What is a Media Kit and Why Does Your Blog Need One
Have you been looking into starting your own business with City Living Network and you keep hearing the term “Media Kit” thrown around… but you’re not really sure what that is or why your city-specific publication needs one?
In this guide, I’m going to walk you through what a Media Kit is and why having one will help you land more ad partnerships and press trips for your city-specific blog.
In a recent post, we talked about how you can monetize your city-specific blog, and one of the points we covered was selling ad spaces to local businesses through your blog. Well, having a media kit is one of the ways that you’re going to be able to do that!
Here at the City Living Network, we help you create a niche, city-specific blog in just 30 days. From ideation to the launch buzz and everything in between, the City Living Network is determined to help the next generation of entrepreneurs become editors-in-chief and start their dream careers – from the comfort of their own homes!
If you're new around here and want to learn more about City Living Network, read this post.
What is a Media Kit?
A media kit is also known as a press kit. It’s a set of promotional materials designed to provide information about your business, typically used to aid news agencies when they’re writing articles about your company.
Woooh. That sounds like a load of gibberish, right?
Essentially, a media kit is a PDF document that you can design to highlight the most relevant information about your business. So if that’s a blog, it’s going to highlight the stand-out information about your blog such as:
Monthly readers
Email subscribers
Page views
Social media followers
So, whether you’re a blogger, photographer, videographer, or vlogger, a media kit that represents your audience and the work that you’ve done will help you grow your business. This PDF document will allow potential brands to quickly see the benefits and outcomes of working with you.
Think about your media kit like your new business card for your city-specific blog. Except with a bit more information that’s going to help you better work with brands and businesses in your community.
What should go in your media kit?
What you put in your media kit is going to be driven by the brands and companies you’re sending the media kit to.
When you launch a city-specific blog with the City Living Network, we provide you with a media kit that you’ll send to local brands in your city that might be interested in buying ad space on your website. That means the information in your media kit needs to be relevant to those brands or businesses that you’re aiming to work with.
Information like the number of people who land on your website every month and their ages or gender can be useful for a brand to know. Think about highlighting the information that’s going to help that brand see a clear win-win when they work & advertise with you.
Pro tip: You can also customize the information in your media kit for the specific company that you’re going to be reaching out to.
It’s important that you don’t fill your media kit with fluff. Cut straight to the point and give brands and businesses the information that they need from you.
However, another thing that you can highlight in your media kit is other brands that you’ve worked with in the past and what that content looked like.
For example, if you’d like to reach out to your favorite Thai restaurant about advertising on your city-specific blog and social media account, you might include an ad, social media post, or blog post that you’d done for another business in the past to show them what you’re capable of creating.
You can show them photos of the menu from another restaurant that you worked with and the outcome of the ad. The outcome of the ad could be things like the number of website visitors OR the number of people who used a unique coupon code from your blog to eat at that restaurant while the ad was running. Either of those things can help you work with potential brands in the future!
Quick tips to making your media kit stand out
I’m going to share some quick tips to help your media kit stand out so you can land more brand deals and sell ad space for your city-specific blog.
Always use your branding. You want a business to know it’s you from a mile away. Build trust and brand recognition through strong, consistent branding.
Be clear and share information that’s truly going to help that business. Yup, that might mean customizing your media kit specifically for the business you’re reaching out to. It might feel like a lot of work now, but that business will be able to see that you put the time and energy into understanding their business, and that will get you more yeses in the long run.
Make your fonts big enough and use pictures! People are busy, especially when they run their own businesses. So make sure that your media kit is easy to scroll through. Highlight the information you really want to share and make all fonts big enough to read easily.
Clear out the fluff and make your sentences shorter. This goes back to ‘easy to scroll through’. You want this document to be easy and quick to read. So cut out lengthy drawn-out sentences and get to your point as quickly as you can, while still telling your story (*insert gif of Pheobe’s rehearsal dinner when Monica is telling her to rush through her speech.)
Include your contact information. This might seem redundant when you’re emailing the business already, but they might forward your media kit on to someone else within the business, and if that person has no way to contact you, it’s going to be an instant no. So make sure you always let them know exactly how they can contact you. Bonus points if you give them a link to book a call with you to further discuss the opportunity.
Creating an incredible media kit can help your city-specific blog speak directly to brands in a clear way, that helps you sell more ad space, get more press trips and that extra invite to a festival you’ve always wanted to attend! And creating a media kit doesn’t have to be overwhelming. In fact, when you work with City Living Network, one of the things you get with your beautifully launched blog is a media kit with pitch templates to help you work with local brands, businesses, hotels, and more in your town!
If you’ve been dreaming of starting your own city-specific publication with City Living Network, this is your sign to book a free consultation with our founder, Lindsay. Learn what City Living Network can do for you today!
