What Is About.me?
About.me is a platform for building and hosting a simple page that points users to your content and social media profiles from around the web. Unlike other free website building tools like Blogger, WordPress.com and Tumblr which offer you the ability to create several pages as well as blog posts, About.me gives you just one, single page to display all your links and a summary of yourself.
Why You Should Have an About.me Page
Although About.me, doesn’t allow you to create a blog or multi-page site, it’s still regarded as a leading site-building platform because it excels in the area of simplicity. If you are a business owner or professional of some sort, you can point colleagues, clients and prospects to your About.me page so they can find out more about you and connect with you all over the web.
About.me could also be considered a social network because you can randomly browse other About.me profiles and connect with those users. This could be great for expanding your network and also for building you personal brand.
About.me Features
Setting up an About.me page is incredibly easy. Here are the main features you are given access to once you sign up for a free account.
Background photo: Your background photo sets the visual design of your page. You can scale it so it stretches over the full page, size it and position it anywhere you want or use a photo from the About.me gallery.
Biography information: Your page gets a headline (typically your name), a subheading, and an area of text to write something about yourself or your business.
Color customization: Set the colors for your page, bio box, as well as the text of your headings, biography and links. You can also customize the opacity of your colors.
Fonts: Choose from popular and funky fonts to contribute to the appearance of your headlines and text.
Services: This is where your social profiles will be displayed, as icons with links. You can add your Facebook profile, your Facebook page, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, Instagram, Flickr, TypePad, Foursquare, Formspring, YouTube, Vimeo, Last.fm, DailyBooth, Posterous, Behance, Fitbit, Github and any additional URLs of your choice.
Contact: You can optionally provide a way for viewers to contact you, either by email or by AOL video chat requests.
Profile statistics: On the dashboard, you can conveniently view how many views your site gets and when those viewed occurred.
Klout score: Under the “More Data” tab, About.me will display your Klout statistics, which measures your overall social influence across the social networks you use.
Email signature integration: About.me makes it easy for you to provide a link to your page in your email signature for a wide range of specific email providers.
Favorites: Browse other About.me profiles and save them to your Favorites list.
Inbox: After signing up, you’re given your own unique About.me email address. It should look like “username@about.me.”
Tags: Under “Account Settings” you can submit keywords that describe you, your business or anything else. For example, a guitarist may want to list “guitar,” “music” and “rock and roll” as tags. These tags will help more targeted people find your profile easily.
Special Offers From About.me
About.me usually offers something promotional to its users as a thank you for signing up. At the time of this writing, they are offering all of its users the opportunity to design and order a free pack of About.me business cards, courtesy of Moo.com.
You can make a few customizations to your business cards and are required to pay a small shipping fee. Unfortunately, there will be a small “Moo.com” watermark printed on your cards, but if you’re just looking for something casual to hand out to people, this might be a nice and cheap option. Alternatively, you can upgrade your cards for a higher price and get the watermark taken off.
Sign up for About.me and get started building your personal profile now.
