Who are you?

What do you do for a living?

Why should I care what you write?

I want to get to know YOU, not just your writing.

That’s why you need an ABOUT page. And a well-written one…with some details and thought.

Too many people ignore their ABOUT page. Awhile ago (can’t remember where I heard about this), there was a meme going around about doing searches on Technorati (I think) for all the default About pages that people never change from the WordPress theme setup. Funny, but sad…so sad…

Over the month of October, my About page received 302 unique visitors, with an Exit % of 33.7% (which means 66.3% of the people that visited the page went on to other pages of the blog.

Recently, I updated my About page using Laura Allen’s 15 Second Pitch. The goal was to get more people to contact me.

Specifically, I wrote:

Give me a call for a free 30 minute consultation to find out how I can help you build your business.

Since that’s gone up, 3 people have gotten in touch with me. They emailed (no calls yet!) and the dialogues have continued. One person asked me some advice on a business idea he had. That was a great honor for me, and it’s been uber-fun chatting with that person. The other two were looking for help/advice on their blogs…

I can’t be sure any of these people checked out my About page (I didn’t ask) but it makes me think that putting a call to action there has helped. It certainly doesn’t hurt!

The two biggest mistakes people make (short of not writing a proper About page at all) are that they don’t including contact information and they don’t update it. Even re-reading mine for the purpose of writing this blog post, I notice some tweaking that’s needed (although I’ve got plenty of contact information.)

Here’s what I know (from my research, testing and validation):

1. If you don’t have an About page you’re missing out on opportunities.
2. If you have a crappy About page you’re missing out on opportunities.
3. If you don’t update your About page regularly you’re missing out on opportunities.
4. If you don’t include your contact information on your About page you’re missing out on opportunities.

Go read your About page now. Please. Fix it up. Tell me who you are, what you’re about, why I should care, and how I can get in touch. Cause I will…and so will a ton of other people too.

This is the third part of a multi-part series on fine tuning your blog through research, testing and validation. The first part was Increasing RSS Feed Subscribers. The second part was Making Money From Your Blog.