How to Leverage the Most Underused Page on Your Blog or Website

Image by: Roberto Verzo

You’ve noticed it as one of those ubiquitous links that is always at the top of blogs and websites. You may have even clicked on it at some point. If you have one of your own, chances are you aren’t quite sure what to make of it or how to put it to use.

I’m talking of course, about the good old About Us page. Too often is the About Us page filled with some meaningless corporate-speak about how the site will “synergistically systemise excellent catalysts for change and simulate paradigms to improve value-added content”. Or, on the smaller individual-blogger level, a quick one-paragraph description of the author next to a generic silhouette picture that means the author never uploaded a picture of his or her own.

If either of these sounds a little familiar (or if you don’t have an About Us page at all), don’t fear. Today, we’re going to discuss how to create an About Us page that will be a valuable asset to your website or blog.

Our Model- The Dust Jacket Blurb

So, what exactly should an About Us page be used for? (And let me say just once that the page could be called “About Us”, “About Me”, “About This Site”, “About Fat Dude”, or any number of things). What exactly is the point of even having this page? And what should we put in there?

I want you to take a trip with me. Imagine getting in your car and driving to your favorite place to pick up a new book; your local library, Borders, that funky little second-hand bookshop downtown, whatever. We’re going to wander through the stacks until you find your favorite section, and then we’re going to pick a new book. And here’s the catch, you only get one; Uncle Fat Dude says so.

How exactly do you go about it? You might find an author you already know, or find titles and cover art that you find interesting. But you only get one, so you’d better be sure. How do you know what the book is really about, or whether the author is someone you might connect with? You crack the cover and check out the… dust jacket blurbs. Bingo.

Okay, time to come back. We found what we need. The dust jacket blurbs! Knowing what section of the store we’re in helps, and seeing the titles, the art, the authors’ names, it all helped us zero in on a few choices, but it was the blurbs inside the dust jacket that helped us pick our book.

And that’s our About Us page.

A good About Us page begins by taking the model of the typical dust jacket blurb. Well, blurbs, actually. You usually see two, right? In the front of the book, some text about the book itself; and in the back, about the author. This is where we’ll make our start as well.

About Your Site

The front flap of a book’s dust jacket is usually devoted to a blurb about the subject of the book, and we’re going to follow that model. Use the first section of your About Us page to tell your visitor exactly what your site is about.

Remember that less is more. Take a look at a dust jacket blurb and you’ll see it will usually run 2-4 short, descriptive paragraphs. Remember this is just a quick introduction to your site… if the visitor was interested in reading a large block of text, she would simply browse through your site to find out what it’s about.

Also remember that  you have the full potential of an interactive medium at your disposal. Include links to your most popular content. Issue a call to action and get the customer to sign up for your newsletter.  Provide a link to your site’s RSS feed. Include images of any relevant features that you’d like to point out. More than anything else, this is your elevator pitch for your site: sell your visitor on why she should stick around and check out your site… and why she should keep returning for more.

About You

Flip to the back dust jacket flap, and you’ll find a blurb about the author: afew notes about what makes him interesting, maybe a line about some other books he’s written or why he’s qualified to write this one. And… you guessed right, that’s what we’re going to do here too.

As you write a brief biography of yourself here’s a few questions you should answer:

• Why should I listen to this person? Just as you sold your blog’s content, so should you sell your own expertise. You don’t need to be an expert to write a blog or maintain a website, but you should give your reader some reason to listen to what you have to say. If you’re not experienced, maybe you’re inquisitive, or outgoing, or funny, or ready to make (and document) a bunch of mis-steps. Whatever it is, find your hook and let us know what it is.
• Why should I care about this person? While you’re selling yourself, don’t forget to be yourself. It’s okay to include your own personality and some information about yourself in your About Us page. In fact: I’d say it’s essential. A sometimes-reader is more likely to become a Constant Reader if they feel like they know (and like) not just your content, but you. Go ahead and let us know about your cats or your kayaking hobby, just keep this last question in mind…
• Why am I still reading this? If there is any chance whatsoever that your visitor may have occasion to think this thought, your bio has become a full fledged, capital-B, Biography. Don’t go crazy here. Keep this section short, but memorable, and personal
• What’s a good question about writing in the first person? Okay, I honestly couldn’t think of one, but this needs to be said: Write this section in the first person. “Sarah is an accountant at Earnst and Young who moonlights as a violin player…” has already put us to sleep because it sounds like a bad Playbill bio. “I’m an accountant, but what I really love to do is play the violin,” is the beginning of an engaging personal story that you are telling to your audience.

You, Beautiful You

That personal connection I mentioned for your bio section can be strengthened tenfold by including a warm, personable photograph of yourself. Don’t be shy about this. Yes, it’s the internet and we all love our anonymity, but if you want to be anonymous, you shouldn’t be reaching out to an online audience. Being able to see your face is huge in strengthening your reader’s feeling of familiarity with you and will go a long way towards drawing in your audience.

Bells and Whistles

Once you’ve accomplished all the above (no small feat in and of itself, I know!), you have a very respectable About Us page that is certainly better than 70% of what you’ll find out there, but why not spiff it up a little more? Here’s some ideas:

• Video/Audio: A picture goes a long way but multimedia, especially video, is an almost unfair advantage. Consider filming a brief introduction to yourself and post it along with, or instead of, your headshot.
• A Social Media Hub: I’ve gotten this far without linking to my own About Us page, but there you go. The three-column layout I set up gave me a lot of empty space beneath my picture, the perfect place to drop all my relevant social media links, as well as links to my other websites. You might want to even consider adding your blog or Twitter feed if your site is not already content-heavy.

It is really easy to just slap up an About Us page that is filled with nothing but so much filler, so you can get on to the more interesting parts of blogging or website development. But, if you can take some time to follow these tips and build a useful About Us page, it will be a true asset to your site.

What other opportunities are commonly wasted? Give me some ideas in the comments!

Q&A: Do you have to be a top expert to blog?

Image by foundphotoslj

I often get a lot of resistance from my on-the-rise friends and colleagues when I tell them they should be blogging. The perception seems to be that if you’re not a top expert in your field, or a celebrity, or have huge financial success, nobody wants to read your blog. Hogwash, I say (that’s right, I said hogwash!). I thought I’d try out a new format, so we’re going to discuss this today as a question and answer.

Okay, I get it, you’re the social media guy and you think everyone else should be promoting that way too, but why should anyone want to hear anything I have to say?

Chances are no matter how early you are in your career, and no matter what that career is, you still have something to teach your audience.

Sure, but there are also probably dozens of people with more experience blogging on the same topic.

Maybe. But they don’t have the same perspective you do. You’re just getting started, hurdling over pitfalls that the experts have long forgotten about. You have your own unique personality and background to bring to the table too, which will make for interesting reading.

No, really. I’m at the bottom rung of the food chain. I’m just getting started as a [comedian/artist/actor/musician/totem pole carver]. It can’t be that interesting for anyone to read about my [failed Sears commercial audition/agonizing over  if "cumquat" or "rutabaga" is funnier/insert random newbie trouble here].

It’s as interesting as you make it. Even if you’re no Hemmingway, you can still serve your audience by giving them a glimpse into your field, and serve yourself by creating a sounding board you can use to bounce ideas or just vent.

So I get some people reading my blog posts on a regular basis. This is supposed to do what for me, again?

That really depends on what you would want to get out of it, and what your particular field is.  A blog can be a way to get your name out there, even without going viral on sites like Digg. There is definitely a value to becoming part of a community of like-minded individuals from within your own field. Nothing beats being able to put out a tweet at 1 am asking for help on a technical issue and getting four responses before you get out of bed in the morning.

What else?

A blog can be a way to sort of pre-build credibility, but only if you stick to it. Even if nobody is currently reading your blog, posting regularly is like putting pennies in your credibility piggy bank for when you do join your field’s online community. It’s tough to be noticed in a large online community, or gain a following, when you have three posts to your name; there just isn’t enough content there for someone to get to know who you are and what you’re about. But if you start writing your blog like the audience is already there, and go looking for them after, say 150 to 200 posts, you’ve got quite a calling card.

So, writing a blog is just a way to gain some street cred with other bloggers?

Not quite.  The whole world has gone social. You never know who may be researching you; potential employers, potential customers, potential collaborators. Your blog is a 150-page resume, a 50,000 word playbill bio, a 500-foot tall billboard for your art. It’s up to you to either fill it with everything you want potential contacts to see, or to leave it blank.

That’s quite a sales pitch.

Why thank you.

Any last words of motivation?

Just a few. If none of the above points seem particularly persuasive to you, I’ve got one more reason why you should be blogging, even if you’re not a powerful celebrity who is going to rake in a fortune on selling advertising space: paying back your online community. If you’re anything like me, you’ve leaned pretty heavily on Google Search while doing any number of different research projects: “How do I get into the Belly Room at the Comedy Store?” “How do I get an agent?” “How do I sell my first painting?” “How do I get my first web design client?” “How do I get more exposure for my band?”

The fact is that you don’t have all the answers to all the questions in your given field. You probably don’t even have most of them. Or even a respectable percentage. But, you still have more than you think. No matter how inexperienced you think you are, there is someone in your community who will look up to you, if you give them the chance. Someone who could really benefit from the experience you do have, or simply from learning from your mistakes and mis-steps.

Is this the part where you summarize the information in this post?

Wow, you’re absolutely right. To sum up; you should have a blog.

To elaborate on that just a little bit, you should have a blog, even if you’re just learning your field, because it will allow you to network with others in your field, build your personal brand online, and lend a helping hand to those less experienced than yourself.

Keep an eye out here on FatBlog for a special series on blogging in the near future. For now, leave some comments and let me know what you’ll be doing with your blog!

Increase Clicks, Likes, Comments, and Buys with a Call to Action

Image by: Duchamp

Your mother always told you to ask for things nicely, and it turns out she may have been right after all.

You’ve honed all of your product descriptions. You’ve posted a sparkling resume. You’ve put together an extremely attractive homepage for your demo tape. Your portfolio is spotless.

But did you tell your visitor to do what you want them to do?

Believe it or not, it works.

Browsing through the web, combing through Facebook, scanning our Twitter feeds, we all consume so much information online that we’ve become unaware of how much of it we don’t consume. For every line of text we actually concentrate on and read, we probably skim past another ten. Friend feeds, RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, comment feeds, we have to get full eventually! Any advertisement or request or other promotional text you post online is just as likely to get skimmed over unless you present your visitor with a clear call-to-action:

Our new single is on You Tube. To listen now Click Here.

Request a Free Quote Today.

Contact Me for Availability.

Don’t get me wrong, you’re not hypnotizing your site visitor with this text; this isn’t the magic answer to getting every new visitor to buy your e-book or subscribe to your newsletter. What it does do is grab your visitor’s attention with a short, simple request. They may not heed your request, but you can make sure they see it.

What easy text changes can you make on your site to increase visitor response? This is especially easy with link text. Here’s a few examples of changes you might be able to make:

Jason’s Resume —> View Jason’s Resume

Kelly’s Paper Roses —> Buy One Of Kelly’s Paper Roses

Download Link —> Download Now

Pricing Information —> Get a Free Quote

Demo Tape —> Listen to Our Demo

Book Excerpt —> Read An Excerpt from my Book!

Another great use for a call-to-action is to elicit a response from your blog readers. Ending each of your blog posts with a call to action instead of just a high-school-lit-class-style conclusory paragraph* is a great way to get your readers participating in your comments section.

*(Anyone else remember “Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, tell ‘em, tell ‘em, tell ‘em, tell ‘em what ya told ‘em”?)

How will you get your viewers to respond to your content better with a call-to-action? Tell us in the comments!**

**(See what I did there? )

Friday Firsts: Starting a Blog

Image by: Annie Mole

Why a Blog?

I know, I know… Starting a blog sounds so New Milennium, everyone-at-the-coffee-house-is-doing-it. But blogging can be one of the most powerful tools for finding, connecting with, and keeping an audience online. Coming from a point of absolute-zero online visibility, a blog is a very strong base camp for your Brand. Here, you can gain some credence with your target audience, let your work be seen, and even start an online networking campaign to rival the possibilities available in both Twitter and Facebook. You may sound a bit pretensious when you tell your friends “I’m starting a blog,” but so what? Help them clean up post mocha latte spit-take and kindly explain that it’s an extremely solid addition to your marketing toolbox.

Picking a Topic:

Blogs come in many shapes and sizes, and might offer beautiful photography, useful articles, an ongoing story, or simply a look into your day-to day-life.  At first glance, it may seem like a photographer should start a photoblog, and an actor should start a “living the Hollywood dream” memoir, and a writer should post her work. But who says? Maybe as an actor you want to start a photoblog with interesting visuals from your audition locations. Maybe an artisan could start a blog not about crafting, but about starting a small business. Maybe a wedding photographer could write stories about his subjects.

When deciding on a topic, there are several questions to ask yourself. Is there an audience for it? Is the market already glutted with exactly the same thing? Does it help sell your brand and bring you an audience? I would suggest, though, that there is one single question about your blog topic that is more important than all the others combined; Are you passionate about it?

A blog is a huge commitment. If you intend to serve any sort of audience, you’ll be posting at least semi-regularly, you’ll want your posts to stay mostly on-topic, and you’ll want that underlying topic to stay as relatively consistent as possible. A topic that you can wring a maximum of 20 or 30 posts out of (or even 90 or 100) , has a built-in self-destruct date and could spell a long term commitment that comes to a dead-end. Pick a topic that you could talk about forever. In your free time. For fun. Passion, equals dedication, equals output, equals a consistently kickass blog.

Picking a Service:

This is where things start to get tricky. There are a lot, and I mean a lot of options out there when it comes to choosing a blog platform.  The first step towards choosing is determining if you want a hosted blog, or a non-hosted blog.

• Hosted Blogs (Blogger, LiveJournal, Tumblr, TypePad, etc)

A hosted blog is any service where your blog, the blog software, and the front end (where you enter your posts) are hosted on another website. These sites offer a varying range of on-board functionality, but are pretty uniformly easy to use.  Most of these blogs are free, and extremely intuitive if you have ever used word processing software like Microsoft Word.

The downside here is some services may display ads on your blog if you choose not to pay a subscription fee, and your web address will most likely be something like YourBlog.blogspot.com or YourNameHere.tumblr.com, which may or may not be professional enough for what you’re trying to accomplish

• Non-Hosted Blogs (WordPress, for one)

These blogging platforms are basically software that you install directly on your own hosted web account (the storage that makes your website possible). Everything remains on your website, so you’re not at the mercy of your service going down or going out of business. Your posts are archived on your own website, and you can make backup after backup until you feel secure that your posts will never ever be lost. The number of additonal plugins, skins, widgets, and tools are seemingly endless on some of these platforms too, which makes a highly custimizable blog.

But there is a downside here too. These babies are not for the weak of heart. Just getting the blog up and running takes much more tech savvy than the typical PC-user has. Customizing can be much, much more difficult. Some of the user interfaces are not quite as intiutive either, as they lean more towards functionality and options than towards attractiveness and ease of use.

There are so many services to choose from, I couldn’t possibly keep your interest through the couple-thousand words it would take to review them all, but keep watching for my suggestions of some sites to check out.

Start Posting!

We’ve come to the fun. It’s time to open up to your audience. Find your groove, and start churning out those posts! Of course, it doesn’t end there. There are endless things you can do to keep improving your blog. Check back in the coming weeks and months for articles on:

• Managing and optimizing your RSS feed with FeedBurner.
• Finding readers with Technorati.
• How often to post.
• Headlines that catch readers.
• Making it easier for readers to link to your posts.
• How your High School composition teacher would tell you to write your posts (and why she’s right).
• Posting more frequently.
• Moving from a hosted to a non-hosted blog.
• Starting a WordPress Blog.

… and probably a lot more. In the meantime, feel free to shamelessly promote your blog in the comments. I would too, but, uh… I think you found it.