What does your About page look like? When was the last time you thought about it? Read it? Viewed its visitor stats?

Done properly, a well-structured, informative and human About page will work wonders with visitors to your site. It’s one of your site’s key pages and one that visitors use, without fail, to work out whether they should buy from you.

It’s one of the key places where you can differentiate yourself; provide some useful validating credentials about you and your Business; and, very importantly, demonstrate that you have a human side and are a friendly company to do business with.

It’s a sales tool

Once users have found your website and learned about how you are going to solve their problems, they will start looking to other areas of your site to help them make that buy decision. Assuming for a second that they’re evaluating more than one vendor, your About page will play a key role in nudging them in your direction. The page is a crucial conversion tool. A good About page is structured to guide the reader towards a strong call to action.

If your About page is bland, uninteresting and doesn’t excite your customer, you’ve probably lost the sale.

Your About page needs to engage, captivate and Convince your customer that you are the company they need to do business with. It needs to communicate your values; why you’re in business; and get them to take action.

Think of it as a bit like the first few pages of a book. If the author can’t get you beyond those first few words, you won’t continue. The author’s job is to engage you. Convince you that her book is worth reading. Parallels with your About page? Yep!

Don’t be boring

If you look at your website stats, you’ll likely see that your About page is the second most visited one, after your homepage. But if it has a high Bounce Rate (it often has the highest bounce rate), you’ll know you need to do something about it. Remember, the bounce rate is the percentage of people that leave your site after reading the page they’re on. Ouch!

If someone visits your About page, they’re saying… “I like what this company does… I want to know more.”. At this point, they’re genuinely interested in what you do, and it’s the job of your About page to pull them in and get them to contact you.

If your About page is boring, you’ve told them to take their business elsewhere. Oops.

Visitors will instantly know if your About page is interesting or not – they’ve seen plenty of them and they know a good one when they see one. If they like what they see, they will reward you with their attention and will explore more of your site. It’s the job of the About page to steer them towards doing something. It could be a call to action to email you, or it could be to read one of your best articles or to download that fantastic case study of yours.

Time to take action

Knowing all the above, you now have all you need to craft an amazing About page that engages, holds interest and converts.

If you need a little help, the following is a tried and tested formula for creating a page that gets prospects excited and steers them to where you want them to go.

While there are tons of ways of creating a good About page, these elements are a good starting point.

• The value proposition
• A day-dream… a what-if scenario
• The differentiator
• Your story
• The offering
• The call to action

This article is already quite long so I’m only going to give you a one-liner about each one now. There’ll be more detail in Part 2.

Value proposition

I’ve written about this before… it’s a simple statement about what problems you solve, who you solve them for, and what the benefits are.

Day-dream

This is where you describe your customer’s world as it will be when they buy your widget.

Differentiator

Of all the companies supplying widgets, why should customers buy from you? How and why are you different?

Story

Introduce the human angle. Why are you a good company to buy from? How did you get into this business? Why should I trust you to deliver the most beneficial widgets?

Offering

OK, I like what I’ve read. What should I read next to convince me to take action? A case study? Your most interesting articles?

Call to action

And finally… what do you want your prospect to do next? Call you? Email you? Be specific. Be urgent. Be persuasive.

That’s it. You’ve done it!

More in the next article. In the meantime, get in touch (now!) if you want some help in putting together your About page. If you’re not sure you want to contact me, read my About page. But beware, if you do, you’ll want to contact me once you get to the bottom.

The post How to write an About page that sells (part 1) appeared first on Orange Mesh.