 Thanks, so today my topic is on five secrets to a knockout about page and I came up with this because you know I have people come up to me at WordPress meet-ups and you know kind of clients and prospective clients ask well what do I what do I put on that page how do I talk about myself so people will listen and I actually reach my customers and you know I get these kind of questions over and over again because I think people focus on themselves and get intimidated and be like how do I either fit you know my business into 400 words or how do I take up 400 words with what I do and explain to people in layman's terms so that's what I'm here to explain to you today. And I think you know the most important part is knowing yourself as well as knowing your audience. So your about page is really your first opportunity for deep connection with that audience so whoever you're appealing to your existing customers your prospective customers our readers if you're a blogger like my friend over here he's been blogging for years now and I like to read him because he's always you know he's always got so much interesting stuff to say and he's got a crazy interesting story. So whoever you're appealing to you want to know so target audience and I think people kind of get tripped up here because they think well how do I find them and how do I keep them interested and what I like to do is sit down with my clients and do what's called an empathy map and so you have a simple piece of paper and I actually have it in a list of resources at the end of my presentation but it's a simple piece of paper and you write everything down about what your readers are thinking and feeling and doing and I think saying when they first come to your blog or they first look for your product or service and then you do that exercise again for what your vision is for them after they've worked with you or after they've read your wonderful piece or after you've made that connection with them and keyword research is a big part of that too so if you know your audience and you have your customer persona developed and you write to that ideally that's your first step so just kind of to see that in practice I want you to take a look at two about pages I've written for clients so this one is for a friend of mine she's a dance instructor social media manager crazy passionate business owner who loves helping entrepreneurs get their kind of online presence set up and set them apart from the competition so she's got a lot of personality and she's a one-woman show type deal so I you know I really played up her go-getter attitude she's a to-do-lister she's a type A but also a really warm personality and in the second paragraph I really have her empathize with her customers because you know to kind of show she's in tune with she knows what they want and kind of the end of that I talk about you know I'm I'm here now and basically I'm ready to work with you and that's in contrast to a site I did for a steel plate work company in my hometown they are more of a corporate feel they they have these million dollar projects and they make like steel plate storage facilities for all different types of industries so what you're going for a manufacturing is more dependability high quality custom solutions things like that and this is much more conservative and it's much more kind of product focus whereas my friends is service focus and it it's a really good clean layout the web design company that I worked with on this with did a really good job of kind of getting it all on there in terms of you know what they do and it's no less personal but it's a different feel so after you've kind of connected with your audience you want to build trust with them and I think in one of our first talks today if you were in Joey Coleman's talk he talked about building trust with your audience and this is kind of the same you know or similar idea they're not going to buy from you if they don't trust you so you want to and he illustrated this throughout his talk he want to show them not tell them that they can trust you but how do you do that well you get testimonials another client of mine is a virtual assistant and her problem is I think that people when they first hear of virtual assistants they think what do they do and if they're not in my office how do I watch them and how do I make sure they're on task and how do I keep them accountable well this testimonial goes a long way to illustrating that she's a crazy good collaborator and worker and she's incredibly smart and you know her her clients happiness with your service is you know kind of illustrated here the amazing Sandra Booker got me through my first ever live webinar if you've ever done a webinar you know how precious that is you know with no crying and no sweat I would pay for that another thing you can do is illustrate your credibility another presenter we had today was Michelle Ames she's a website designer and she's been in the WordPress community for I think six years now and she's done tons of stuff in the WordPress community and she's a crazy smart marketer and so she really drives that home on her page and when I read it I said I would totally work with this lady look at all the look at all the stuff she does look at all the people she has contacts with look at all the formal education she has and she's got 20 years of experience and fundraising marketing and teaching you know I'm sure she could do whatever I needed her to do and so that inspires confidence in prospects that makes them say okay if she's helped all these other people there's a chance that she can guide me through my challenge another thing in number three and I think this is another challenge people have is crafting your story in your own voice and finding your sweet spot and letting your personality shine this is I think a lot of the time what my job is is to find those stories in people's businesses and help them bring them out help them give them what does it mean to craft your own story well in you know four or five hundred words you've got to set yourself apart from every other person on the web who does what you do so Todd over here has an amazing story he's a blogger but he's so much more than that he's a storyteller and when I saw him talk two years ago I thought I've got to have him talk at my local meetup and so I you know I wrote him an email and I said Todd you know you've got to come down and talk to the writers in my community because you're just that good at crafting your story and you know he if you know anything about him he's been through an amazing health journey that I'm sure he can tell you more about but he's got a compelling story so much so that I remember it two years later that's a you know that fosters connection and when you foster connection all that other stuff comes into play so again my client the virtual assistant you know talks about how she's got integrity and she does things with peace and love and she built this little company and her vision is to change the world she wants to make the lives of small business owners easier and no she she talks about helping people do the work they were called to do not not just sitting at their desks right so does anyone here is anyone here kind of writing your about page right now and you're totally lost I said you know what's my story and how do I find it so what do you what do you do a lot of people have been in your position my mom's actually retired and you know what I find is that it's a real almost like a new life for them your identity isn't built around work anymore it's built around probably your hobbies your you know your family yeah thing you know what do you want to do now is the question you're asking yourself not what does my boss wanted want me to do by five o'clock it's a from from what I've seen from you know both my parents and kind of other people I know is that it's a totally different outlook on life and it's a you know it's a big question to answer so how I guess you really start to soul search in terms of you know what what makes me different than any of the other retirees out there and if I want to if I want to monetize that by any chance how do I kind of appeal to my market right and I think when you know by the time you kind of engage yourself in that conversation it's I think you'll surprise yourself with the stuff you come out with something constructive in some kind of legacy yeah yeah so like what what industry you're like what's your do you have a specific hobby or I work as an engineer okay yeah yeah so like maybe self-publishing is an option yeah so you're you know when you kind of figure that out you're about page might be centered around I'm a self-published author here's what I write and here are my books plural and you know and what they're about and then you kind of zero in you do the keyword research for that topic and you start you start then you start coming up with all sorts of ideas for blog posts and you build your content strategy around that that's when it gets really that's when it gets really fun and I you know as a writer I can sympathize with how do I how do I get into words what my life's passion is because it's not easy it's not easy for me either it's not easy to do it for yourself yeah so I think that's what people bring me in for but when I have to do it myself I have to really like it takes weeks still it's a whole different ballgame when it's yourself so and it requires asking yourself a lot of hard questions you know but part of that is that you get to kind of go back through your journey and to take you know kind of key milestones or key moments and say you know how do I how do I integrate that and how do I infuse kind of my passion into my story on a page and one of the ways to do that is to use pictures and video because I work with words but what you can do with with words and pictures and video is amazing I have had to kind of struggle with this because I'm a storyteller and I also one of my hobbies is photography and I like to write long-form content and what you know what people people kind of grown up that sometimes they say long-form content you may not have to spend you know half an hour reading something and you know if you're a blogger you don't want to hit people with a wall of great text you want to use color and and passion you know in life and you know more than more than words so I work with a lot of different that's where designers come in that's where videographers come in and there are tons of you know equipment and you know different devices out there now that you can take a video on your smartphone in 20 seconds that you couldn't 10 years ago and you know come up with a completely exceptional about page or blog post and this is another example I didn't write this one but this is an example of an about page I happened to cross when I was writing an article on this company so what I loved about this is that they have their story but their pictures really bring it out they build themselves as and I think they are the only oyster house in Niagara where I'm from and how they started six years ago was they bought a 1974 VW camper and that was there kind of you know that was their kind of stick and from there they've grown their business into a flagship restaurant and you see them at the ribbon cutting there and it's just a it's just an amazing story Mike Langley the guy pictured there I actually wrote an article on him he went to China to compete in this world it's called shuck off and he competed in a world shucking championship at the end of the month in May and to be like he's so he's Canada's I think best your fastest shucker or something and he's competing at the world level now so I wrote an article for my client kind of playing that up and saying you know wow we have this great story right here in Niagara basically you know our national champion and he's going for the big time and you know what's what really sets this page apart is the story that you can see kind of like the progress and the VW camper or something that you don't see every other restaurant having it's unique I think like maybe yeah so it's multimedia very much so multimedia I didn't happen to find it like a video I liked on an about page for this presentation but you know I think if they if they had video of them at a at a food festival or something shucking yeah yeah if he gets back and he and he puts one up there of you know him him on the stage hoisting the trophy that's huge right you know different you know different aspects of media so I've had to really adjust my thinking like you know what media and different multimedia is my friend it brings more attention it's all you know it's all content it's all creating great content right so my fifth point is about white space so yeah you do want to have video and you want to have the best you know possible story and you want to have pictures in there but also don't be afraid of white space because minimalism can be beautiful and what I mean by that is that you don't have to fill up like every inch of your page in fact please don't it hurts my eyes and it doesn't make for a great user experience so use white space with judgment so one of the one of the about pages I love for this as an example is my friend Jessica St. Peter she runs a web design company called brand web design and she talks here about you know what she offers clients she you know custom creates online solutions she develops brands and she does a little teaching to small business owners to you know have them create their own branded materials she doesn't have any pictures on here but what I loved is that she really used white space effectively it's beautiful it's simple and sometimes that is the best thing to get your message across it's all pretty much right there and what I love about her site is that she has kind of like different different sections and different colors and she really has flow to her page she knows what she's doing she has calls to actions here she has her social right up front she has more information where you can click so she knows what's up and I think I had a bonus point in here about calls to action so if you search HubSpot or any blog of any size on marketing you're going to see all kinds of information and you can probably subscribe to a bunch of different tools and newsletters and all that stuff about calls to action because we're forever arguing in the marketing world about how to create calls to action that actually motivate people to do what you want them to do because there's tons of different schools of thought on this and people I think it all caught up in well what are the best you know most what's gonna get me the most clicks and what I love about you know Jessica's site again here is that it's you know it's a really easy kind of flow to go from visiting her site and at the bottom she has this thanks for visiting are you interested in working with me book a discovery call bam okay I want to find out more so you're telling your reader what you want them to do next because it's not always obvious it might be obvious to you but I promise you it's not for your customers and your readers and anybody else outside who's visiting your site for the first time so even if you're not selling something on your site even if you're a blogger or an author what you can do is say you know if you have a blog or if you have anywhere to point that reader anything you want them to do next this is where you want to put your call to action in this is where you want to tell them about that and I've always this has been always kind of one of my challenges when I first started creating content because you know I didn't want to be too too pushy or I didn't want to yell at people I didn't want to I didn't want to be too car you know used car sales many so you know I I would agonize over this stuff and I think you know what what I look at when I see these examples is that you know it doesn't have to be you know cheesy or kinsy it doesn't have to give you a yucky feeling it just has to tell them what you want them to do because they don't know and you know if they don't know they're not going to give you their money and they're not going to come back to your site so calls to action are are your friend use them so what I want to point you to here are resources empathy maps what I talked about earlier some tips on how to make your own about page and for a keyword research and the search engine optimization which I didn't talk about a lot but is also hugely important for target targeting your page is a Yoast SEO if you're writing anything on WordPress you want to get this plug-in because it just gives you a really easy way of punching in your keyword and creating meta description and doing all that SEO stuff and it color codes everything you need to do to turn that little green light on that you want to get before you publish your page that says okay this page is good to go it's optimized so it's a priceless tool to have and there are free keyword research tools out there so you can basically use there's a lot of them I don't know the ins and outs in each one but in the research I did at lunchtime so I will post this I will post my slide deck on slide share and you can you can go ahead there but yeah there are tons of tons of tons of tools out there to use everything from keyword.io which is easy to remember to what are some other ones people like to use I believe there's a hrefs there's tons of tons of free and paid tools out there so they're your friend too they might look intimidating at first but learn to use them because it will be worth your time so now I want to answer your questions. I love the idea that there's one pop up sign up for my thing but I hate it when it keeps coming up every single page that I'm going to someone's website and this thing keeps coming up so I feel like there should be a range to have it come up once and then you know after that they still on the same site. Is that a possibility? So I think so because I have that experience too and you know the really I'm like not as technically capable on this stuff as I wish I was but and I don't like to use those things on my own site just for that reason. If people want to want to contact me or want my stuff that badly. Yeah yeah yeah especially when you're on mobile and the X is kind of like grayed out way up in the corner and you can't see any of the content you actually came there to read. Yeah so media sites are bad for that I find. And also like when you go to write your email but it's not optimized for emails so it makes you type the whole thing out again. Yeah so like I wish we knew which pop ups of the game was which email boxes actually knew that an email was supposed to be there. Yeah it's kind of a wild west out there. I find like we're starting to standardize some of that stuff and some of it is starting to be like regulated but in terms of like the tools that have been used. Like I find it's different for every site. Yeah so I'm always interested. I'm like you know I'm very passionate about learning more about kind of user experience and usability. So if anyone can do a talk on that next year I will come to it because user experience is huge in content as well. I don't know what you use but I use MailChimp. Yeah it's just a setting to change but it only pops up once. And when someone goes to put their email in it knows it's an email so it says here's your emails. There's a setting or it should know. I mean it's a subscribe box. Yeah. Right. Yes. It should just automatically come with that. And I'll say go ahead with that. Sure. Yeah. Sure. What do you think? Would you recommend writing in like first person or third person? I like to write in first person. If you're like you're a one woman kind of business. Well it's me and my husband. Yeah. So I would. Just you. Yeah. So there's a thought on this and you know you might talk to another marketer and they might say make your company look as big as possible online because that builds credibility. And I believe that if you're a one person business or you know one or two people use the pronoun that makes sense. So if you are a we I say use we you know if you're a partnership we if you're a one person show I I like I I like try not to start like every sentence with it because people scan we scan pages before we read them. And if people read I I I even if you're talking about them their eyes are going to glaze over. So kind of at the top start like start right in with the empathizing and talk to the pain points. Target audience you can talk more to their pain points and say I understand what you're feeling. Now here's why you're on my site. Here's why you're like here's kind of what problems you might have. And on my own site I use I because it's just me. So and I'm a freelancer. I'm a copywriter and I don't know I don't think I plan to hire at all. I partner a lot with web designers and social media people but I just work for myself. So I I like using I because I think it creates connection with my audience. It says you know I'm what you see is what you get type thing. Yeah. So you could write about it. Well he has his and he writes both I write both certain things and then we write both things together. So sometimes I'm using I sometimes when you delete. Yeah. I'm definitely like definitely in your blog posts if you have a byline and you write as I and he writes is him or yeah. Yeah. So if you have like if you have a kind of a joint vision for that. What do you do. I should have asked what you did. I should have asked what your what your business is. Okay. So I'd say if if you have a kind of a joint vision you talk we know this is our story and kind of how we got here. And then you kind of point to your blog page and say for each of our stories. So the things that we write together but then there's things like you write technical stuff. Oh okay. And I wouldn't have a clue. So when it comes up and it says by so-and-so it says by Jeffrey or I write something that says by yourself but it's a joint one that says by so-and-so it's you can see who is writing. Yeah. Yeah. I would suggest we for your about page if it's like single purpose and I for your posts. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Would it matter then if it's a business or a blog title as opposed to the individuals that you vote it's about. Like you know you could say you know things you see company. Yeah. The voters do it helping you with this. You're probably more you know probably you see blog is here to do whatever and we bring whatever. So it's it's not an individual it's an entity. Yeah. Yeah. So I've seen like different titles like about us or even about or no different like for the corporate kind of like the corporate page. I did. Where is it? On the way back here. I used the company's name. Canada's premier tank builder. TIW still plate work specializes in so and so and then on my other page we used I'm a go getter to do list or a goal setter. So it's clearly like kind of a different tone and a different kind of a different message because here you're connecting with everybody in that company from the executive down to the the foreshot people here you're connecting with one woman. So I think that was the question is I heard it. Thank you say I'm a this I'm a that I did this. I never heard you say I like I like I prefer the third person. I don't know like I like pretty my clients out there as if they wrote their bio unless it's a speaker's bio which you know use your if you're writing a speaker's bio it's I guess it would depend on the piece of content because if you're if you're kind of cribbing your about page for your speakers bio when you write your speaker bio you say you use third person and then for your about page you use first person. And I like I've seen different styles but I like I think the important thing is the person behind it. So if you're focusing right now on the outside of the person. Yeah definitely. So you know this one kind of really really brings out like you want to go to that restaurant you know or you know catch these people at a food festival and say what may do leave because this couple left downtown Toronto to come back to Niagara where this guy is from and you know and buy a 1974 VW camper and start an oyster start an oyster house like not everybody does that I want to meet these people and you know I want to eat at the restaurant and I want to find out all about them. They're buying what you do they're buying why they're buying your why right. So you have to find this this page is kind of heavier on pictures but find your why and then drive that point home emotions are big people don't buy based on emotion they based or they they buy based on emotion not logic the logic supports their justification. So supporting documentation if you're selling a piece of software or you know benefits you know basically benefits over features is what I'm trying to kind of say here so we connect and we identify with one another based on emotion we justify our purchase decisions with well this is the features it has and you know this is why my decision is right. So when you're arguing with your spouse you can say well this dishwasher is this or you know this digital camera is this but there's something that attracted you to that business what is it and that you have to ask your current customers. Yes. Anything else? So I actually the only the only examples in this presentation that are mine are this one and this one but what I do with my clients is particularly for TIW I was on site interviewing their people and you know actually walking around their place where they're building these machines and where they're building these pieces. I was you know kind of on site with them for a good couple of months a good three months by the time we were done that project writing bios and kind of meeting other people and kind of getting in the culture for what I'm supposed to write because steel storage tanks I didn't know anything about steel storage tanks or the industry and we know what I love about my job is that I get to meet different people every day so you know a contrast to manufacturing and social media and digital marketing is huge but it's really about connecting them to their audience so I do interview them I do love to sit down with them in person or remotely or truly if I have to but I really like what I call those kitchen table conversations and getting them to drill down to their why. Now why are they in business? I just got my five minute warning so I can take one more question. So I noticed that the examples the URL has about us at the end but I noticed that the headers are different I like like I'm just at school the other one said our story yeah I like that so what's your experience with that using do you think there's one that works really well like I really like our story. Yeah I think for yeah it's really based on your business and kind of what your what your voice is and what your tone is like scope is corporate wise that's you know here's everything we do and our story is really personal and what I do is to me driving home the fact that you know here it is I'm going to explain to you right now plain plain English and she's really clearly saying it's me let's talk she's she's taking a stand and saying I'm not going to tell you I'm a ten person company I'm not going to hide behind the fact that it's just me I'm going to kind of proudly say that it's me and you and she's maybe I'm thinking about this too much but she's saying like she's kind of a partner right so it's really dependent on what your what your goals are for that page. She's actually done a really good job of saying what she does for her customer as opposed to saying what she's yeah that's probably preferred. Yeah so what your clients are really looking for when they come across these paragraphs is I think exactly this not what you do but what can you do for them is what they're looking for so she kind of spells that out really perfectly here she creates custom online solutions for savvy entrepreneurs who want more than a cookie cutter website that's a lot of entrepreneurs out there and she she specifies like even somebody who's not into online marketing doesn't know any of this lingo could say okay she can help me out with my visual branding. Yeah it's right there. Yeah so this is her site. I think it might be a separate page but because a lot of them you just click on it and it just brings you to that part of the page. Yeah but she Yep it is one page. How do you feel about one page? I have different like different opinions on I like the my own site is like different pages SEO wise I've heard different pages are better but I've also you know depending on how they're how they're developed and how they're done when pagers can work too I think it depends on what your like what what your goals are there too. Do you think it's annoying when people put a menu and it just drops down halfway through the page? Not necessarily like I like I like to control things like I like to click on and like again door to a different page. This is a different page right? I think it is. So there it is. That's all one page. So what happens when you press about? Does it go drop down? So when you go to her home page let's see what happens. It's slow. What's going on? So that's a different page. So you click the about page to go to about all right. But thanks everyone for kind of engaging.