Are You on Your About Page?

How do your visitors find out about you?

Sure, they read your content and your blog posts and find out about your business or your perspective on things. They can likely find your upcoming events and how to contact you. But where do they learn about you?

It might seem an odd question. But it’s one that’s overlooked often. Sure, we put up our bio page and add a little photo and that’s all fine. But where are you on your bio page? In other words, when someone reads the page do they learn about who you are? Or are they left with a laundry list of what you’ve done?

The other day I was working with a client, Cindy, on a website. She had written some great copy. As I looked over her homepage, her services pages, and her pages describing her services and how they could help someone, they were really good. Her writing was clear and easy to understand.

Cindy had done a great job writing engaging, alive and caring copy. As the audience, I could see myself in what she had written. It wasn’t hard to figure out, right from the homepage, whether or not she could help me. I felt heard and seen in how she wrote. It made me want to find out more - more about her services, and more about her.

Just as I do with many of the clients I work with, I read her bio page almost last. I like to get a tone for how someone is writing to their audience and about their services before I read how they speak about themselves. Many times the style of writing changes when I get to the bio page.

My client, like most others, was no different. She wrote in the all-too-familiar style of reporting about herself in the third person. Gone was the feeling of personal relationship and aliveness I had felt with her other pages. And while her bio was technically well written, I felt like I couldn’t find her in it.

Having known Cindy for months, I’ve grown to know her well - her humor, he passion, her warmth. But I saw and felt none of that in her bio page. Gone was the person and in place was the report about the person.

Don’t make this mistake. Everyone on the planet knows that it’s highly likely you’ve written your own bio. So talk about yourself in the first person. Use I, me and we. Share your life. It doesn’t mean you have to get into personal details if you don’t want. But it should mean that when I read your bio page, it’s clear that you’ve written it. But more importantly that it’s about you and not some version of you.

Few of us know we can write about ourselves in a warm, honest, conversational style. Yet the best bios are often the ones written as though you are telling your own story, complete with your ups and downs.

A good bio shows that you’re human - that you’ve made mistakes and learned lessons. It meets the audience where they are in language they can understand. Ultimately, your audience should identify with you in your bio. They should see themselves in some part of it.

Cindy got this quickly and rewrote her bio adding those personal touches only she can. She also felt better about it. She really liked thinking about her bio page as her narrating her own story. And the people she’s shown it too have been very receptive to bio.

Remember, people are looking for a person to do business with - not a business to do business with. They want to know the person behind the business. And they want to be able to identify with you - as a real, breathing, honest-to-God, living being. So meet them there.

So as you write - or rewrite - your bio page, keep one thing in mind… your audience will become your clients when they feel they identify with you and can trust you. They’re hiring a person, regardless of your service, who they’ll be in relationship with. Hence, a bio describing you as a person, just like them, can go a long way to building that trust.