Nov 28, 2012 / Beginner

About Page 101: Making Them Care

Without an About page, you’re nobody. It’s not only one of the first places new visitors will head if they like what you’re serving up on your blog, it’s also your calling card. The problem is, most About pages are about as enticing as putting your hand into an alligator’s mouth. In fact, to be fair, at least that would have an element of excitement, which is more than can be said for your garden variety About page.

So how do you make your About page worth visiting? Luckily, there’s a ten step program for that (twelve is so 1995). In this 101 post we’ll focus on getting the basics right with five things to keep in mind when carving out an introduction to yourself and your blog that doesn’t scream “nothing to see here, move along.”

1. Know what you want to do with it. Your blog or site exists for a purpose. If you don’t know what that is, and don’t set about making it abundantly clear, your chances of having people stick around to read your content are on the fast track to nowheresville. Imagine you were running a roadside BBQ emporium. If the sign for said emporium had pictures of yoga poses, moustaches, kittens, and hotdogs on it, you’d probably be failing to connect with your potential audience. Your About page is that sign. It’s your chance to inspire them into action. Know what it is you want to inspire them to do. Do you want people to get in touch? To realize that you’re an expert in fossilized monkey dung? To hire you? To follow your blog? To seek you out on Facebook? To laugh until they pee? Have a goal, and everything else falls into place.

Action time! Set a timer for 90 seconds. In that 90 seconds, jot down 1-3 things you’d like your audience to feel, think, and most importantly of all, do, when they read your About page.

2. Meal vs. shopping list. A shopping list and a delicious meal have a lot in common (okay, ingredients), but they’re not the same thing. Imagine a hungry friend comes over for dinner. But instead of serving them your signature dish, you read them a list of ingredients. “Pasta” you say. “Cheese” you say. “Tomatoes” you say. Half an hour in, they start to cry.

That’s exactly what most About pages feel like. “I come from blah blah” you say. “I like dogs” you say. “My best friend Winnie thinks it’s cute when I blow my nose trumpet” you say. But none of it holds together. It’s a shopping list. Your job is to put those parts together and make them into something greater than their sum. Tell us a story, connect the dots: “Living in the mountains of Switzerland as a teenage shepherd, I learnt the art of playing the nose trumpet to communicate with the first of my many canine friends, Winnie. My love of dogs, mountains and nose trumpeteering has continued to this day, only now I play nose jazz in Seattle while Winnie’s son Mr Ruffles dances a doggy tarantella. For cold hard cash.”

Action time! Get that timer out again. Give yourself 60 seconds this time, because you like living on the edge. Scribble down, at breakneck pace, any words that spring to mind to describe you (“book nerd,” “cat fancier,” “walrus trainer”). Take another sixty seconds and do the same for your blog (“hilarity fiesta,” “doom machine,” “cat photos”). Take on one more bout of sixty second scribbing, because, hey, what’s three minutes between friends, and do the same for important events in your life (“dog bite,” “cheese aversion,” “psychokinetic prom fire”). Now you have all of your ingredients on the page, give yourself 90 decadent seconds to draw lines between all of the above and see how you can connect them all into something greater than the sum of their parts.

3. Front load it. The first sentence of a good About page is there to get the reader to the second sentence. The second sentence’s job is to get them to the third sentence. If people aren’t getting to the fourth sentence without letting out a gut-wrenching yawn, you’re probably veering off course from your goal. Which is to make people do something. The right people. Your people. The others you don’t mind. They don’t belong here. “Get off my land!” you might say to them. But the people you’re addressing, the ones you hope will stick around? Make sure you’re reeling them in from sentence one.

Action Time! Imagine for a moment that you’re one of those poor deflated looking people on the street trying to get strangers to take fliers from you. Only, instead of fliers, you’ve got your blog. You have half a second to get their attention. What are you going to say in that half a second to make them stop in their tracks? Set a timer for, say, two minutes. Jot down as many opening lines as you can come up with.

4.Elevator pitch. Nobody’s saying you need to boil your About page down into haiku-like super-brevity, but it IS a good idea to have a short, scannable, one-liner version of it to complement the fuller-bodied story of you. Think of this as your way to get a foot in the door of your reader’s rapidly dwindling attention. How can you boil down everything you’ve said in your bio to a single, inviting, enticing soundbite you can use to reel them in?

Action Time! The timer’s off for this one, because being concise is challenge enough. Try to capture the essence of your About page in a single sentence, like the tagline for a movie.

5. For realsies. When we sit down and write it’s very easy to slip into English Class 101 pretentious writing mode. You break out your best adjectives. You toss around flowery verbs. Before you know it, you have the most stilted, unnatural chunk of snooze-text you’ve ever seen. Write your About page as if you telling this to a friend over coffee, beer, or a less stimulating but no less refreshing beverage of your choice.

Action Time! If you really want to put it to the test, go and do that — pitch your About page to a friend. Rehearse. And tell them about your blog. If you see them wincing, you probably need to rewrite your About page so that feels more natural and down to earth. Bonus points if you try this on a stranger at a bus stop.

Hopefully that gives you a little something to shake up your About page. Coming up, in About Page 201: The Meat Grinder, we return like champions to a feast to make minced meat of the most important page of your blog, and ratchet that beast up several more mixed-metaphor notches to excellence.

Until then, link up your own About pages (or those that have inspired you) in the comments and show us how it’s done. Or if you’re hungry for more ways to personalize your site without alienating your audience, check out our earlier post on three ways to make your blog your own.

Image credit: Based on You are Here by Roland Tanglao, CC-BY-2.0

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  4. I really appreciate the insight that word gives on how to start a blog and the fact that you offer it to those that don’t have custom pages, is very admirable.
    Thank you, thank you, thank you…

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I had the same problem but when I switched themes the new theme worked with it. You could always try browsing other themes to see one you like.

      Liked by 2 people

      2. No, definitely not. I’ve discovered through playing around with WordPress there are a lot of little things you can tinker with. I seem to discover more and more all the time and as soon as I think I’ve learned it all I discover something new. It just takes time. 🙂

        Liked by 4 people

  10. I’m new to blogging and didn’t have too many ideas about the best way to set things up. I ended up with a page about my blog and how it came to be: http://wp.me/P2MIsj-2

    and another page called ‘who am I’ http://wp.me/P2MIsj-2o

    It may not be a conventional set-up but anyone who dips their toe in the water about the blog can find out more about my background and my journey through this thing called life in ‘Who am I?’ So far so good 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  12. Ha! Number 5 is exactly what happened to me. I wrote what I thought was a kick-ass bio, sent it to my best friend, and (since she is a true friend) she wrote me back and told me how much it sucked. So I rewrote it, pretending like I was talking to her on the phone. And now the story of my About page is part of my About page.

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      1. hey Andrea – you definitely have good writing skills and can keep peoples interest but [and this is direct hypocracy from the hypocrites mouth and i would love to hear some feedback from you about mine below] i feel like it’s too long for an about page – great for a blog but for an about you want to give just a glimpse, a fishing nibble, a grab of attention…in my humble opinion… so not wanting to knock you cos i think you have great potential and i know my about needs crazy work too so maybe we can wade thru this together but i would say a third of the size would get more readers cos inet readers are lazy…

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      3. Hi Andrea, I agree with FISH that it’s wordy and long. I thought it would be good to keep everything until “My name is Andrea Badgley” then cut everything until the last paragraph “I haven’t saved the world, and…”. I like the last paragraph, even without the reference to the blue bug and youthful goal, it’s catchy.

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    2. Yes, you have style. I would edit it down a bit. I was reading some of your other postings and again you know what you’re doing but maybe edit them down so that you have the wonderful delicious kernels that speak volumes. Keep it up and I’ve just subscribed. We’ve got to help one another on this new adventure.

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      1. Thanks so much, y’all. Paring down is not my strong suit 😀 I appreciate your feedback to keep working on it – without critiques we will never improve! I was up in the middle of the night trying to figure out my elevator pitch, and boy, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to do it.

        Liked by 1 person

  14. I love this post. It inspired me to write one sentence:
    Fresh out of rehab, I said “I feel like I’ve had lobotomy.” The surgeon said “well, in a way, you have.” I’m thinking of making that sentence alone my “about me” page….thoughts? Thanks for these helpful hints!

    Liked by 1 person

  15. very helpful – my biggest problem is that i struggle to live without long run-on sentences which i don’t think many people work well with… i like to write how i speak and while sometimes it works, othertimes i imagine it is a bit much – these tips really helped and have changed it up a bit but figure i have a long way to go yet… http://brettfish.wordpress.com/about

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    1. OK, I think you do need to edit your About me. Pare it down to the most important elements you want to convey. Say’s I the new blogger who’s editing and editing and still not happy with my About Me.

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      2. your about page [like the about sandra twist – works!] is looking so much better – just the i from Miraculously missing at the beginning but it really is so much better – well done!

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    3. I like the shortened version. There is a typo in the 3rd paragraph: “after all is is meant to be about”.
      I would also suggest maybe cutting “two other things you should know about me is that” in the 5th paragraph. it feels like it breaks your momentum.

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  17. Reblogged this on Sorta Ginger: Ramblings of a Quasi-Redhead and commented:

    OK, after reading this I realized I did indeed have a random grocery list out there. I have taken the time to actually write out my “About” page. One day, I may actually do something about the other pages, but first I have to come up with a blog idea for today!

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    1. i think it is great length – i would break it into paragraphs to give some more space – the picture at the top is stunning and eye-catching – i would just proof read or get it proof read as there are a bunch of spelling or grammar errors which are the kinds of things which put a lot of people [especially teachers] off so just check on those [first museum spelt wrong, an “an” is written as “and” and so on] but the heart of it is good… i would move where they can find your art further down [maybe the end] because you want to grab their attention first and try come up with a catchy first sentence that will really grab people… i imagine something like “You want to know what art is?” grabs a little more than “I’m an artist” but i would play around with that and try get something that sounds more like a news headline… but good work so far – hope this helps.

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      1. Thank you so much. I can’t believe I have spelling errors. You’re right it’s a real turn off. OK I’m going back to think. But thank you so much for looking.Back I go to edit again.

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      2. Thanks, redid it again using your construtive comments. I’ll do it again if you so wish. (G) Yes, found those spelling and grammar errors. To be honest my eye’s just don’t see them. I gloss over them. Now if it was a color that wasn’t right…

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      3. “[first museum spelt wrong,” did you know that ‘spelt’ is a grain? 🙂 just thought I’d toss that one in here – not that you asked for my opinion, it just jumped out of me before I could catch it and stuff it back inside.

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  22. When someone likes a post of mine or comments on one, I look at their site. That’s a must. One of the first few things I do is look at the About page. It does give some insight into the blog. I also skim the first few posts and maybe a few older, archived posts. If I see enough to interest me, I follow. Even when I don’t follow, I periodically go back to these sites and look.

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  27. Thank you!!! I had no idea how to use that page other than to show ppl I had a case of verbal diarrea… I’m so not kidding…. I’ll fix that page. Thanks

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