What Is A Media Kit and Do I Need One?

You may have seen this mentioned by other bloggers, but if you’re not sure what a media kit is, then how do you know whether you need to keep one?

A media kit (in the world of blogging) is a collection of information about a person or a blog. Think of it like your blogging CV – you want to show off the best parts of your blogging life, and your favourite achievements. Your media kit can be used to tell potential collaborators, such as advertisers and brands, about your demographic (the audience to which you’re aiming your blog at), your statistics and why they should work with you, but it’s also a nice thing to be able to look at and say “Yes! My blog is pretty awesome!”

Your media kit should be as unique as you (and your blog) are so open up your Word or Google Docs and get typing! Theme your media kit to look a little like your blog with the same colours and fonts if possible – you could even use the header image from your blog to put at the top of your document to make it stand out.

Open by talking about yourself and your blog. Give the reader a basic history about how long you have been blogging, how long you have been running this blog (if this isn’t your first), and why you blog. Keep the intro reasonably short and sweet – about 150 words should do it. Since this is your opening paragraph to the reader, you want to draw them in – there is the possibility that the person reading your media kit hasn’t actually visited your blog before so here’s your chance to make an awesome first impression.

Next, talk about your demographic. What is the average reader of your blog like? This is important to future advertisers because there isn’t much point in them working with you for a product that is aimed at 40 something males if your blog audience is primarily 20 something females. (There’s nothing to say that your audience couldn’t include those males, but the advertiser will probably find more benefits to them from a blog that does cater to those guys!) You can use services like Alexa, Quantcast (which you’ll need to put a bit of code on your site to get any data from) and good old Google Analytics to find out things like the average age, location, gender, etc etc.

Something that will follow on from demographics are your vital statistics. Talk about your unique visitors and pageviews, but don’t forget to include things like the people who subscribe to your blog through RSS and Bloglovin’. Another useful thing to include are your social media following numbers. Facebook likes, Twitter followers and the people following you on Instagram are all important to an advertiser, because they want as much exposure from you as possible. Your Instagram audience might not follow you on Twitter or your Facebook audience might not click through to every blog post that your page pops up, so talk about any extra special posts everywhere to attract as many readers as possible.

So, what are you offering your advertisers? Now is your chance to talk about what you do and don’t do. Do you accept pre written posts, or do you only accept payment for posts on the condition that you write it yourself? Do you mark all links as nofollow in your reviews? Detail here what you’re going to do, but say you’re open to suggestions – who knows what you haven’t thought about doing before!

This section is up to you whether you include it or not, but the services section would lead nicely into what your rates are – how much do you charge for a sponsored post or tweet? How much is a banner advert on your blog?

Finally, talk about how they can get in contact with you. The most important thing to include is your email and your blog address (just to remind them!) but you could include things like your Twitter account, phone number or postal address where any lookbooks or products could be sent to.

Save your media kit, so you can edit it for any new collaborations, and send it out to the advertisers in PDF format, so there’s less compatibility issues.

There are obviously other things you could include, like previous collaborations you’ve been particulary proud of, or maybe even testimonials from people you’ve worked with before. Like we said earlier, this is your blog CV – sell yourself!