What is a Media Kit and How Do I Make One?

You’ve probably heard of media kits, but you might be a bit sketchy on what these actually are and how you can create your own as a homeschool blogger.

A media kit is a document you provide to potential advertisers and other parties you are interested in working with.  It is meant to reflect your reach as a blogger.  Your reach is wherever you might have a realm of influence (online or not) that can be demonstrated in numbers.

A media kit can be as simple as an ad page with basic blog and social media numbers or as complex as a full-blown demographic study of your readers printed and bound.  Whatever kind of media kit you choose to create, remember to be clear and concise.  No company wants to thumb through 20 pages of data about your blog.  They are looking for the bottom line.

Is your blog worth working with?

Let’s get started!

TRACK YOUR SITE

Before you ever get started creating a media kit, it is important you have some way of tracking numbers on your blog.  Most people use Google Analytics as the provider of this data because it has been shown to be the most accurate.  For some bloggers, this is a blow considering most other tracking programs show MUCH higher stats than Google.

On Raising Arrows, I track with both Google Analytics and Jetpack (formally WordPress Stats).  However, when it comes to my media kit, I pull my information from Google Analytics.  (Need help understanding the data on Google Analytics?  Read this.)

WRITE A BRIEF SUMMARY OF YOUR SITE

Think of this as the Reader’s Digest version of your About Page.

My About Page on Raising Arrows is long.  It contains many links to other sections of my blog, so a reader can really get a good feel of what they will find there.  But remember, companies want brief and to the point.  So you write what’s called an “elevator pitch.”  If you were in an elevator talking to a potential advertiser, what would you say about your site before the elevator stopped?

So, my lengthy About Page would be condensed to this:

RaisingArrows.net encourages the homeschool mom to teach, parent, and disciple with purpose and vision, rooted and grounded in God’s Word.  Melding the experiences of raising a large family, losing a young daughter, and living in the trenches of homeschooling day after day, Amy offers her readers a gentle voice and a firm resolve to live life abundantly.

PRESENT YOUR DATA

The next step is to present your blog in numbers.  You can keep these to what I like to call the Fab 5:

1. number of subscribers
2. Facebook likes
3. Twitter followers
4. pageviews
5. unique visitors

Or you can add in even more things like Alexa ranking, Klout score, Google page rank, and any other metrics you track.  However, I will tell you I have yet to work with a company that cares about anything beyond the Fab 5.

ADVERTISING OPTIONS

If you are offering advertising, this is where your ad options go.  On my ad page, I’ve listed them by placement and included a screen shot so potential companies can see where their ad will go.  You must remember many companies are not familiar with blogging advertising options.  Pictures are good!

You can choose to list ad prices here or not.  I do simply because I want to make things as easy as possible for potential advertisers.  We’ll talk more about ad pricing in another post.

MAKE IT EASY TO CONTACT YOU

One big issue I see time and time again are blogs without an easy way to contact the author.  If a reader or business has to click more than 1 or 2 times, you’ve lost them.  My ad page has an email button at the top and my email address at the bottom.  You should also have an easy way to contact you from your home page as well.

If you are worried about spam, there is a plugin in WordPress to help called Fast Secure Contact Form.  I use it on both my blogs.

These are the basics of a media kit (particularly the kind that would serve as an ad page on your blog itself); however, a quick search of the web will give you a plethora of information on creating more extensive media kits to hand to companies or offer as a pdf via email.  Here are a few resources I’ve found to be helpful:

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