Here are some tips for writing an effective About page.

Start with a picture.

Because people like to do business with people they know like and trust, showing what you look like and that you are a real person can go a long way toward helping establish that trust and likability.

Tell people about you and your business.

It’s called an “About” page for a reason. This is where you tell people about you, your business, your products and services, your mission, the history of your business, and why they should consider doing business with you. Don’t make this just a dry statement of facts, though. It should be written in your voice with your personality shining through.

Incorporate social proof.

Your readers will want to know what other people think of you. Include testimonials from your customers and fans that show off the benefits of doing business with you. Other forms of social proof may include a client list with impressive names or large numbers, such as the number of books you have sold, number of clients you have helped, etc.

Brag a little.

Have you won awards? Have you been profiled are featured in major media such as the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times? Mentioning those things on your About page can give you instant credibility.

Where are you?

I am surprised at how many people give no indication of where they are physically located anywhere on their website. Although you don’t have to give details that would violate your privacy, it’s smart to at least give people a general idea of where you are located. If for no other reason, I like to know where someone is so that if I telephone them I call during appropriate business hours in their time zone.

Include contact information.

Include a link to your contact form or include the contact form and other info such as address and telephone number on your About page.

Don’t forget the call to action.

What do you want people to do after they’ve read your About page? You might want them to sign up for your newsletter, contact you for an appointment, connect with you on social media such as Twitter or Facebook, sign up for an introductory teleseminar or webinar, or view your product pages. Don’t make them guess. Whatever you want people to do, make the next action clear and simple for them to do.

Optimize your About page.

Your About page, like any other page on your website, should be properly optimized for the search engines. Be sure to weave your most important keywords through the text.

Your About page is, in many ways, a sales page. It deserves at least as much time and attention as you would give to a product sales page. Once you’ve written a draft of your About page, set it aside and come back to it several hours or a day or two later. Proofread carefully to avoid typos and grammatical errors.

Want to see some examples of good About pages? Here are a few I like from a variety of sites:

Andrew Reifman is a web designer who, judging by his About page, has a good sense of humor and doesn’t take himself too seriously (although it is possible that he overestimates his pool playing abilities). His About page shows off his expertise and makes it easy to learn more about him while letting his personality shine through.

Dogs Trust is an animal welfare charity in the UK. Readers learn about what they do and how they can support the organization, as well as having many opportunities to connect with them on social media.

Chris Garrett is a blogger and social media expert. Chris describes his experience and expertise on this page, with links to where readers can hire him or buy his products.

Although this is not technically an About page, my Connect with Cathy site shows people where they can find me online: my websites, social media profiles and more. This one page site (aka a “business card site”) describes my online presence concisely.

There are online advertising programs, such as Google AdWords, that will put your advertisement in front of searchers looking for keywords you choose. Paid search brings visitors to your Web site, sometimes within minutes of setting up the ad. Of course, that traffic comes at a price. You pay each time someone clicks on your ad. Costs per click can range from a few cents to $100 or more, depending on your keywords. Pay per click advertising can be a way to get visitors and customers quickly, or it can be a way to burn through a lot of cash with no results to show for it.

Whether you are looking for an online marketing method to use instead of or in addition to paid advertising, the ideas here will bring targeted visitors to you. Best of all, they take no money and little time.

Put press releases online. Write press releases and post them to online distribution services, such as Free-Press-Release and PRZoom.com. Both offer free press release distribution as well as paid services. Don’t forget to add the release to the media room of your website. Fresh content is good for your search engine rankings.

Post articles online. Add original content to your website, and encourage others to link to it. Have a reprint policy to let visitors know how they can use your articles on their sites or in their newsletters. Your policy should always require that they include your brief author bio and a link to your site. Offer your articles to non-competing sites in your niche. Post them to online article directories, such as EzineArticles.com. Articles put you in front of lots of new customers, and the links you get from having your articles all over the Internet will help your search engine rankings.

Participate in online forums. Answer a question raised by another member, post a link to a resource on your site, or offer a list of tips. Most blogs allow you to post comments, so add helpful comments to blogs in your field, too. Always include a brief signature with a link to your website when posting to forums.

Create social media accounts–and use them. Sign up for accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites. Make your profile as complete as you can. The more you put in your profile, the easier it will be for interested persons (e.g., potential customers) to find you and connect with you. Be active by posting to your accounts. You do not have to spend all day on social media sites, but taking a few minutes now and then to update your status and post an interesting link puts you in front of a lot of people.

Offer testimonials. When you find a product or service you love, send a testimonial. Ask that your name, company or product name and website URL be shown with the testimonial. You can find companies soliciting testimonials by searching for “submit testimonial.” Of course, only recommend products and services you have used and can honestly recommend to others.

Each of these techniques takes only minutes but can bring results immediately and for years to come. Repeat them often to multiply your results.

Here is one of the most common of these predatory practices:

You get a letter that looks like a bill that tells you that your domain name is about to expire and,

“You must renew your domain name to retain exclusive rights to it on the Web, and now is the time to transfer and renew your names from your current Registrar to the Domain Registry of America. Failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date may result in a loss of your online identity making it difficult for your customers and friends to locate you on the Web.”

A careful reading shows that they are not billing you to renew your domain name registration, they are trying to get you to transfer your domains to their registry. However, many people who do not fully understand the domain registration process, or who do not know where their domain names are registered (e.g., domain names were registered for them by their web designer) have been tricked. The letter has a lot of talk of saving money, but their fees are about three times what you would pay elsewhere.

The FTC already obtained an order barring DROA from making false or misleading representations in connection with the advertising, marketing, and promotion of domain name services, so I guess this is the new and improved letter. It does say that it is not a bill, and it mentions the “transfer” of the domain, but the overall effect of the letter is to imply that you need to act now to avoid losing your domains.

What you should do:

Shred the letter.

Learn where your domain names are registered, if you do not already know. Make sure your information, such as email address, is current. Most registrars will contact you via email to let you know your domain names are about to expire.

Set your domain names to automatically renew. Most domain registrars allow you to do this. Or, renew your domains for several years at a time so you do not have to deal with annual renewals.

It is also a good idea to lock your domains so they can not be transferred. (They can be unlocked, by you, if you decide to transfer them or sell them later.)

In another stupid domain trick, you get an email that says something like this:

(If you are not the person who is in charge of this, please forward to your CEO, as this is urgent, thank you.)

Dear CEO,

We are the department of registration service in China. We have something need to confirm with you. We formally received an application on September 3, 2010, one company which called “TEKpower trading co, ltd” is applying to register “idealady” as brand name and domain names as below :

idealady.asia
idealady.cn
idealady.com.cn
idealady.com.hk
idealady.com.tw
idealady.hk
idealady.in
idealady.tw

After our initial checking, we found the brand name and these domain names being applied are as same as your company’s, so we need to get the confirmation from your company. If the aforesaid company is your business partner or your subsidiary company, please don’t reply us, we will approve the application automatically. If you have no any relationship with this company, please contact us within 5 workdays. If out of the deadline, we will approve the application submitted by “TEKpower trading co, ltd” unconditionally.

If you actually contact these people, they will try to sell you a batch of domain names at inflated prices to “protect your brand” in Asia. This is not something you need to do. No one is trying to register these names, and you do not need to do so, either. This is just a sales pitch.

What you should do:

Delete the email. Forget about it.

If you do not want to receive letters and emails such as the above, one step you can take is private registration of your domain names. There is usually an annual fee for private domain registration, but your contact information will not be published on the web, making it less likely you will receive this kind of junk mail.

The best way to avoid getting caught up in these schemes is to be educated. If you get a communication that says you need to do something to protect your domain names, do an online search for a portion of the text in the letter or email and find out what others have to say.

One way to get started without any out-of-pocket investment is as an affiliate marketer. Although some affiliate programs will require you to have an established website or blog in order to approve you, many do not. You can set up pages on Blogger.com, Squidoo.com and other free sites where you can publish content and promote products through your affiliate links.

Choose some products you love and would recommend, then write reviews of those products. Or write articles that would be of interest to the people who would want to buy the products you are recommending. For example, you could write articles about improving your golf game and link to golf equipment, DVDs about golf and more. (Note: With the FTC rules that went into effect in 2009, you must disclose that you may receive a commission if customers buy one of the recommended products through your links.)

Selling on eBay requires a little bit of money for listing fees, but it is an inexpensive way to get started selling online. One benefit of selling on eBay is that you can learn a lot about writing good copy and getting people to buy while selling off stuff you have around the house. Try it! Grab 20 or 30 things you want to get rid of. Set up listings for them on eBay and practice your copywriting skills.

Of course, if you can invest even a few dollars in your business, it will be much easier to get started. Your own domain name and web hosting can cost just a few dollars a month.

You can spend weeks searching online for free information, or you can invest in training or coaching that will cut your learning curve and help you make more money faster. That doesn’t mean buying every product that promises to make you rich, but it does mean paying for help that will get you started fast and help you make more money sooner. When you invest, invest wisely.

If you choose to get started with absolutely no money, use your initial profits to pay for some tools that will make it easier to build a successful online business.

Whatever you do, do not wait to start. The best time to start a new business is always five years ago. The second best time is right now.

I entered my payment information and clicked submit. That is when the bad things started happening.

First I had to go through multiple pages of “one-time offers.” Each page was very long and took forever to load (even with my fast connection), and I had to click on the “No thanks” button each time.

Then I got email confirmations of my purchases. Purchases? Plural? Huh? I thought I bought one book for $9.95. But, no. The email confirmations showed that I also bought a group of products for $197. And that $9.95 product? I was charged $29.95.

I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that while I was clicking through all of those special offers, I accidentally clicked on the order button for the $197 product. The pages were loading slowly, so the buttons may have shifted as I was clicking. However, I did not intend to order it and did not want it. And I was not given the opportunity to confirm my order and just hit with a charge for $197. Their ridiculous order process caused the error. I verified that the price of the other item was shown on their website as $9.95, and took a screen shot.

The only way to contact them is through their help ticket system, so I filed a request for a refund of the $197 plus the $20 overcharge. This is where it really gets interesting.

The first response I got suggested that instead of a refund, they would give me three additional products that I also do not want. I said, no, I want a refund.

So the second response said that they had refunded the $197, but again offered an additional product instead of the $20 refund. They blamed a “technical error” for the overcharge. No, I want a refund of the overcharge, or I want the entire order canceled and my $29.95 refunded.

Still waiting for the next response. If it is not a refund, I will initiate a charge back through my credit card company. This is absolutely unethical marketing and customer service, and I will not allow someone to make a profit from me by using these kinds of tactics. The only reason I have not already done a chargeback is that I am curious about what they will do next.

This process has been inconvenient for me. But for many other people, it could be more than inconvenient–it could be expensive. Many people use debit cards, and they may not have an extra couple hundred dollars sitting in their accounts. Getting unexpected charges of $217 could cause them to overdraw their accounts and get hit with lots of fees.

Maybe this kind of sleazy marketing works. Maybe most people are fine with this. I am not. I am unsubscribing from all of this marketer’s lists and will never do business with anything he is involved with.

Just say “NO” to sleazy marketers.

Actually, you should register more than one domain name. That does not mean that you must have multiple web sites. You can have all of the domain names point at your main site, or you may have different URLs point to different sections of your web site. It is easy to do with domain forwarding (available though any of the domain registrars).

Your business name may make a good URL. After all, many customers will simply enter your company name in their web browsers (perhaps followed by dot-com) when they are looking for you online. Which brings us to the next point:

Get a dot-com. Not dot-net or any of the other top-level domain names. People still think dot-com when they think of web sites. Anything else is likely to confuse them.

If your business name is difficult to spell, consider registering common misspellings, so that customers can find you even when they make mistakes.

Also register variations of your primary domain name. When I registered IdeaLady.com, I did not check to see if TheIdeaLady.com was also available. When I thought of it a couple of years later, it was taken. The good news? I was able to buy the domain recently. Once the transfer is complete, anyone who enters TheIdeaLady.com will be taken to IdeaLady.com. The bad news? Buying the domain name from a squatter cost several hundred dollars.

Register your own name. Owning your name on the web is important. If you have a common name and discover that someone else has already claimed the dot-com, consider registering your name with a title or middle initial.

Go beyond your company name. You can improve your standing in the search engines with a keyword-rich URL. What words will customers use to search for companies such as yours? For example, http://www.MicrowaveGlassTray.com/ takes you to the site of Martin Microwave, where they sell replacement parts for microwave ovens. I found it when I was looking for–-surprise!–-a replacement glass tray for my microwave.

You can register domain names at any one of thousands of registrars, including http://www.GreatDomainsHQ.com/. When you check a name and it is available, register it now. Do not wait. It may be gone a week, a day or an hour from now. Domain names are cheap. It is better to register a few names you end up not using than to miss out on one you really want.

Register your primary domain name for multiple years. And sign up for automatic renewals so you do not lose it. If you fail to renew your domain name, someone else can grab it and put up a competing site or worse.

Your URL is part of your identity. Choose a name that will make you easy to find online.

According to comScore, of the five major search engines, Google accounted for 63.1% of the searches conducted in October, 2008. That is more than three times the number of searches at Yahoo!, the second-ranked search engine. That means that most most SEO is aimed at Google, because a high ranking in Google can deliver lots of qualified visitors to your site. Of course, other search engines use criteria that are similar to Google’s, so if  you rank well in one, you may rank well in others, too.

Fortunately, Google wants to help us help them index our sites. Although they are quite protective of the inner-workings of the ranking process, they do provide clues that can make indexing by Google easier and more thorough, which may elevate your site’s rankings.

Here area few of my favorite Google resources to help you optimize your site:

Google Webmaster Central Blog
An official Google blog that has lots of tips, advice and tutorials on what you need to know about how Google indexes sites.

Google’s SEO Starter Guide (PDF)
Want a simple guide to SEO, in easy to understand language? This guide is it. Many of the best practices described in this short guide are easy enough (and non-technical enough) for even the newest Internet newbie to understand and implement. The guide is also available in Spanish.

Matt Cutts’ Blog
Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team, and his blog sometimes addresses topics of interest to those who wish to rank well in Google. Matt points out in his disclaimer that this is his personal blog and does not represent Google’s official policy, but his blog can be a good place to get insight into what is happening with Google Search. You can jump right to the Google/SEO posts but the blog also has lots of interesting info on tech topics and more.

If you want more comprehensive instruction on SEO, you can subscribe to this SEO service.

If they buy something, you have their name and contact information so you could reach them again. However, you do not have their explicit permission to do so.Worse, the people who came to your site and didn’t buy are gone. Perhaps forever. Oh, they may come back some day, but it is more likely that they will forget all about you.

Now imagine that they have at least a third option. In addition to buying or not buying, they can sign up for your mailing list. Perhaps they are interested, but not interested enough to buy today. Now they will continue to hear from you, learn from you and remember you. Ultimately, they may buy from you. Even if they don’t, they may forward something they receive from you to a friend who may buy from you, or sign up for your mailing list, or…

Having a list is a way to develop relationships with possible customers. It creates trust and showcases what you can do for them.

So, how do you build a list? One easy way is with a form on your web site. When you use a service like Aweber (the list service I use), you can easily create a subscription box (like the one at IdeaLady.com) or boxes that slide onto the page, etc. Visitors simply enter their email addresses to subscribe, just as you did.

Put subscription boxes at multiple locations on your site. Much of your search engine traffic does not come in via the front page.

Offer a bonus to subscribers, such as a free course or ebook.

When you speak or present a workshop, ask attendees to subscribe by checking a box on the roster, or entering an email address on a form.

Make subscribing to your newsletter a call to action in your email signature, in the resource box of your articles, and elsewhere. Keep in touch with prospects to turn them into fans and customers.

There is nothing wrong with getting a lot of visitors referred to your site by Google. However, if those visitors represent 30%, 40% or more of the traffic you receive, you need a new plan. If the Google algorithm changes, or Google penalizes your site for some reason, you will see a dramatic drop in visitors–and the income they produce.

Start by taking a look at your web site statistics. How do people come to your site? There are three general ways: search engines, links from other sites, and direct entry.

Chances are, most of your search engine traffic comes from Google. Obviously, you do not want to receive fewer referrals from them. Instead, you should diversify so that you receive more visitors from other sources. Let’s say you are getting 1000 visitors a day to your site, and Google sends 40% (400) of them. Other search engines account for 20% (200), links another 20% (200) and direct traffic (type-ins, bookmarks, clicks from email) the final 20% (200).

If you could generate an additional 300 visits a day on average from sources other than Google, you not only have a 30% increase in traffic, you have reduced Google’s percentage of traffic referrals from 40% to 30%, making you less dependent on the traffic from Google. Even if you see an increase in Google referrals and the percentage of traffic they refer to you stays at 40%, the overall increase in the number of visitors will help to insulate you from any changes affecting future Google referrals.

Does increasing your traffic this way sound impossible? It is not. Although it probably will not happen overnight, it can be done with a few simple steps. Here are some ways to do that:

Optimize areas of your site for other major search engines, such as Yahoo! and Windows Live. Although all search engines look for some of the same things when ranking sites, each has their own algorithms and weighting and generates different results. You can learn more about optimizing for all of the search engines at http://www.SEOSmarts.com/

Get lots of links. The search engines all like to see lots of quality links to your site, so getting more links will help your rankings. But the links also bring more people to your site, and that is the more important result in this context. Look for ways to get one-way links from authority sites and quality sites in your topic area.

Get active in social media. My logs show visitors coming to my site through Twitter, StumbleUpon, Facebook and other social media sites where I have a presence.

Encourage people to bookmark your site. That can mean saving it to their Favorites, or on a social bookmarking site such as delicious.

Ask visitors to sign up for your RSS feed or email updates. If your site generates an RSS feed (as all blogs and many other sites do) use a service such as Feedburner to offer visitors ways to be notified when new articles appear on your site.

Start an email list. Use a service such as Aweber to collect email addresses and send a newsletter from time to time. Include links to recent articles and other resources on your site to encourage readers to click through. I find that sending a newsletter results in a traffic spike at my site every time.

Add new content frequently to encourage visitors to return often. Tools such as bookmarking, RSS and email newsletters are great at reminding visitors to return to your site, but you have to give them a reason to do so. When you update your site regularly, visitors will come back to see what is new.

Implementing some or all of the above ideas will get more visitors to your web site and make you less dependent on Google for traffic. Get started now and you can see results within days or weeks.

Watch for my upcoming series on specific way to get more incoming links and bring more people to your website or blog. Subscribe now, via RSS or email, so you don’t miss a thing!

Many times, people looking for information will simply enter the name of a person or company followed by “.com.” Voters wanting to learn about the candidate may enter his name and end up on a site set up by his political enemies. People who do not read the attack brochure carefully may even think that the “JohnSmith.com”  site is the candidate’s official site.

Fortunately for this politician, when you do a Google search on his name, his real campaign site comes up first and the attack site was not in the top results. However,  you can not be certain that this will happen if you are ever the victim of this kind of identity theft.

You may think that you do not need to own <yourname>.com. You do business under a company name, and you do not ever plan to run for office, so why do you need to register your name as a domain name?

Well, even if those things are true today, they may not be in the future. And if you decide you want to own the URL of your name, you do not want to discover that someone else owns it. Especially if that someone else is a political opponent or someone else who may use the site maliciously.

It is possible to dispute another party’s ownership of the URL of your name; however, that will probably not do this politician any good as it is unlikely to be resolved before the election. Plus, it is a pain in the rear to have to deal with the dispute resolution process. Is it worth $10 a year to avoid that?

It is also possible that the person who claims “your” domain name will have just as much right to it as you. If they share your name you would have a hard time convincing anyone that you have more right to the URL than they.

When I registered my first domain name, I did not register my name. At that time registrations were much more expensive and I did not see a reason to claim my name. However, a couple of years later, I noticed that someone was buying a lot of names of prominent Internet personalities. I decided I should strike before I became prominent enough to be a target for a squatter.

For a while, I pointed this URL at IdeaLady.com, my primary site. When I decided to set up a blog, CathyStucker.com seemed like the right URL to use.

Also think about registering common misspellings. Lots of people spell my name with a ‘K’ so if you try to go to KathyStucker.com, you will end up here.

Not sure what you should do with the URL of your name? Why not create a business card site?

And once you have your URL registered, start thinking about your identity on social media sites. Although there can be an unlimited number of “John Smith”s on Facebook, on Twitter there can be only one. Do your best to lock up your name, business name or nickname in as many places as possible.