As anyone with a personal website knows, the hardest part to write is the “About” page.
It quickly becomes a head-scratcher. Write about…me? Everything about me? The most interesting things about me? No, you eventually realize: This page is not really about me. It’s about the part of me that’s relevant to the reader. Someone has come to this website because they are looking for something, and you have the answer. Maybe you are an expert. Or a service provider. Your job, therefore, is to tell a story that builds your audience’s trust in what you are offering to them. That signals your purpose. That makes someone say, “This is exactly who I’m looking for.”
How do you tell that story?
Well, you can start by considering a good example. Go to LewisHowes.com. Click “About.”
Who is Lewis Howes? Here’s the lifeless, Wikipedia-style version that you will not find on his site: Lewis Howes is a former professional football player who reinvented himself as a marketing expert, then created a personal brand based on how people can succeed financially, and then reinvented himself again as someone who helps people live fulfilling lives. Along the way, he wrote two bestselling books (and now a new one, The Greatness Mindset), topped the podcast charts with his show “The School of Greatness,” and somewhere in there, he became a household name to millions.
But instead of all that, here’s the story he tells on his site: Howes opens by sharing that he was “an awkward boy from Ohio,” and that everything changed on October 11, 2001. He was a college football player with dreams of going pro, but on that night, he learned that his dad—“my biggest fan, my greatest ally”—was in a terrible car accident that left him in a coma. His dad would never be the same. More loss would follow. Howes did get recruited by the Arena Football League, but less than a year later, an injury ended his burgeoning athletic career. “I was broken, broke, and deeply depressed,” he writes. Then he started to pick himself back up…
Howes has spent more than
