Happy Thursday, y’all! Today I’m shaking things up a little bit and talking about media kits! Maybe you’re a blogger, an aspiring blogger, or just curious about what goes on behind the scenes for bloggers like myself. 🙂 A media kit is basically a resume for your blog. It showcases things like your blog stats, social stats, favorite posts that you’ve done, and companies that you have worked with on collabs in the past. It should be a snapshot of your blog and personal style. Mine is 3 pages, but I’ve seen 2 and 3 pagers look amazing too! 🙂 Just like a great resume can land you your dream job, a great media kit will help you land the collab of your dreams.
For me, I use my media kit usually for one of two reasons. I send it to a company that I want to collaborate with to showcase my work and how we can work together, or a company has reached out to me and they want to know more about my blog and any services I offer!
How to create a media kit
You can totally design yours from scratch. I did this when I first started my blog, and I really loved it. Recently I upgraded and switched my media kit over to a template to look more professional and polished. I chose this design from Dreamy Presets. It’s so gorgeous and super easy to customize. Her instructions were so easy to follow, it made creating one actually fun! I changed up the color palettes and the layout a bit for mine, but you definitely do not need to. My final media kit looks a bit different from the template, but I love how it turned out. The image at the top of this post is a little snippet of the top of the first page of my media kit. 🙂
What to include in your media kit:
Your blog name + Info
This may seem totally obvious, but you never know! Make sure your blog name stands out and your blog URL is noticeable. Your beautiful media kit won’t do you too much good if your name isn’t load and clear. 🙂 Make sure your email address is visible too. You also need to have an about me section and about the blog section. Your about the blog section should convey what sets you apart and what you focus on. Readers should get a good view of what your blog is all about within a few short sentences. Your about me is more personal, and this can include whatever you want to share with others – your location, your age, your dogs names and ages (haha JK, well kinda), etc! All of this is on the first page of my media kit! 🙂
Your social Media Stats
For me, my largest following is on Instagram. I want to showcase that because I am proud of how I’ve built my Instagram following. I am also present on YouTube, Facebook (my blog page), Twitter, and Pinterest! For me, my Facebook page isn’t super strong yet, so I don’t include it on my media kit. I do however have 330 subscribers on my YouTube channel that I’m super proud of, so it’s best to showcase where you have the strongest presence. Hopefully that makes sense! 🙂
Your blog stats
# of monthly page views // # of unique monthly visitors // % gender // % with age ranges // % location of views
Your monthly page views and unique visitors will (or should) be different. Some people re-visit your blog multiple times in a month, and companies like to see your numbers. Because I am a woman and I focus on style, beauty, and lifestyle, I am interested in targeting women. I am also interested in targeting women 18-40, so it is important for me to have my blog readers and followers to be in my target audience. So why do all of these numbers matter? Well, companies love working with bloggers that have a large audience, because obviously it gets them more exposure. That is why they care about monthly page views and unique visitors. However, brands most importantly want to worth with bloggers that are targeting the same audience. For example, I probably wouldn’t be the best fit for grey hair coverup, as my hair isn’t greying! However, I’d be a great fit for a young & trendy clothing boutique, as we appeal to the same audience. Hopefully that makes sense. 🙂
Your fave past collabs/previous work
Okay, so you have worked with some amazing brands, amazing! Companies will never know if you don’t showcase your favorite work! For me, my favorite collab has been with Madewell. You totally bet I am showcasing that collab in my media kit. Include images and any details on how successful it was – any related stats are fab to include. It’s especially great if you have testimonials from previous collabs, saying how awesome you were to work with! 🙂 I’ll talk more about this below!
Your rates/terms of collaboration
Blogging is so much fun, but like any job it takes a lot of work and time! For me, a post can be super quick or I may have worked on it for a few hours. I take time to take beautiful images. I then have to edit them to match my personal brand and style of my blog. 🙂 I’ve learned to not feel bad to ask for payment in exchange for posts! It’s amazing advertising for companies, and advertising isn’t free y’all! So please, don’t feel bad. Decide on what you want out of collabs and stick to your guns!
Unfortunately, there’s not a black and white way to go about asking for payment. You can either do a product exchange (free product in exchange for x posts) or you can charge different rates in addition to the company sending you product. For me I have different rates for just an Instagram, a full-sponsored blog post + social sharing, a partial sponsored post, etc. Your rate is up to you, and whatever you think is right. I’ve read a TON on what you should charge and what’s appropriate. A good rule of thumb is to charge $100 for every 10,000 social followers or 10,000 blog views/month. If you have 6,000 Instagram followers you would charge $60 for a post. If you have 20,000 blog views a month, you would charge $200 for a post, etc. That’s just a baseline and depending on how much time you’ll spend on the post I go up from there.
Testimonials
I’m so happy that I got my template from Dreamy Presets because I wouldn’t have ever thought about including testimonials otherwise. Testimonials are basically just kind words from companies that you’ve worked with in the past! If you’re super impressive and on top of things with your collabs, every company you work with should be able to write you an amazing testimonial. Most of mine actually came from un-sripted emails, just from companies thanking me for my work! 🙂 It makes you feel good and it also makes you look good to other companies that are interested in working with you!
Blogging is so much fun. I am obsessed and love the fun opportunities and challenges it brings my way daily. There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes, and hopefully this post helped out with anyone that is curious about blogging or learning more about bloggers. I would love to continue this as a blogger series, so please comment below or email me with any post suggestions that you’d like to learn more about – anything to do with blogging or bloggers! 🙂
Hope y’all have an amazing Friday tomorrow! XOXO
