Building An About Us Page That Helps You

Building An About Us Page That Helps You

I’ve been doing a little work on my niche sites for the niche site challenge. I wrote a tweet earlier that the best way to get started was to find a good niche website and see what works from it. That’s what I did yesterday, and I came across an interesting thing: The About Us page of one site was genius.

If you’re like I was, you are probably thinking, “A niche site basically is a set of sales letters where you’re hoping your reader will leave the site. Why would you need an About Us page?”

Like I said, that’s exactly what I thought until reading the About Us page yesterday. Then I saw the light, and I realised a few things about an About Us page for a niche site:

1. It adds legitimacy to the site (Whilst your site is basically some affiliate links with articles wrapped around them, you don’t want it to look like that’s what it is.)
2. An About Us page can be used to sell stuff and direct traffic.
3. An About Us page – and this is the important one – is used so that you can sort out in your head the features and benefits of why you’re building the site.

Why Are You Building A Site?

You’ve taken the awesome step that’ll lead to all sorts of good things; you’re participating in the niche site challenge. Naturally, you have reasons for doing so: You want a ton of money, you want to improve your copywriting, you want your cat or a harem of beautiful girls to love you, so on and so forth.

That presents a problem: You can’t expect people to read your site and buy your stuff if that’s your attitude going into a site building project. Nobody who reads your website cares if you make any money writing it, and nobody will pay for you to keep writing if there isn’t a tangible benefit for them. They want to see immediate tangible benefits before they read your site, let alone pay for some product you’re reviewing.

Writing an About Us page for your website helps clear your head of “I want people to buy through my affiliate link” and replaces it with “I’m writing this site because I wanted to learn about this niche subject and realised that not many sites talked about X aspect of the niche.”

It’s as easy as thinking this question: “Why am I interested in X subject?”

So, for the first website I’m creating as part of the challenge my reasons are (aside from the beautiful women and chests full of gold):

• This niche is something that promotes healthier living
• There are lots of different options for products to buy in this niche, and it’s overwhelming
• There are professional people who provide this service, but it’s far more fulfilling to do it yourself – as well as cheaper and healthier.

Those are all true reasons for my getting involved in said niche. Those facts will inform every sales letter I write because they are key benefits. (Notice how they also work according to the magical triangle?)

They’re also good reasons because they don’t state anywhere that there’s any money involved. I’m not saying, “if you buy this product I’ll get a $30 commission.” I don’t need to – I have a disclaimer page for that and people aren’t going to complain as long as I provide the benefits I’ve stated anyway.

To build this section of the About Us page, just think about the three problems your target market faces and why your site is going to answer their fears on said subject. Then move on.

Inform Your Audience

There’ll be questions that everyone has. If you have a vacuum cleaner niche site, there’ll be certain things that you’ll have to inform people about;

• What to look for in a vacuum
• What are ten faults that bad vacuum’s have?
• Is dust a secret causer of asthma?

I don’t know. I made those examples up off the top of my head – you’d actually have to look into your subject and see what people care about. Once you have done that, add those articles to your niche site. Sure, they aren’t sales letters, but you can link them to your sales letters and get long tail traffic. (I’ll talk more about this in a later post.)

Put them in your About Page. You’ll look more legitimate, get people to stay on your site a little longer and if you write helpful and insightful things, then you’ll get more sales on your sales letters.

Sell Stuff

Here’s where you follow the above formula: Have a section on your about page which leads your readers directly to your top performing sales letters. (On the site I mentioned, this was a light bulb moment.)

Just put:

“If you’re unsure what the best X to buy is, then here’s what I found when trying out various X’es:

(article one, article two, etc.) “

Final Thoughts

Yesterday and today, I’ve been writing quasi-sales letters in the form of About Us pages. I say quasi-sales letters because whilst they aren’t direct, they are a part of a funnel. That’s the genius thing about an About Us page for a niche site: essentially our call to action is to send our reader to our best sales letters. Everything above that provides a structure which naturally hits all the points we would in a regular sales letter anyway:

• Build authority
• Give benefits
• Hook reader with a story of struggle
• Assuage fears that they’re being sold to
• Send them on the way that we’ve pre-determined.

Added to that, like I said above, doing this will help you to work out what your angle – or why people are reading your site – should be.

P.S. This isn’t a niche site specific thing; this structure will work for any website.