Struggling for sales? Fix your “about me” page

March 14, 2018

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pexels-photo-210590 — Struggling for sales? Fix your “about me” page

A few years ago I took the leap and finally started my freelance business.

Like most new freelancers, I thought the whole sales process was going to be easy as I had more than enough experience and had valuable skills that could help any business…

So I started off by designing an amazing website, learned some SEO, cranked out some amazing blogs…

And waited for the sales to come rolling in.

One week went by and I hadn’t heard anything…

Then a month went by and I still hadn’t heard anything…

Then finally, after not getting any clients for the first 3 months, I realized I had to figure something else out.

After a little bit of thought, I realized the secret had been right in front of my face this entire time…

Facebook Advertising!

I felt so stupid for not doing this before. Like all the gurus said, all I had to do was throw together a decent campaign, spend time optimizing my target audience, throw up some clickbait headline…

And voila! The visitors would visit my site, see how amazing I was, and practically pull out their credit cards to work with me.

I spent the next few days getting everything together so my site would be ready for this influx of visitors that I was about to receive, then after a few long days…

I was ready to launch and finally get those sales in the door.

After a little bit of thought, I realized that I didn’t want to launch the campaign just yet as it was a Friday night and I might not be able to respond to all my inquiries right away, so I set the campaign for Monday morning and enjoyed my weekend.

The following Monday I woke up a little earlier than usual, more than excited to see my results come in…

But $500 and a whole bunch of confusion later, I had to accept the fact that I wasn’t going to get sales this way.

When led me onto freelance sites

Before reaching this point I’d read a lot about freelance sites and couldn’t help but see how shitty they were.

I’d read countless stories about how experienced freelancers struggled to get jobs on these sites, and being a new freelancer I knew I was going to struggle even more…

Which made me stay away from these sites for the longest time, but now that I didn’t have any other options, I had to give it a try.

I started off on Upwork.com as I knew this was the largest site, and after spending a solid 45 minutes throwing my profile together and getting my portfolio ready…

I began mass blasting proposals like a madman.

I figured this was the best approach for me as more proposals = more opportunities, which does sound good in theory…

But after submitting 30 proposals in one day and not getting any results in 2 weeks, I once again had to go back to the drawing board.

With $1,500 left on my credit card — I hired a coach

At this time I was at the point of either A) getting a job again (which I really didn’t want to do)…

Or B) hiring somebody who’d been in my shoes before.

This led me to doing some searching around the internet, and after scrolling through some blogs, I came across exactly what I was looking for…

A guy from my hometown who had been in a very similar situation, but after studying psychological tactics and understanding how to easily stand out from the crowd…

He went from starving artist to wealthy freelancer in a matter of months.

Knowing this was my last shot at survival, I reached out to him immediately and after a short consultation, we began working together.

He blew my mind right away

I was beyond excited to get started and patiently awaited his review (of my existing proposals/profile)…

And I’m not going to lie, I was honestly expecting some “silver bullet” that nobody else was using.

Deep down, I thought he was going to show me how to create videos that impressed clients and got them to work with me right away…

But then he sent his response and mentioned how my biggest problem was my “about me” section.

Yes, seriously…of all things — the about me section was holding me back.

This concerned me at first and I questioned whether this guy truly knew what he was talking about, but I’d already dropped $1,500 and didn’t know what else to do…

So I listened to his advice and re-created my about me page exactly how he wanted me to.

And the results were…

AMAZING!

A few short days after applying these tactics, I started applying to jobs again…

And before I knew it, I started landing jobs like crazy.

I started off by increasing my bookkeeping rates, landing jobs that way…

Then I upped the ante and started applying to writing jobs, even though I had zero experience, and starting winning jobs that way…

And then I decided to really crank it up a notch, changing up my About Me page on a dropshipping website that I’d started 6 months before that (and got little sales)…

Then after making these changes, I launched the same Facebook campaign, getting these results over the first week:

After that I made some changes to my actual freelancing site that hadn’t generated any sales before hand, and without doing any marketing to this site (all traffic comes from people who search it after seeing my email address)…

I started getting leads from this as well, and needless to say — I became a firm believer of the About Me page.

Why does this work so well?

I’ve read a lot of reasons why this does and like everything else in life, nobody really knows for sure…

But if I had to guess, I’d say it’s because of 3 things:

EVERYBODY checks out the about me page before buying something

I mean, think about it. When’s the last time you visited a new website and didn’t check out the about me page?

2. 99% of about me pages out there suck, so it’s easy to stick out

You know what I’m talking about, the “traditional” about me pages that make companies sound very professional and to them, it sounds great…

But when you’re a reader, it’s boring as hell and makes you run away (because they look fake).

3. Because it’s a secret way to sell clients when their guard is down

Yes, you read this correctly, when designed properly….

An about me is nothing more than a hidden sales letter. One that not only connects with your audience, but also shows them how your product (or service) can solve a problem of there’s…

And if done correctly, there’s no possible reason why they wouldn’t work with you.

Sounds like something you could use?

Here’s how you can make some major improvements in 30 minutes

Since a perfect “about me” page is really a hidden sales letter, it does require some advanced techniques to truly learn how to do this…

BUT, in the spirit of learning, here’s 3 easy steps you can do to drastically improve your about me page and stand out from the crowd.

Act like you’re talking to the client

Let’s face it, academic jargon is the killer of sales.

Nobody wants to read something that’s hard to understand and sounds like they’re talking to a pretentious asshole, so the best way to get around this is by simply having a conversation with the reader.

How do you do this?

Just use “spoken language”. Read your text out loud and if it makes sense, then great, that’s all you need…

And another thing that some people use is talk-to-text services, where they’ll speak into a mobile app and edit it after that.

2. Use “you” more than I…

But remember, this is more of a guideline than a hard rule.

Doing this is just a good tactic to make sure you’re talking to the reader (not bragging about yourself)…

And if you have “you” more than “I”, then you’re almost guaranteed to do this…

But never do so at the expense of not making sense, because well, that’d be counterintuitive to our goal.

3. Show the client that you understand their problem, then show them how you can fix it

When you really think about it, business isn’t that hard. You’re simply solving a problem for somebody, and even though you’d think your target market understands this problem…

Most of the time they don’t, or well, they don’t realize how your service can solve it anyway.

And that’s honestly it, but to give you an example of an About Me page that has single-handedly generated $10’s of thousands of dollars for me (sometimes without even having to apply to jobs)…

Here’s one of my best performing Upwork profiles, where I provided Sales Copywriting for businesses.