Online Hosted Profile Pages – Alternatives For A Blog About Page

Well, it’s time to get back to the real chore of blogging. And to that end, here is the fourth installment in a series of articles on personalizing your blog and extending your personal reach online.

If you missed the first 3 post in the series, here’s the list:
1. Putting A Face On Your Blog – Don’t Be A Mystery Blogger
2. Choosing & Using A Blog Profile Picture – Putting Your Best Blog Face Forward
3. Your Blog Profile Page – Blog Authors Should Be Knowable

Wouldn’t it be great if you could have an awesome about page that didn’t require you to do much of anything at all? Something that helped others know more about you and gave them easy access to finding and connecting with you online? Well it is possible to have a profile page that is just that easy.

It all comes down to linking to an online profile that you can set up or already have established on a separate online community. There are a number of possibilities here, depending on what is important to you.

With a little thought, planning and tweaking, a profile that you have online may be the perfect solution to adding an about section to your blog. If you have more than one blog it can be a real boon to be able to link them all to one about page.

In addition to giving you a place to park your profile, these sites have a number of other features that can help make your profile more interactive and accessible to others who use the same community sites. This means that other members may friend or follow you and may very well click through to visit your blog. This makes your profile page all that much more powerful for reaching potential new readers. Ah, social networking at its best.

Here are the features that are common to most of these sites:

Profile page.
Profile picture.
About/Profile Bio.
Recent visitor activity.
RSS Blog Feed.
RSS Twitter Feed.
Email Notifications of activity from site.
A list of your social network memberships.
Ability to follow &/or friend members.
Ability accept/reject follow &/or friend requests.
Send messages to other members.
Receive messages from other members.
DoFollow Links back to your blog or site.
Embeddable widgets for your blog or site.

Below is an example of some of the embeddable widgets these sites provide that you can embed in sidebar to help promote your about page or profile.

You can see another widget, from Retaggr, in my sidebar. I find this one to be one of the more attractive and functional widgets available from any of the online communities.

Instead of writing incessantly about the various services, I’ve set up profile pages on each one. You can click on any of my links below to get a better idea of how each one looks, the information they provide about you and the individual features they offer. When you’re done viewing a profile page just click your browser back button to return to this post.

I have personally chosen to use the Retaggr service for my own about page and am very happy with it. Here are some of the features I found most appealing:

Saves me having to add a Twitter widget and a Social Profile widget such JustAddMe from Widgets Lab. Both these functions are already incorporated into the Retagger widget.

The service allows me to create an attractive and feature rich About Page, hosted on their site without having to bother with any HTML or CSS code. In addition they have a subscription service that offers advanced options such as premium themes for the about page, personalizing your profile’s web address and more. The pro service is available for only $9.99 per year, very reasonable, but the free service is feature rich and more than adequate for most people’s needs.

If you do choose to use an online community profile page for your about option, all you have to do is provide a small about blurb in your sidebar with your profile picture and link to your online profile of choice. Or you can embed a widget in your sidebar that links to your online profile as well.

No matter how you decide to execute your own about page will depend on the your needs, resources, skills and the time you have to set it all up. The important thing is to take a look at all your options and choose something that works best for you. An about page is just another way to make your blog more interactive, appealing and personal. The possibilities are many and all depend on you.

Next time we’ll be exploring the second last topic in this series:
Putting A Face On The Comments You Leave Around The Web

Again, in case you missed them, here are the first three posts in this series:
1. Putting A Face On Your Blog – Don’t Be A Mystery Blogger
2. Choosing & Using A Blog Profile Picture – Putting Your Best Blog Face Forward
3. Your Blog Profile Page – Blog Authors Should Be Knowable