Writing an effective “About Us” page

When introducing yourself, simply be confident and honest. But you don't have to show off as much.

The purpose and goal of an About Us (or Company) page is to help your business.

A well written About Us page helps your company to:

• Build credibility
• Create a connection with a potential customer
• And of course, to introduce yourself

To achieve the above there are couple of strategic “rules” that will increase your chances for success. You should use all of them when creating your page.

And yes, you mind find more on this subject on the internet, however, the following is pretty much all you need.

How to write it well? Seven things to consider

There are seven main things you need to address when writing an About page:

1. You need to answer: Who you are?
2. You need to answer: What is your expertise and how it addresses their problem?
3. Give people a chance to contact you
4. Write in third person
5. Include a photo of you (and/or your business/building)
6. Use a bulleted list
7. Link to other pages

1. Who you are?

Start with writing down couple of things about who you are (business as a person). Here, it is not about your expertise but about things like:

• What your business is? (event planning, financial consulting, advertising…)
• Family owned business
• Around for 20 years
• Why is your passion in this industry
• How big/small are you? (8 employees, no employees)

After having this small outline you can link it to sentences.

2. What is your expertise and how it addresses their problem?

People want to know what you are good at, what do you specialize in. List things such as your certificates, previous successes, specialties, your focus…

And people want to see that your expertise addresses their problem. Provide an example of how you “solve” a specific problem. Example: “YYY Corp. will handle the job from start to finish – from furniture moving, to taping the windows, painting the walls, to a final clean up, and putting the furniture back in place.”

3. They want to contact you

After people are convinced that you are the right person for their job you should clearly send them to your contact page or provide some basic contact info right on About page, or both.

4. Write in third person

Unless your business is a one person operated and it’s also obvious to others (you are an artist for example) you should write an About page in third person as much as you can.

Therefore, instead of saying “I will provide you with…” write “Trading Corp. will provide you with…”

5. Include a photo of you (and/or your business/building)

Photo with a business owner and key staff members builds trust. It shows that the business is real and people are doing a great job if they are willing to reveal themselves. This is especially true for small to medium businesses.

Then you can also include a photo of your offices, or a building. One is enough.

6. Use a bulleted list

For sections #1 and #2 you can use a bulleted list to give people an easy way to just scan what you are about instead of writing lengthy paragraphs.

7. Linking to other pages

There will be opportunities to link to other pages on your site within your About page copy. Use them and link those words to page like your services.

Example:
If you are saying “…providing painting, delivery and custom design…” then link those services (words) that have specific pages to those pages. So the word “custom design” will be a link to a page where you describe that service.

Also, if you have a Twitter account or a Facebook page then link to those pages.

How long an About page should be?

Providing that you address all of the above then an About page should be as concise as possible (as short as possible).

People want to find what they are looking for quickly, so unless you are a big corporation that there is a lot to say about you shouldn’t need more than 500-600 words.

What is word of mouth marketing in today’s world? And its importance.

Today, facilitator for word of mouth communication does not have to be a bench.

The more I work with Internet and help my clients with online marketing (as well as overall strategies) the more I believe in the word of mouth power.

It is not to say that Internet should become irrelevant in your marketing efforts, quite the opposite. Because the definition of “word of mouth” changed significantly and not many people actually realize it, at least I believe so.

According to Wikipedia “Word of mouth” is defined as:

“Word of mouth refers to oral communication and the passing of information from person to person…”

That is of course true. But let’s focus on the words “oral communication”.

What is word of mouth today?

Obviously, historically “word of mouth” was describing something being passed from person to person by telling – oral communication. And this passing of information happened in person.

But today when people communicate with each other by many more means than just orally “word of mouth” no longer fits in such a small definition. At least not for marketing purposes.

Today, people use emails, Facebook, text messages or Twitter to pass on information.

What is word of mouth marketing?

In short, this is the best marketing you can have. It means that information is being passed to someone by another person in a casual way, preferably by someone whom they trust.

If a friend tells me that these running shoes are great, or that car mechanic is the best, I am very likely to follow his opinion since I trust him and he is personally communicating such info to me.

However, notice that I don’t care how the info from him got “to my ears”.

Using word of mouth for marketing today

Now you can clearly see that word of mouth describes a bigger means of communication than just a personal meeting, or oral communication.

What this means for word of mouth marketing today, is that you should consider all communication channels when discussing a use of this type of marketing.

And because channels like email, Facebook, Twitter or text messages most likely communicate information from trusted sources the person receiving them is very likely to believe them. In all of the above cases you either have a flat out power to approve “the communicator” or the people voluntarily sign up to listen to you, which means they already trust you to some degree.

The big picture

Since I would never advise a client to pay someone to communicate desired information to their friends then there is only one solution – to be honest.

By being honest, I mean, that it is perfectly OK to get people talking about you in good terms by simply delivering good products and services. It is also OK to reach out to your Facebook fans with a new offer because they signed up for it voluntarily.

But with today’s word of mouth we have no control over how it’s done. And this shouldn’t be a problem for you because we know it has the same powers as 200 years ago when people actually talked

Is giving your customers more choice the best thing to do?

Should I get the white one...or the cream white? Maybe light gray? Ah no, that one is too small.

I bet you experienced situations before when you felt almost intimidated by all the choice that was offered to you. You analyzed your options, compared pros and cons, then finally decided.

Surprisingly enough, instead of feeling great about the choice you made you felt almost liberated to finally be done with it. Not much satisfaction at the end.

Here’s the good news: Don’t worry too much as it turns out to be a fairly common scenario in our society.

To understand this phenomenon take 20 minutes and let this great presentation to explain it to you. If you don’t have time right now (but make sure to get back to it) then skip the video and scroll down to learn what this may mean for your business.

Consequence of too much choice

In summary, Barry’s Schwartz presentation argues that our old belief that “more choice means more individual freedom which leads to more well being and more happiness” is not quite true.

Barry is a leading psychologist and argues that there is a certain number of choices that give us satisfaction from choosing and that actually improve our lives. But he believes that our western societies are long past the point (number of choices) in many areas of life were at the end no matter whether we make a good decision or not we will be unhappy.

Why is this important to your business and marketing?

Experiencing “the intimidation” myself I thought about the “choice concept” few times but until this video I could not come to any meaningful conclusions. Now that I know (I think I got it) here is what I think is important to pass on:

1. Don’t assume that by giving your customers more choice will make for a more successful business. Your customers need to be happy at the end of receiving of your services in order to come back. But clearly too much choice can ruin this.

2. Don’t assume people want many options. We like to give lots of options to people when we are trying to market ourselves. We think by giving more choice than a competitor will make them come to us. At the first glance potential clients think that too but the reality is that if you confuse them they will leave. And after few days of rest from making that decisions they will start shopping again…and will likely not even consider you.

3. Improve your service by filtering down the amounts of choices for your client. He/she hired you to do what you are good at and is paying you to do that. Narrowing down the 20 options he can choose from to logical 5 or 10 will improve your service because you used your expertise to eliminate the obvious bad ones. This saves your client time and headaches.

Hence, why people hire wedding planners. It’s not only the time planners save them but it’s also sparing them the headaches (and regrets) from having to choose from hundreds of things hundreds of times.

4. Giving less choice makes your life easier and makes for better decisions for your client. Again, client expects you to deliver good stuff. To achieve that lots of times it is better to really filter down the choice for the sake of your client.

This will also make your life easier since the client won’t be going back and forth once a decision has been made on a specific stage of a project. Simply, if you leave them with little guidance they will be rethinking their past decisions. This will complicate your life as well as make it very possible that an unprofessional decision will be made (in a given field where you should be the expert).

5. Read the client and take responsibility. If you guess a client to be reasonably well equipped with expertise in your field than give them more freedom, more choice. If that’s not the case take responsibility in your hands and make the decisions for the benefit of both of you.

What do you think?

Whether you agree or disagree with my conclusions you are welcome to leave a comment. We will both learn more by sharing. Or maybe not, since too much discussion can leave us with more choices and headaches

10 Tips for writing content for your website

For anyone, writing content for his or her website is one of the most problematic things to do because we have very different writing skills and we tend to be very perfectionist about it.

To help you get over this “perfectionist obsession” here are couple of tips that will make your content writing better and will serve you as a guideline on what to do, what to avoid and be aware of. If you are in line with these you will not be editing your copy for weeks.

1. Short sentences and paragraphs

People are more scanning than reading on the Internet, so it is important to give them manageable chucks instead of long blocks of text. After all you want to keep them reading.

The best thing to keep them interested is to use short sentences and paragraphs. Leave anything you don’t really need to say out. Paragraphs should be no more than 5 lines long unless there is a good reason for it.

Side effect of all this is having lots of white space within your copy. White space makes it way easier to read on a screen than you would ever notice on paper.

2. Bulleted (or numbered) lists for highlights

Bulleted or numbered lists are one of the best ways to keep people interested because they will see you are giving them what they want in a concise way.

Use lists over splitting multiple facts with comas within a long sentence. Lists are easier on eyes and they are clearer. This will keep your readers moving through the article. And if they want to go back to something important later, it is much easier to find it in a list than in a block of text.

3. Spelling: Canadian vs American English

Always keep in mind for which audience you are writing. If your business is located in Canada but wants to attract more Americans than Canadians then your spelling should reflect that. It is easy to get confused.

For example, a simple words such as “colour” or “favour” need to be spelled “color” and “favor” for the American audience. Canadians don’t mind reading both but if you are serious about your business professional image then this should keep your primary audience happy.

4. Use lots of headlines

Just like with paragraphs, sections of articles on the web are also shorter than in newspapers. So use lots of headlines to break up your article into more “digestible” pieces.

However, this does not mean each paragraph will have a new headline. Only keep in mind that if a person scans an article versus reads it whether they will get some idea of what the article is about. Therefore, they can decide whether they should read the whole thing.

5. Use links to reference other pages

One of great ways to keep people on your website and help them navigate it is to use links within your copy to move them from page to page.

For example, if you write:”If you have more questions about this package please contact us.”, then you would make the words “contact us” a link to your contact page.

6. Only one space after a period

Always put one space after a period, not two or none. People have different habits when it comes to an end of a sentence but the correct way is to use one space after a period.

7. It’s and Its

This is a common mistake committed on the web by even the most professional writers. It may come from trying to write fast but at some instances people simply don’t know the difference.

It’s – is short for “it is”, so you can say “it’s your car” instead of “it is your car”.

Its – communicates possession. “Its cover is plastic” is correct as opposed to “it’s cover is plastic”.

8. There, Their (Your), They’re (You’re)

There – references the whereabouts. “I got there on time” or “my car is parked over there”.

Their (Your) – like “its” this term communicates possession. “Their hands were cold”.

They’re (You’re) – is short for “they are”, so you could use it as “…no wonder they’re late”.

9. Than and Then

This is one of the most made mistakes in writing besides regular spelling mistakes. The misuse of these words can make a sentence to loose meaning and make you look illiterate.

Than – is a quantitative term used for comparison. “I am taller than you” is correct while “I am taller then you” is not.

Then – references point in time, so you could say “He came home and then called you.”

And here is a sentence when you would use both terms:”Once he is better than him then he will get more opportunities.”

10. Overuse of bold and italic for highlighting

You should use bold or italics for highlighting important things, however, an over use of these within an article will result in nothing more than annoying your reading.

Reserve them only for few instances and you will make a greater impact when you really want it.

Happy writing

The above tips give you good guidelines on how to write for your website or even on how to write in general.

Always make sure to keep in mind who your audience is. This will make it easier to form your thoughts and target the right reader.

Search engine optimization: some tips, tricks and advice

Search engine optimization or SEO – many people ask for it or about it. For those that don’t know what it is here is the Wikipedia definition:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

SEO, basically, uses a set of techniques that improve position of your website in search engine rankings such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. Some of the techniques are applied directly on your website (within your text), whereas, others are applied outside (linking to your website).

No matter what we advise here, always remember, that you actually do business with people. So whatever you do with SEO make sure the text and the looks of your website can make the sale. Google’s robots aren’t gonna phone you up any time soon

SEO tips and tricks you can do on your website

First, you need to determine what keywords you want to be found for. It is really good to be found for a term like “wedding planner” or “roofing company”. However, those are highly competitive terms as you go head-to-head against anyone providing those services, and uses English on their website.

So you need to think deeper, more like this:

• Where am I providing my service? (location)
• Who are my through customers? (gay couples, businesses, individuals…)

You got the idea, so lets optimize for a term such as “Vancouver wedding planner” inside a copy on one of your website’s pages.

You want to use that term as the first words in your page title, in your first paragraph and as a term throughout the page. Then you can ask your webmaster to put that term on the first position of your title, description, and keywords tags. Those are pieces of code that are part of each page’s code but are not visible to visitors but search engine robots read them.

Actually, you can see what’s inside the title tag when you look at the very top of your browser window.

To further increase your chances for this term, you want to link to the page you optimized from your other pages. And the text that is the click-able link should say “Vancouver wedding planner”.

SEO tips and tricks you can do outside of your website

To further improve your ranking you should try to get links to your website. The best is when those links appear on pages that discuss the same or similar topic like you have on your optimized page.

To get links from other websites might be tough but here are some way:

• Ask your friends to link to you.
• Participate in topic related forums an leave signatures with your link.
• Sign-up for directories.
• Start a blog that is outside of your website.
• Exchange links with other businesses that offer services related to you.

So that would be all the basic things you can do yourself to help your website gain positions on search engines.