Blogging 101: Creating a Media Kit

If you’ve been blogging for a while you’ve probably heard of these things called Media Kits – but when you google search it there’s a lot of information out there, that differs. Plus, there’s a lot of information that isn’t applicable to bloggers, or to your particular niche.

What is a Media Kit?

A media kit for bloggers is usually used to show off yourself and your blog/YouTube/social channels to brands you want to work with. Marketing and PR professionals also often use them to better understand whether blogger X, Y and Z will be a good fit for the product they want to promote.

Overall, think of a media kit to be a kind of resume/CV for your brand. It’s a way to pitch yourself to brands and agencies that can create collaborations and sponsorships. (And other services but we’ll talk about that a bit later!).

Often a media kit is a one-pager, although depending on design or how much information it can be two. Again, extremely similar to how a CV works. Media kits usually include a brief overview of your blog and yourself, and will include imagery, statistics, and other relevant information.

What Do I Need to Include in a Media Kit?

The good thing about media kits is that they’re so personal and can change from blog to blog. My background in marketing and PR has meant that I have seen a lot of media kits (some amazing, some good, some… not so good). Which means I know what people look out for on each of them and these are the main parts you should include:

Main details

This may sound like common sense, but I have seen media kits that don’t include main details like an email address, the bloggers name or even a link to their blog.

Introduce yourself as well as your blog. People resonate more with other people (which is why influencer marketing works). The PR you’re pitching to knows this, so make yourself personable in your media kit. If you can’t convince the PR that you’re someone that can influence others, your media kit starts to fall apart a bit.

Whilst you may think your blogs name should be enough, make it easy for the person reading and have a URL somewhere on the page, whether as a hyperlink or in text. This also helps because so many blogs have different top-level domains – for all you know the person reading your kit may assume you’re at BLOG(.)co.uk when really, you’re at .com. This can possibly lead them to think your site has gone down or is no longer around if they can’t immediately find the site.

Contact details are also a must. Yes, you may have emailed your media kit to them with a lovely signature with all your contact details on. But what happens if they’ve saved your media kit on file for future reference and then can’t find the email from you? Or it’s in a shared drive and another employee wants to reach out? Make sure that if the only thing the reader is seeing is your media kit – they can clearly see who you are, what you do and how to find you.

Relevant Links to Your Channels

As a note before I talk more about links in media kits. I mentioned before about hyperlinked URLs or URLs as text and this depends on the type of file used. The media kits file type often depends on which software you have access to. Most media kits work best as a PDF (and come across as more professional) however you can create image (JPEG) media kits, which will work if you’re also adding them to your site. If you are using an image then hyperlinks won’t work, however with PDFs you can use that functionality.

So, your media kit should have links to all relevant channels that you have connected to your brand. This means your social media channels, portfolios, or even if you have a server on Discord. For example, my media kit links to my LinkedIn profile, which shows that I think of my blog as a professional extension of myself. If you can justify the link – make sure you add it in.

Statistics

I know a lot of bloggers think of statistics as the boring part of blogging. However, these are vital if you want to work with brands, because it’s a quantitative way to show them that working with you will be effective in their marketing campaigns.

I suggest sharing your monthly average ‘Unique Users’ (Sometimes called MUU or AMU) and ‘Page Views’. Unique users is the better of the two statistics as it shows how big your audience on your blog is. Page views can be used in conjunction with unique users to determine engagement and whether readers return to your blog.

Note on Page Views: I’m sure many of us have looked at our daily stats with surprise because “wow we’ve had so many page views today”. Only to realise it’s because we’ve been on our own site whilst logged out… It’s happened to the best of us! Because of this, some bloggers do try to play the system and claim they have a huge amount of page views and don’t disclose unique users. PR people do realise that this happens and are well within their rights to request screenshots of statistics for proof and refuse to work with you if you aren’t transparent with statistics such as Unique Users.

Please remember that they are working as a business that has KPIs they need to meet, and that means working with bloggers and creators who bring value to the business.

For social media statistics, you can use the built-in statistics. Twitter and YouTube are very good at having relevant stats already in its analytics, but for Instagram you will need a business account (it’s free!) and you may need to set up a spreadsheet to track things yourself because they’re not great.

Follower count is the most obvious stat to include in your media kit for all channels. Don’t worry if you have a lot less followers on one account, businesses will take this into account depending on which opportunities they have.

An important stat for Twitter and Instagram is the engagement rate your posts have. Twitter has it under the ‘Tweets’ tab on analytics, and you can see your monthly avg. easily. Instagram is a lot harder, and this is where that spreadsheet I mentioned comes in handy.

To work out engagement rate for Instagram you need to use the SUM formula to find out how many engagements you have on one post. Engagements include likes, comments, shares, bookmarks, and interactions – all of which you can find on Instagram’s Insights. Then to find the rate %, you divide the engagements by the ‘Reach’ number on that post. Do this for all your posts in a month, and then avg. the rate.

Imagery

Nearly every blog has images, and a lot of bloggers take a lot of pride in their photos and graphics they create. So of course, make sure you select some images that show off your work, and that fits your content well.

Additional Information for Media Kits

Of course, the above isn’t an exhaustive list of what to include (and honestly the below isn’t either!). You can use your media kit to be creative when showing off what you can provide a brand.

Audience Demographics

Interesting extra stats you can use are your audience’s demographic. Being able to tell a brand most of your audience is X gender, in Y age range in Z county can really help them decide you’re a good fit. It’s an assumption that if you want to work with a brand you most likely have content that already fits, so you can say your audience is a good fit for their desired audience.

Of course, this could go wrong if you’re trying to reach out to a brand with a completely different audience. So always research the companies properly, and you can always remove this section if you feel like it won’t work in your favour.

Previous Partnerships

Similar to audience demographics I guess, you can show that you’ve worked with companies with a similar audience, or a company with similar values. For example, showing beauty brands you’ve worked with other beauty brands (& successfully!) can be extremely beneficial.

Even better is if you have stats to prove success. For example, X amount of people used your code. Or Y% of clicks on your affiliate links converted to purchase. Previous partnerships show the value of working with you from a business perspective even more than your channel stats.

Testimonials

Getting follower testimonials can be a way to say, “hey look I know I’m good at this because other people say so”. Plus, if they’re on a site like Fohr which bloggers can’t edit, they have a lot of authority.

Shameless plug: If you like my content please fill out a follower testimonial on Fohr for me, it takes about 5 minutes.

Even better, is asking brands you’ve already worked with for a brand testimonial. These have a high authority because there’s extra expertise thrown in too, that you are a good content creator to work with.

Services

If you have specific ways of working with brands, for example sponsored posts, make sure you make that clear in your media kit. I have a wide range of possible services to offer because of how I’ve set my site up and how I’ve previously worked with brands. So, my list looks like:

Of course, that’s not an exhaustive list of services bloggers can provide – and being creative with content can help you. If you have great ideas for how to promote a brand, make sure you pop that into your services list.

Rates

Rates is one that can be a hit or miss for a media kit.  If you already gain sponsored posts, and other brand deals, it may be easier to create set rates for your services. If you’re unsure, I would recommend not including rates, but negotiating possible budgets depending on the brand, the product, the needs of the collaboration etc.

Of course, having a ‘rates’ card somewhere is important as it quantifies the work you put into your content. You then can negotiate with brands based on your base value. For example, a larger brand has a larger budget, so you could ask for more and negotiate if needed, to not go below your asking price.

What Should a Media Kit Look Like?

What your media kit looks like is completely up to you! You can get creative with it. Plus, it’s a great way to work on your branding.

However, if you are stuck, there’s so many great templates you can use online (with a lot being for free). Canva has templates you can use already, but you can also download them. Or you can just have a nosey through others and create your own from scratch.

The only design choice you need to absolutely abide by is make sure that it is clear and readable. Plus, make sure your key information is easily found, so if a PR person is skim reading it, they see what they need fast. No one wants to spend ages picking information out of bulk blocks of text or strain their eyes reading yellow text on a white background.

Do you have any other questions about Media Kits? Anything you’re still struggling with? Let me know!