So, you’ve been posting to your blog for a while now, and you have some readers; some loyal, some not, but still you have readers. What do your readers want to know about you? And how are you going to give them this information? Well, the easiest way of sharing yourself with the world is creating a Profile or an About Me page. Whatever you want to call it, a Profile is basically a page or section of your blog providing information about you to your readers. So what kind of information should you include in yoru profile? Here are a couple of About Me pages I came across.

Donna’s World (Blogger)

Gender: Female
Astrological Sign: Virgo
Occupation: Retired Accountant
Location: Atlanta

Interests
Family, Gardening, Computer, Reading, Photography

Movies
Love Actually, Sense and Sensibility, Roots, Trading Places

Music
Favorite Artist: Alison Krause

Books
Handmaid’s Tale, Gone With the Wind, Kite Runner,

Rampy’s Ramblings (WordPress)

The life of Cliff and Gina in Memphis–mostly happy, occasionally boring, but always life.
This is my public diary open to anyone who cares to read it. Thank you for visiting my blog.

Notice that there is quite a bit of variation between the two Profiles. The Donna’s World profile uses a list format to showcase her information. Through this approach, we see an orderly breakdown of information about the blog’s author. But, does this work for the reader? The profile includes such things as her astrological sign, favorite movies, and occupation. (I should add that Donna’s World is a Blogger blog; each of the items listed is a link. With these links readers can visit other blogs with the similar profiles. This process works similarly to tags, but is confined to blog profiles; kind of a tagging system exclusively for Profiles.) Is this going to give your readers the information they want to know about you? Maybe. Depending on your blog’s goal, you may want to include different information.

According to ProBlogger, there are four things that you need to include in your About Me page:

1. Who you are

2. Your problem or goal

3. Your expertise and how it addresses your problem or goal

4. Contact information

Let’s take a look at Rampy’s Ramblings and see how it measures up to ProBlogger’s profile guidelines.

Who You Are

Cliff and Gina in Memphis. Great. We have names, but we don’t really know anything else about the author(s) other than that they live in Memphis (location is always something I want to know about bloggers). A bit more of a description as to who the author is would be helpful.

Goal

By using a blog as a sort of diary, you are able to stay away from being corralled into a particular topic; you write what you want, and that’s that.

On the other hand, if you write a business blog, you want to have a goal in mind the entire time you are writing, and make sure that your content matches. Maybe your goal is to provide sangria recipes to the public, one recipe at a time, one week at a time. If this is your goal, make sure that this is what each and every post addresses even if it is a roundabout sort of way.

Expertise

Expertise is another thing pertaining mostly to business blogs. In business use, you want to showcase your expertise in a sort of mini version of your resume. Why are you qualified to write what you write? You want your readers to have confidence in your posts, and this is how to do it.

If you are writing a personal blog (diary) you want to showcase your expertise to your readers through honest, thoughtful posts. In the Expertise section of your profile, it may be a good idea to give a bit of information about your background, so that your readers know where you are coming from with your views and posts.

Contact Information

I can go either way with this one. If you are using a blog for business purposes, then yes, you definitely want to include contact information in your About Me page, and many other places throughout your blog. That said, part of the allure of blogging, is that you can do it anonymously. You can write what you want without worrying about consequences (for the most part anyway). Unless you are selling a product or service, I would shy away from including contact information on your blog. After all, your visitors can leave you comments if they want to get in touch with you, that’s what they are for!

When you write your About Me or Profile page, keep in mind that you are writing it for your readers; they want to know about you, and now you know what information they want to know:

· Who You Are

· Blog Goals or Problems

· Your Expertise

· Contact Information

With the incorporation of these categories into your blog you will help your readers picture the person behind all of your brilliant blog posts! Happy blogging!