Writing a good ‘About’ page
To really capture your audience and to get them to relate to you more I believe it is crucial to have a few key things on your blog / website. One of the most crucial ones is the ‘About‘ page.
Apart from letting your readers know a bit more about your blog, you can also tell them a little more about yourself so that your readers have a better connection with you and what you write about. You don’t need to get intimately personal, but share what you’re comfortable with.
Here’s what I put on mine;
My name is Mathew Packer, my friends call me Matt or Packer. I live on the east coast of Australia in a beautiful city called Newcastle with my fiance Cath, and our dog Cherry Bomb.
I’m a fiance, photographer, blogger, entrepreneur, freelance web designer, marketing genius, editor, 9-5 worker, golfer, sometimes-handy man, and generally a pretty nice guy.
Another thing that I think is very important these days in blogging, particularly when their is advertising revenue involved, is to actually write a disclosure statement.
Time and time again I read articles on peoples blogs where they’re promoting some form of advertising or the latest and greatest pyramid scam / scheme but they don’t actually use it themselves or even worse they’re just signed up as an affiliate to promote it to their readers who in turn are the ones who actually put the time and dollars into the scheme.
When it comes to reviewing products and making recommendations on them, inform your readers if have an existing relationship with the company who have sent you the product. Recently I’ve seen a couple of fairly high profile bloggers recommending products of brands who were advertisers on their websites, yet they failed to inform their readers of that existing relationship and were scrutinized for potentially providing a very bias review.
As an example, here’s my statement;
I will not write about advertising channels, search engine marketing techniques, or even products, that I do not use. This won’t change under any circumstances so please do not contact me about endorsing anything unless you’re prepared to send me a free sample, and unless you’re prepared to receive genuine and honest feedback about it.
The reviews that i have published are based on time I’ve spent with the product and are very honest. If I don’t like it I do inform my readers, and on the flip side if I receive excellent service or I’ve found a product that is very good I also tell me readers. This has always been the case, and will continue to be the case. The banners on my blog are all companies that I have bought things from and received excellent service, they are companies I am happy to recommend based on that and that alone.
What other things can you put on your ‘About’ page. The list is endless really, but for some ideas here are a bunch of different ‘About’ pages from other bloggers who I think understand the importance of having the About page;
- Darren from Problogger.com
- Dan Boud from Boudist.com
- Chris Garrett from Chrisg.com
- Skellie from skelliewag.org
The Best of The Week [TBOTW]
Going through all the RSS feeds in my Google Reader was a bit hazardous as I had a huge number of articles ’starred’ from the last month but I think I’ve whittled it down to a good selection of things you should check out.
Let’s get started then, newest first;
- Lifehack.org published an article this morning on How Your iPod Can Make You More Productive - The iPod is an incredible organizing device! It takes many shelves worth of CDs and condenses them into one tiny gadget, thereby reducing clutter..read more..
- Newly launched Nettuts.com (the guys behind PSDTUTS) published a tutorial showing an easy start to Creating a PayPal Payment Form - Although it can have some issues, PayPal does provide a very simple way to take payments on a website. And with a little tweaking you can easily turn a PayPal..read more..
- Adii, of Premium News fame, gave us some insight on the online apps a rockstar freelancer would / could / should use in his article titled Online apps that’s worth using - I must admit that I never thought that online applications would ever replace desktop software solutions, but in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been using some applications that are doing just that…read more..
- My mate Joel, aka ju:femaiz, wrote a new ‘Schooner Rant‘ on some dramas he’s had with moving to a new home and getting ADSL2+ connected, I know the drama all too well so I sympathize fully. Here’s his blog titled Schooner Rant: ADSL2+ Connectivity Ridiculity
- On ProBlogger.net there was a guest post from Gala Darling of iCiNG fame which gives us some ideas on How To Deal with Negative Comments On Your Blog - Negative comments are a funny thing. I’ve noticed that on iCiNG, typically the rude comments come from someone who’s never commented before..read more..
Ok I think that about does it for this week, there were a huge amount more great articles that I’ve read over the last month however I’m going to end up with a post about 10 pages long if I post all the good content.
You should definitely check out all the articles and blogs I’ve listed here, there’s some fantastic content amongst them all and they’re all very regular publishers so definitely subscribe to their RSS feeds.
Till next week, that’s it from TBOTW..bad acronym I know..haha
Cheers
Matt
Entrecard is broken!
Well it seems as if Entrecard has gone a little bizarro world tonight. I just logged into my account to approve some adverts and what do I see, 512 credits to advertise on my blog! Weird!
The after a little further research it seems like the whole Make Money Online category has gone a little haywire, see the following screencap.
I was thinking about placing an advert on Problogger, John Chow or one of those high-end blogs but well at this rate I’ll be saving up my ECs for the next 30 years or so!
Wonder how long it will take till this is corrected?? Till then, buy some ads on my blog, I’m a total bargain at only 512 ECs!!
Find me here