The Best Marketing Tool for your Astrology Blog–An Effective “About Me” Page

©2008/2010 by Donna Cunningham, MSW

 The “About Me” section of a blog or website is a separate page where you introduce the visitor to yourself, your work, and what you stand for.  Research into the habits of internet users reveals that this is usually the first page they click on and the one they spend the most time reading.

If you don’t have one yet—or if yours lacks impact—you miss an important opportunity to develop a relationship with a potential client. When visitors don’t have a clear picture of who they’re dealing with and don’t feel a connection, they’re far less likely to become clients. 

Researchers also found that to be effective, this introduction needs to be warm, personal, open, and honest. A sense of accessibility was crucial for the corporate sites these studies focused on, and it’s even more so for professionals in private practice. What you’re marketing on this page isn’t a product but yourself and your life work.

The text should paint a vivid picture of who you are, what you stand for, and what drives you to offer your services. It humanizes what could otherwise be a dry, impersonal sales pitch.  A professional-quality photograph is one way of establishing a connection. A well-written, compact, and engaging summary of your life work and values is another.

Where do you get material for your About Me page? A resume is one place to start, but I’d advise against posting yours on your site. Resumes are too impersonal—and frankly too boring. Internet visitors respond to presentations that are livelier and more personable.  You do need to portray the background you bring to the work.  

Newcomers won’t understand technical details about your profession or method or even bother to read them.  Cover those details in your Services Page or in educational articles on the site and create links to them on the About Me page. We’ll go through a step-by-step process of creating a good bio in a later article.

Make sure the text is conversational in tone. Good internet writing is very different from print media. It needs to be clear, simple, and readable. Researchers discovered, using eye tracking cameras, that visitors scan pages rapidly rather than reading them word for word. Words, sentences, and paragraphs should be short and clean, with no chance of confusion. The language needs to be concise, powerful, proactive, client-centered and real.

One way to make your About Page less formal and more conversational is to tell it like a story—suppose that you met a new group of friends and they wanted to know how you got into your field and what the stops were along the way. 

As you write it, imagine what questions your new friends would be asking. Imagine where they might be confused by your field’s jargon or some unfamiliar spiritual group you belonged to. 

You might even call a close friend and tell him or her exactly what you want your web visitors to know. Then as quickly as you can, write it down, as close to word for word as you can remember. Just let the words flow. You can fix spelling and grammar later.

Avoid jargon that would put off newcomers to your type of service.  In astrological work, these might include terms like progressions, quincunx, retrograde, stellium, and Grand Cross.  Keep inserting brief and unobtrusive explanations for any technical terms that you feel you need to include.  

For example, if you’re a lightworker, you might write:  “Then I went to a spiritual group that teaches you how to work with different colors of light. Lightwork boosted my own healing, so I began working that way with clients as well and found it made our work together go faster and deeper.” 

For more detail on the working of the technique, add links to those groups or to pages on your site that talk about those strands of your work.  (This also helps in promoting your site. Search engines rank you higher with good links.)

A good About Me page takes time, thought, and creativity.  As the research shows, however, it pays off in getting readers to stick around long enough to read the rest of your material.  

 Put yourself in your readers’ shoes—when you visit a blog or web page that has little or no information about person, how inclined are you to trust the person?  And when you need help on something and are looking for the right person to help you, how does a dry rectitation of credentials in four-syllable words strike you?  When you’re creating your own About me page, visit other astrologers’ blogs and read how they’ve approached this very important task.  I invite you to visit mine here: About.

More Website and Blog Tips on Skywriter:

• Free Advertising—How to Create Email Signatures
• How to Add Impact to Your Site with Pictures
• Tips for Bloggers 1—Retooling your Astrology Posts to Keep them Fresh
• Tips for Bloggers 2—Backlinks and other Tactics
• Tips for Bloggers 3–A Promising Anthology on Blogging
• Testimonials that Work: Promote Yourself with Integrity, Credibility—and Class!
  Writing Tips–10 Dos and Don’ts for Astrology Blogs