You think your business operates in a crowded field? Try being a food blogger, where the competition seems to include anyone with an oven and an Internet connection.

Even in niche fields like cupcakes or gluten-free cooking, you can find more recipes in one week than you could possibly make in an entire year. The supply is endless and the price is free, making the “recipe industry” quite possibly the world’s most competitive commodity business.

So how does one lowly blogger keep readers coming back again and again? In any competitive field where the product is much the same, personality becomes the key to forging relationships — and Brooke McLay had me at “Hiya!”

A voice I can’t forget

It’s been months since I combed through literally hundreds of recipe sites on behalf of a client, but Brooke’s distinctive voice still stands out in my mind. She grabbed my attention with that friendly, familiar greeting and held me through eight breezy paragraphs of introduction to her Cheeky Kitchen blog.

If you’re hungry for a more effective “About” page, you might try adapting Brooke’s successful recipe to suit your own tastes:

• Show some personality, even when talking business. There’s not much life’s story here. This “About” page is focused mainly on the mission of the blog, yet Brooke still manages to convey her personality through word choice and writing style. When she declares that life “should taste pretty dang fantastic” or that meals should be “a celebration every, single, stinkin’ time,” you get a strong sense of the gee-whiz enthusiasm that’s being served up with every recipe.
• Be choosy in sharing personal details. When Brooke does get around to her personal life — way down in paragraph 7 — she introduces her “four fabu kids” and her “one sexy man” mainly to show that she understands the way real families eat. Her kids don’t like Brussels sprouts and her husband doesn’t like “Spicy Tomato-Glazed Eggplant Fritters with a Caper Reduction Sauce,” but those aren’t just random, cutesy details. Instead, they explain Cheeky Kitchen’s mission to be “a resource for food that everyone will actually eat.”
• Be relatable. Some food bloggers love to show off their drool-worthy “test kitchens” or name-drop their conversations with celebrity chefs, but Brooke maintains a laser focus on keeping it real and relatable. When she says, “I know what it’s like to wake up on Monday and have $40 to feed the family for the rest of the week,” you know foie gras probably won’t be on the menu here.
• Soft-sell success. Brooke has written two cookbooks, won international cooking contests, hosted a cooking show and published hundreds of recipes, but you won’t find her touting those achievements on her “About” page. In fact, when she does make an oblique reference to her resume, she manages to turn the spotlight back on her community: “I certainly didn’t think I’d one day have a blog that would trip me around the nation, land me fantastic gigs, or introduce me to a world of lovely, kind, uber-talented readers, fellow bloggers, and friends.”

A pinch of this, a dash of that

In an interview, Brooke compares her “About” page to the family room of her home, a place where “good friends are invited to kick off their shoes and sprawl across the couches.”

Turns out, making people comfortable is actually hard work: “I studied a lot of other bloggers’ About pages,” she says, and even now, she continues to keep notes all year long for an annual re-write.

“On any one day when I’m feeling passionate about it all, I’ll sit down and type it out, edit it, and post it. I try to let it be a very organic process. I don’t want a highly stylized About page, I just want it to really show what my site is truly about.”

Brooke wants most of the site feels like “a chat over lemonade and tea, but I’m not always living that voice.” When it’s time to talk business with potential sponsors, for instance, the “family room” didn’t seem like the proper setting. That’s why Cheeky Kitchen includes a separate “resume-type page for companies interested in hiring or working with me.” It’s like the difference between a family room and a formal living room, she explains.

What do you think of the “About” page at Cheeky Kitchen? Does it make the same impression on you that it did on me? Are there any other elements you could adapt to your website? And who else would you like to see included in this series?

• For last week’s post featuring Aaron Biebert, please click here.