How to polish your blog’s ‘About Page’

Updating an ‘About Page’ was one of the most popular tasks from PBN’s recent Big Clean 2016 e-course so I thought I’d reshare it as a post for everyone. Big Clean 2016 is now over but if you’d like to hear about out e-courses in the future make sure you sign up to our monthly newsletter over in the sidebar.

An ‘About Page’ is often one of the first a reader visits and one of the first a blogger writes but over time too many get neglected and become out of date. Not ideal when they can play a big part in how we make a first impression. So how can you go about updating your ‘About Page’ to reflect where you are now and lead your readers into your blog?

About Page or Start Here?

Before you dive in, it’s worth taking a minute to think about whether your blog would benefit from something like a ‘Start Here’ page rather than an ‘About Me’ page. It’s really a matter of preference as both will cover much the same topics but the focus will be slightly different (you can see the PBN ‘Start Here’ page here as an example). As a rule of thumb readers would probably expect an ‘About Me’ on a personal blog to get to know you and your story better whereas a ‘Start Here’ page may suit more fact based sites, focusing on telling readers what they will find and guiding them to your main topics.

Questions to ask

It can be tricky to ‘big ourselves up’ but remember this is your opportunity to explain to a new reader why they have come to the right place so don’t be shy. Read through your current ‘About Me’ page and then ask yourself:

• Is it up to date factually?
• Does it include at least one image, ideally of you by yourself or with your family?
• Does it describe what your blog does for people?
• Does it explain why you’re the right person to write it?
• Does it mention and link to some of your key content?
• Does it tell people how to contact you (or link to your contact page)?

Tone is important too

Finally, have a think about the tone of the page. Does it match the rest of your blog, be it friendly, funny, enthusiastic, thoughtful? It’s easy to become overly formal when talking about yourself and lose the ‘voice’ you’ve been cultivating in the rest of your writing. Writing in the 3rd person, for example, can sound a little stilted, breaking that personal connection with your readers.

We’d love to see your revamped about pages when your done so leave us link in a comment below or tweet it to us @pbloggernews so we can take a look.