Writing about yourself may feel weird and awkward… I know that it was for me when I started my business.
I struggled with what to say, how to say it, and structuring the content for my About page when I built my first website. So much back and forth. I mean, I didn’t want to bore people with stuff about me.
Soon, I learned that this page was a lot less about myself and way more about my audience.
Your About page is another way to attract and engage with your ideal audience. This is the place to communicate the mission of your brand and more importantly, how you serve your audience. It’s about The WHY behind the awesomeness that you offer.
See, it’s a lot less about you. So you shouldn’t feel creepy as you build out the content for these pages.
It’s time to get your About page to convert readers into customers. Let’s dive into the content that you actually need to create to display on this vital website page.
Your intro/brand story
Your brand’s story is how you’ll kick-off the content on your About page. This vital piece will quickly builds a connection piece for your website visitors.
Since your About page will be full of text content, you’ll want to pull in only the important details of your story:
- what you do
- why you do it
- who you built your brand for (ideal customer)
- your unique way of solving their problems
Pro tip: This is also an opportunity to share what you’ve overcome to build your business. You instantly become super relatable with your audience along with adding an interesting touch to your brand’s story.
Your brand’s mission, vision and core values
To get others to quickly understand and trust your brand, they’ve gotta know the WHY behind it. This is done by bringing your brand’s mission and vision statements into the content of your About page.
Your Mission statement lets your audience know what they can expect from your brand.
Example: Broadstreet Business Consulting provides business coaching services to newbie entrepreneurs. We work together to help you effectively develop and maintain a business that harmonizes with your brand’s core values.
Your Vision quickly outlines your brand’s purpose going forward. It describes its future position.
Example: Broadstreet Business Consulting’s vision is to help rising entrepreneur’s everywhere build business’s with clarity so they’re ready to truly serve their brand’s audience. Our belief is that a business should be operated with the intention to effectively engage and connect with others. It’s not about sales. It’s about building people-driven brands.
Your core values are the beliefs that you run your business by. They help you to stay true to your brand’s mission, vision, and how you serve your audience.
Sharing these values on your About page adds a powerful punch of content that gives the visitor more insight into the culture of your brand. These can be displayed in a bullet-pointed list that includes a quick description of how each value pertains to your brand’s WHY.
An example of Whole Food’s core values will give you insight into how to build these for your brand:
- Customer Service: “We satisfy and delight our customers: Our customers are the lifeblood of our business and our most important stakeholder. We strive to meet or exceed their expectations on every shopping experience.”
- Growth and Happiness: “We promote team member growth and happiness: Our success is dependent upon the collective energy, intelligence, and contributions of all of our Team Members. We design and provide safe and empowering environments where highly motivated people can flourish and reach their highest potential.”
- Abundance and Prosperity: “We create profits and prosperity. We earn profits every day through voluntary exchange with our customers. We know that profits are essential to create capital for growth, job security, and overall financial success.”
My favorite list of core values come from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits.
Your credibility
It’s time to share how your unique superpowers have helped others in your brand’s audience.
This keeps the focus on your audience since you are sharing experiences that customers similar to them have had when working with you. You’re also able to position yourself as an expert in your industry.
A simple way to do this is to display 1-2 customer success stories that share the overall awesomeness of your brand’s customer experience. They should be short testimonials that will help to keep this page’s content contained.
The brains behind the brand
Let’s continue to connect by bringing the personality of your business into this page’s content. It’s important to share with others the real person behind the brand and exactly who they’ll be working with.
Folks don’t want to read paragraphs of your life story. Instead, keep this part short in sweet by:
- pictures of yourself and the behind scenes of your brand (2-3 high-quality images are enough)
- 3-4 sentences about who you are and the skills that make you an expert in your industry
- including some quick interesting facts about yourself in a bullet-point style list
Content Structuring Tips (Let’s Make Things Readable)
Your About page will be packed with info but since busy people will be viewing this page, it’s important to keep this page’s content easy to digest. Incorporating the following structuring hacks will keep this page super readable for your website visitors.
- Break up content with headings (h2 and h3 styles to text)
- Keep paragraphs to just 3-4 sentences
- Add 2-3 pieces of brand photography to bring a more visual feel throughout the text
To recap, your About page is meant to help you connect with your audience by sharing your brand’s story and overall mission. Keeping this content readable and focused on how you serve your audience will make your website visitors want to engage with your brand.
