I’m always striving to improve my business and my website’s reflection of it. Recently, I revamped several pages here to more accurately reflect who I am, what I have to offer and to whom. One of the pages I revamped is my About page. And though I love it, and it’s definitely “authentically me”, I believe everyone can benefit from a fresh set of eyes on their stuff, no matter how good their stuff is already. So I asked Naomi of IttyBiz.com to have a look at it for me and give me any suggestions she might have for improvement.

As the days passed, I grew more and more nervous. As I said, I love my About page. I worked hard on it and practiced all that I preach. What could be so wrong that it’s taking this long for her to make her suggestions? I couldn’t take it anymore, so I emailed her about it. Here’s some (the pertinent part) of the reply I got this morning:

“Here was my problem. I loved your about page. But it wasn’t quite right. So I put on my copy editor hat and thought of all the ways I could mix it up to make it work. And it was a horrible pain in my ass and it kept not working and I was being a real bitch to Jamie about it. Bless him, he said, “When you used to do this for [insert name of evil company I used to be a copyeditor for here], didn’t you always say that if it was hard, you were doing it wrong?”

Jamie’s a f****** genius.

So I sat down again and really thought about it and realized the reason I was having such a hard time was because I was making it hard. If we made the changes I was thinking of making in the beginning, it would lose the YOU factor, and that would be stupid. Therefore, having thought of my objections and the blocks in the copy, here’s what you should do:

1. Cut the line at the beginning about “If you got here from Twitter”.
2. After the first bit about you’re the person behind vAS and your Twitter ID, add a sentence that says, IN ONE SENTENCE, what you do for a living. Benefit rich. “I help people like X do Y so that Z.”

Then the rest of the back story is interesting and nobody’s reading through it going, “Huh? When do we get to the pitch?”

After I let out a whoop and a holler in celebration, I cut the line she was talking about in #1. That leaves her second suggestion.

Now any of you who’ve worked with me know that I preach knowing who you are, what you have to offer and to whom until the cows come home. And my About page reflects all that – just not in one sentence as Naomi suggests. And she’s right – we ALL need to be able to say it in one sentence. We all need to know our X, Y and Z.

In this case, X is the “to whom” part, Y is the “what I have to offer” part and Z is a 4th, but very important element: the “what’s in it for you” part.

So let’s take mine in pieces, shall we?

X = “to whom” = entrepreneurs like you

Y = “what I have to offer” = create or improve your web presence

Z = “what’s in it for you” = you can use the web to make money doing your thing ? in this lifetime!

Now, let’s put it together:

Hey – how cool is that? It’s 139 characters, including spaces, so I could Tweet it if I wanted to. Extra handy!

Now it’s your turn. Tell me your X, Y and Z and then put it all together in the comments below.