Photo with thanks to PuzzledMonkey on Flickr.
You know how when you sit down to write the dreaded about page, and you want to get it right, because somebody somewhere told you that it’s the most visited page on your site? (Nothing like a boat load of pressure to really turn the creativity on eh?) And so you’re faced with either starting from scratch, or maybe tweaking what you have already.
Well yeah, I feel your pain lovely. And I think I finally worked out why it’s just so hard.
*drum roll*
What?!?
Think about it for a moment … you’re this wonderful, glorious, multi-faceted, superb individual, with so many interests and dreams and passions. And sure, your business might deal with one or two of these specific facets but even then, those parts of you are growing and stretching and changing all the time: bits are knocked off here and a little tweak along the way there.
When you write your about page, you’re trying to hone all of that stuff into one neat, concise package that will whisper gently to your ideal clients. And sure, you might totally nail it the very first time you write it.
But what happens when, just a few months or weeks (or dare I even say, days?!) later, you find that you’re not quite the same person that you once were? What then?
You might follow the tradition of so many others before you and write a page that speaks directly to your perfect people. It’s a pretty popular thing to do to be fair and the psychology behind it works a treat.
Who would you prefer to have serving you … someone who serves the whole world, or someone who has dedicated themselves to serving you and people just like you?
There’s a joy that comes from feeling like someone knows you and your needs and your hopes, dreams, fears and aspirations intimately.
But if people are ever changing, how can you even begin to hope to really get inside their heads and win that one?
I don’t know about you but catch me on an off day and it’d be enough to make me want to curl up with a hot cup of tea and forget about it all. It’s too hard!
Well I had this idea that might be kind of crazy but I’m going to give it a shot and I wondered if you might like to play too?
Thanks to the wonders of WordPress’s new(ish!) menu set up, you can now very quickly and easily add a something to your menu that isn’t a page on your site.
A link to a sales page for your new thing that’s on a different site for example.
Or a blog post.
Or anything really that has a URL.
So what if, instead of having ‘about me’ linking to a static page on your site, you chose to link to a blog post? And maybe, instead of that hefty ‘one time cracked it and now I’m done’ love letter to your ideal client, you have a link to a blog post.
By the very nature of their being, with comments and share buttons and the like, blog posts are fluid. They’re not timeless. They can be revisited. Discussed again.
The way I’m doing it is rolling ‘about me’ and ‘about you’ into one post because the idea of writing a post all about myself every time I have an iteration feels like it could quickly become a pain in the arse!
But if you want to play too, you can do it in whatever way feels like it would work best for you.
But remember, the key here is fluidity. You might try it one way and realise that it’s not exactly right for you. That’s OK. Just tweak it. Or delete it. Or keep it as it is, version 1 if you will, and then start work on version 2.
But what do you think? Do you find yourself stuck because you’re trying to prepare the perfect, one-time solution? Let’s chat about it in the comments.
