Quelling skepticism with your About page.

We are entering a golden age of opportunity.

There’s opportunity aplenty, when you know how to look at things.

See, there are a lot of people out there who are skeptical about anyone who is selling anything on the interwebs.

You may even be dealing with 3 layers of skepticism:

Layer #1: They are skeptical about anyone who’s selling.

Layer #2: They are even more skeptical about anyone who’s selling things online.

Layer #3: They are SUPER hardcore skeptical about something being sold online , because they actually bought something from someone else, and it didn’t work out so well for them.

Because at the end of the day, a website is just a pile of words + pictures. And you can’t really “see” who’s behind that at all.

This is what you are up against when you want to build an online presence.

How do you begin to swashbuckle your way out of this corner you’ve been painted into?

You’ve got to have a super valuable service, one.

You’ve got to have your integrity intact, two.

And, three, you might as well have an About page that doesn’t suck.

By this I mean, quit hiding out behind a boring bio. Quit trying to “look professional.” And actually tell the nice people why you do the work you do.

This goes double for service professionals. Because there are plenty of people who may offer a suite of services (or results) similar to yours, but there really is only one you.

One of the best ways I’ve found to really impress upon your potential clients that you geek out on what you do more than anyone else they’ve met is to “uncork your personality” when you write your About page on your website.
And to do that, you need to know your Powerful Story.

This is the story of how you came to do the work you do now.

And we’re going to follow Aristotle on this one—it needs a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning is where you started out, the middle includes your lowest point (or your AHA moment when you started your business), and the end sums up why your experience (and training) to date has prepared you exquisitely to help [your target market] do [what you help them do] so they can [benefits + outcomes].

This kind of writing is a whole other genre than you may be used to. Most people don’t learn dramatic storytelling structure in school. And they don’t teach you how to write copy that moves people to action, either.

So be patient with yourself. And as you travel in cyberspace, note whose About pages on their websites draw you in… and which ones put you to sleep.

There’s more storytelling to writing copy + marketing than you might first think.

Mighty thanks to cjggbella’s Flickr Photostream for the woman hiding.