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I recently redid most of my media kits after attending the EVO Conference Before and After: Sales & Monetization. I learned a lot from listening to Stephanie Schwab discuss the elements that make a media kit successful so I would like to pass some of that advice on to you.Here is a media kit that I created for the Spina Bifida Support Forum. I am showing it here as a slide show but you can see how it looks neatly packed into a .pdf as well. Also, the conversion online screwed up the font running the url at the bottom. That is not how it looks when it goes to potential sponsors. There are some other weird formatting things the slide show did so do look at the pdf to compare.
This is a small forum with the sole purpose of supporting those that live with the same conditions my son does. I used Microsoft Powerpoint 2010 to create the design of the slides then converted it into a .pdf using Adobe Acrobat Professional. If you don’t have similar programs available to you you can always use google docs for free.
Identification: Name and Logo. Include a clear description of what the doc is.
Contents: What will people find in this document? I choose to add many photos throughout this kit as a way to further brand the site. I wanted to make the kit compelling and interesting. Since the site is a community, pictures of our members make sense here. Pictures are worth a thousand words. Communicate what your site is about through well places photos.
About Your Site: Trick here is to clearly communicate who you are and what your site is about clearly and conscisely. This is not the place to post your whole bio.
Site Statistics: There are many places that you can garner your stats from and all will be very different. Some tools to use to check your stats are Google Analytics, Lijit, Compete, or Quantcast. These all require that you either register an account and insert some code on your site or submit the url for tracking. Take the time to make sure you are understanding your blog statistics. I use a program called Jing to grab screenshots. There is a free and paid version. I use the paid but the free should be just fine for grabbing quick stat screenshots. Make sure you clearly identify where your stats are coming from and when.
Demographics: Since this is an international community and I am not just necessarily looking for US sponsors, I choose to include the top ten countries the readers are from. If you drill down farther in this area in your google analytics you can information on states or areas that may be important in going after local sponsors.
Site Reach: Where are you in social media? This site doesn’t use twitter but I included facebook. I pulled my inbound links (which are really high) from webmaster central. You use Search Status firefox add-on for the google page rank and alexa ranking.
Site Usage: I choose to highlight my US demographics here because Quantcast does an awesome job of making me a nice, neat little picture of who our US readers are.
Advertising Opportunities: Banner Ads: To grab the screenshot of the entire page I used SnagIt. There is a free 30 day trial. I added the arrows and text in powerpoint. Some things to think about here are if you are comfortable using a banner rotation program or if you want just one static ad. $5 per 1,000 impressions or page views (cpm) seems to be fairly standard in ad pricing. So using that as a guide I may want to aim for making $450/month off my top banner. With this being the first time venturing into private ad sales on this site I went for 5 $75 slots. That will most certainly change over time.
Advertising Opportunities: Sponsored Posts: If you are going to run sponsored posts you need to clearly define your boundaries. How many links can it have? Are you writing it or the sponsor? How will you clearly make sure to disclose it? In my example this is a forum post so the rules are a little different but you get the idea.
Advertising Opportunities: Sponsored Travel: This is where you can describe any upcoming conferences you want to attend or travel opportunities you might be interested in. Explain what you would be willing to do in exchange for travel and why a company should invest in you
Contact Information: I use a UPS mail box for anything related to my blog. UPS boxes are great because many companies won’t ship to PO Boxes so using UPS gives you a physical address. They have permission to sign for all my packages avoiding me having to wait around and they send me a text when something is delivered. The phone listed is my cell. I would not be comfortable listing my house.
Some additional things not included in this kit that you might want to add:
Reviews/Giveaways: Do you do them? What are your guidelines? Will you return products? Mail to winners? What is your average turn around time? What types of items work best for your readers? Do you charge a fee? Show an example of a successful giveaway you have done.
Press/Media: Where has your site been featured? Give excerpts if you can. Have a campaign that performed really well? Include a testimonial from the brand. Pictures are great here.
Editorial Calendar: What are you writing about this year? Stephanie has a great roundup of posts about editorial calendars on her site.
That ought to give you enough
One more thing: I have opened up my Blog Frog community to share pr opportunities and advice so make sure you join me over there!
Have any advice that I didn’t think of? Programs you use? Something you just want to tell me? I love comments and questions so leave ’em!