it.
Talking all about yourself is not the way to keep someone interested in what you have to say.
That is actually also good advice for your second date, too.
What, Then, Do You Talk About on Your About Me Page?
There is a system to business (and blogging is part of your business) that we teach in the Blog Simple Framework:
- Get them to notice you
- Get them to pay attention to you
- Get them to trust you
- Convert that trust into money
If someone has made it to your About Me page, then they’ve noticed you and now they are wondering if they should pay attention to you.
I mean, they don’t read through going, “hm, should I pay attention to this lady?”
But they do go through the page and get a feeling. They either get that “Oh, my GOD, she totally gets it!” feeling or they might even get a feeling that says, “I have nothing in common with this person and I don’t want to hear another word she says”.
Either one of those is actually an acceptable reaction to your About Me page. I know you think you want to write something that will make every single person fall in love with you, but that’s not the goal.
You don’t want everyone to love you. You want the right people to love you. The people with whom your message resonates. The rest you don’t have to worry about.
The right people will pay attention to you if you talk to them about the problem that you want to help them with and if you do so in a way that makes them feel that you understand the problem and can help with it.
Start With The Problem
You’re not going to start your About Me Page with a detailed life history of yourself. You’re going to start by talking about the problem that you are going to help your reader solve.
For this site we don’t go overboard with our about page.
In the future, there will be pins great titles that our soon-to-be readers will notice (remember the first principle of Business? Get them to notice you). They will click them and end up on a post that is in some way related to making a how they see the world.
They’ll like it. They’ll like it so much they’ll want to know more about this Odd Noodle thing.
So they ended up on the about page which gives them an idea of the problem that Odd Noodle can help them solve.
The goal of the language we’ve chosen is to show that we understand that building an online business is about more than just following a set of IKEA instructions. It’s a place you want to be unique to you. If that resonates with our readers, then we are likely to be able to get them to pay attention.
Now It’s Time to Talk a Little About You
After you’ve talked about the problem that you want to help with, it is time to talk a little about yourself because the next step in the business system is to get them to trust you.
Earning your reader’s trust is something you’ll do over and over again in blog posts, emails, videos, and whatever other medium you choose to use, but your About Me page is a great place to do it, too.
You earn your readers’ trust by showing them that you have been on the journey that they wish to take and that you’ve solved some of the problems that they will encounter themselves.
You don’t have to present yourself as an expert (unless you actually are an expert), you just have to show that you’ve been through this experience and that you’ve learned from it. And now you’re going to share what you’ve learned.
So while you are taking this opportunity to talk about yourself, you only need to talk about yourself in a way that the reader can relate to.
If you have a site on gardening, then you can talk about your first garden and growing your first tomatoes and how that first tomato plant sparked a gardening fire in you and over the years you’ve gardened yourself to a small homestead.
But you don’t have to talk about where you went to college, how many kids you do or do not have, what your personal beliefs are or anything else that isn’t pertinent to the problems that you want to help solve for your reader.
You only have to talk about what you know about the problem that you’re going to help with.
This is where some people get a little nervous. They think that they need to be an expert on a topic in order to help a stranger out.
But think about that for a second.
In real life, if you grow the best tomatoes on the block, do you hesitate to let your neighbor know the kind of fertilizer you used?
If your best friend asks you about the new lipstick you’re wearing, do you say, well, I’m not a makeup artist, I don’t want to tell you what I’m wearing because then you might buy it and not like it.
No. You don’t do that. If you do that, you should stop doing that.
You help your neighbor and you let your friend know about the lipstick.
Your neighbor doesn’t ask, “But, wait, do you have a degree in agriculture?”. He doesn’t care about that because he’s seen your tomatoes!
He trusts you when it comes to tomatoes because you’ve grown some seriously awesome-looking tomatoes.
And your friend doesn’t ask for your beautician’s license. She sees the lipstick on your face, she likes it and she wants to try it for herself.
Your blog is no different. You present the results that you’ve gotten and that is what people want in order to trust you as their guide on this journey.
Convert That Trust Into…
Ok, we’re probably not converting that trust into money on the About Me page. It’s not completely impossible, but let’s focus on converting the trust into what we like to call a True Fan.
True Fans are the people that read all the stuff you write, sign up for your email list and they will buy things that you recommend or make.
Think about where we are at right now in the readers’ interaction with you. They more than likely read a blog post you wrote and they liked it so much that they ended up on your About Me page.
They read about how you are going to help them with their problem and they learned about the journey that you took and trust that you have something to teach them about how to solve their problem.
Now it’s commitment time. You need to ask them to commit to you in some way.
This is the perfect time to ask them to give you their email address in exchange for your newsletter that is packed with value every week and some type of free resource (your freebie, opt-in, trap… it has many names) that you have made for them.
There is no better time to ask someone to join your email list than at the end of your About Me page. They’ve already made a commitment of time to you.
They read your post, they read your About Me and because you are so awesome and you wrote an awesome About Me page, they are more than happy to hand over their email address.
Very often I hear bloggers talk about not wanting to “bother” people with emails.
Now imagine that all of the people on your email list went through the process above. Would you feel differently about sending them emails?
You should.
You should feel like if someone has made that type of a time commitment to you already and exchanged their precious email address with you, then you owe it to them to continue to send them value in the way of amazing emails.
And, yes, you will owe it to them to share amazing products that you love as affiliate sales opportunities and you will owe it to them to offer them the product that you made that is going to help make their journey so much easier.
I’m not saying the About Me page is the only place you should ask for people to subscribe to your email list. But I do like to illustrate the point that if you collect email addresses in the right way, then you can lose that whole “I don’t want to bother them” thing that is holding you back from connecting with your followers.
Now, if you are not in a place where you are ready to collect email addresses yet, you don’t want to lose the opportunity to further delight this reader with your content.
Use this part of your About Me page to link the reader to your Ultimate Guide on X or to your post where you review all of your very favorite tools for Y.
Remember, you have gained a little bit of trust with your About Me page which means your recommendations for products are going to carry more weight with this reader.
One Last Thing To Remember With Your About Me Page
There’s a funny thing that happens sometimes when people get to their About Me page. They forget about all of the important rules for creating an easy-to-read post.
There are no headings, poor-quality images, and paragraphs are gargantuan.
Your About Me page needs to be as easy to read as a blog post. Maybe even easier. Don’t suddenly start writing in the form of a high school essay just because you’re not writing a blog post.
Use your headings, images, keep the paragraphs 2-3 sentences long. Add some lists and highlighted text. Make it easy for the reader to consume the information.
Ready to Go Write the About Me Page Your Readers Are Waiting For?
Now that you know it doesn’t have to be all about you, the About Me page should feel a little less intimidating. (You might have noticed that you could even blog anonymously with an About Me page like this one).
Part of the reason you started this whole blogging thing is because you wanted to help people with something, right?
Deep down there was a part of you that knew you had something to share with the world and that’s the part of you you want to share in the About Me page.
You wanted to be the person that people turned to for help with their problems. The About Me page will help you show them you are that person.
So.
Go get ’em.
