In an earlier post I discussed the issue of using your picture on your blog: Building your Brand: Use a Picture. There I wrote about how using a picture of yourself helps your readers feel more connected to you as a person.

In this post I want to discuss a related idea – your 'About' page on your blog.

If your blog doesn't have an About page – it should. It provides a way for you to let your readers know more about you – what kind of a person you are, your motivation for writing your blog, etc. It is yet another way for your readers to feel more connected to you as a person.

How to Create an About page
If you are using WordPress, making an About page is easy – just go into your dashboard and under write, choose 'page', rather than post.  Depending upon the theme you are using, the page you create should have a link to appearing somewhere on your blog, usually in a side bar.

Two Types or Approaches
There are essentially 2 types or approaches to an About page. One is focused on you and is more of an About Me (or Us) page. The other is focused on the blog itself and could be considered more of an 'About This Blog' page. If you have a lot you want to say about both you and your blog, you may want to make it into 2 different pages. If not, you can combine it into one About page, which is what most bloggers do.

About You
Information that you might want to include about you are why and how you started the blog, what is your interest and experience in the topic you are writing about, some background information, etc. If you have kids you can mention it here too. Of course there are good reasons that you may not want to include their pictures or names – but you could still share their ages and other information that won't personally identify them.

For the purpose of transparency, you may want to include information concerning what interest you may have in your topic – do you work in a related industry, is someone paying or sponsoring your blog that could be influencing how you are writing, etc.

You should also include contact information, or a link to a contact page here. And yes, this is very important! I recently wanted to contact some other bloggers about collaborating on something but they had no way to contact them other than leaving a comment – I wanted to talk to them privately, and since comments are not private I was not able to follow through with it.

About Your Blog
Telling your readers about your blog is a great way to let people know what it is you hope to accomplish and the future plans you have for it. It also provides a way to direct people to posts or pages that you think are more important, or are starting places to understanding the rest of your blog.

You may also want to include why someone should be interested in reading your blog – what will they get out of it? How does it solve a problem for them?

This is also an opportunity to explain or link to a page explaining how to subscribe to your feed, or to explain what that means.

More coming soon in the Building Your Brand series!