Should You Or Do You Link To Your About Page?

Ok, this is a question that has been brewing in my mind ever since I redesigned my blog. We all know that commenting is a great way to drive traffic but not every blog out there has CommentLuv installed. With CommentLuv we can promote certain blog posts but without it we can only use our name.

The more well known bloggers such as John Chow, Shoemoney and Darren Rowse don’t have CommentLuv installed so we have to rely on the comment itself to attract enough attention that somebody may potentially click through. You did know that you should be providing thought provoking comments to get people to click through, right? Ok, good at least you do know that. With that said, when somebody does see your comment and decides to click your name I am going to assume that they are interested in knowing more about you.

Now, I will admit that all of the comments that I have left on blogs have redirected to my main blog page except for about maybe 2 or 3 in which I had linked to my about page. But this has really been burning in the back of my mind. The more I think about it the more reasons I can think of to link to my about page rather than my homepage. The person clicking your name on your comment on another blog isn’t necessarily wanting to hit your homepage, they want to know more about you I believe. Unless your home page is dedicated to telling visitors about you, which most home pages don’t, you are directing them to the wrong area of your blog.

Garry Conn provides a welcome page on his blog and he has talked about this before about using a welcome page when using social media instead of your blog’s homepage. He suggested using this method as a great way to build your mailing list or RSS subscription numbers or whatever else you are trying to get your readers and visitors to do.

This is another reason why you should have an about page or a page detailing a little bit about who you are and what you do. Blogging is a social machine and thrives off of the aspects of communication and interaction. Sure people might be interested in your posts but they are also equally interested in who you are. Even myself, somebody who isn’t as social as a normal person, I am interested in knowing who is behind the words and a little about them. When coming across a new blog I always check out the About page just to get some background information. We as humans have an inclination to know more about something that we don’t know much about, I believe it is something that we are born with, not something we develop.

So, with all that said, I’d be interested to hear what some of you have to say. I think I may start working on my about page and start using that as a link when leaving comments instead of to my home page.