Whether you’re a blogger who writes about food, finance, travel, education or anything else, odds are high that marketers everywhere are anxious to hire you to help them promote their message. The challenge for them lies in finding the perfect blogger to help them get the word out. Bloggers can increase their chances of getting noticed by the right people by crafting an eye-catching, informative media kit that does a good job of showcasing their strengths and outlining their rates and options. Let’s take a look at how you can easily and quickly create a standout media kit on Flipboard.
1. What is a media kit anyway?
The ultimate goal of a media kit is to give potential clients or sponsors all of the information they might need before deciding to work with you. It’s your chance to put your best foot forward and really show off who you are and what you can do. A media kit is also a good place to outline the kinds of partnerships you’d love to create. Many connections have been made because bloggers have dared to share the things they’d like to write about!
2. What should you include in your media kit?
Think of a media kit as a really robust résumé. There are four major areas for you to cover:
Who you are: Start by sharing photos of yourself and other things that are relevant to what you write, your family, places you’ve been, food you’ve cooked or dreamed up, or things you’ve crafted. If ad space is something you really want to sell, then you’ll want to show off a screengrab of your home page with any available ad space.
What you about: Since the goal is to get hired to write or promote a company, you want to be sure to share the types of things you write and any regular features that you post. Something you’re already doing might be the perfect fit for a campaign a marketer is working on! Samples of your work are also important to show off. Pick the ones that you feel are most reflective of your personal style and skill, and don’t be scared to show posts that you’ve written for campaigns. It’s can be useful for campaign managers to see how your sponsored posts look before deciding to hire you.
What your reach is: Next you’ll want to show off your stats. Remember, bigger isn’t always better! So don’t hesitate here. Best practices say to just grab a screenshot of your analytics dashboard. While you’re at it, be sure to include your social media numbers; everyone knows that a blogger’s reach far exceeds his or her page views!
What you’re looking for: Last, but definitely not least, you’ll want to outline what you want out of a professional relationship. What are your rates, your offerings? What are (or aren’t) you willing to do? Are you looking for conference sponsorship? Speaking gigs? Review opportunities? You’d be amazed at how many bloggers forget ask for what they want. Whatever you do, don’t forget to add a way for people to contact you: you don’t want to make that part of the process hard.
3. How does this all work on Flipboard?
Most, if not all, of the things listed above should live somewhere on your blog; Flipboard enables you to package it all nicely and neatly so that you can wow anyone looking to hire you.
Start by creating a private magazine. Then, keeping the four categories above in mind, start flipping items into your magazine. Don’t worry too much about the order; you can always go in and edit your magazine to make the story flow better. You can add photos, posts, even links to your social media profiles.
Once all of the elements that you’d like to include have been added to the magazine, click on the edit button at the top of the screen or under the featured image.
Organize all of your items into the order that makes the most sense to you and use the compose feature to write notes to tie everything together or to fill in anything that might be missing. Be sure to write notes for everything you’ve added to your media kit to ensure that anyone reading it knows exactly why that particular item has been added.
4. Share your media kit far and wide.
Once you’ve created your Flipboard media kit magazine, you can share it on your blog, in your email, or anywhere you think that someone interested in hiring you might come across it. Travel blogger Tawanna Browne Smith, who uses her Flipboard Magazine media kit to showcase all the places her writing has been featured, shortened the link to her media kit magazine and features it on the back of her business card!
Once you’ve created your media kit magazine, be sure to share it with us on Twitter with the #FlipBlogger hashtag so we can help you spread the word about how awesome you are!
~JessicaR curates Geeky Finds
The post How to Use Flipboard for Your Media Kit appeared first on Flipboard.