How to Make a Media Kit (Without It Being Out of Date by Friday)

Step 1: Collect the numbers, and note where each came from

Do this before you think about layout. Open each platform's own analytics — not a third-party dashboard — and write down what it tells you. Keeping a note of the source beside each figure feels pedantic for about five minutes and then saves you every time someone asks where a number came from.

Engagement rate deserves its own warning, because it is the number most often quoted and least often defined. There are at least three formulas in circulation and they produce meaningfully different figures. Whichever you use, state it on the kit. The engagement rate calculator uses the median of your recent posts over followers and shows its working, which is a defensible choice you can point at.

Step 2: Write the three things no tool can generate

Everything in step one can be automated. These three cannot, and they are what separate two creators with identical numbers.

The positioning line

One sentence naming what you make and who reliably watches it. The test is whether a brand could use it to rule you out: "lifestyle creator sharing my journey" rules nobody out and therefore rules nobody in. "Budget home cooking for one or two people, mostly students and early-career renters" is a sentence a brand can act on immediately, in either direction.

Three pieces of past work, with results

Not a logo wall. Three posts, each with what it was, who it was for, what happened, and a link. If you have never done a paid partnership, use organic posts on the subject a brand would hire you for — a creator who has clearly nailed the format they are being hired for is a smaller risk than one who has worked with brands in an unrelated category.

Your rates

Starting rates per deliverable, with usage rights, exclusivity and volume priced separately. The common anchor is around $10 per 1,000 followers for an in-feed post, adjusted for the format and your engagement — the rate calculator applies that transparently and shows the arithmetic, so you can defend the number rather than just quote it.

Two things brands notice immediately: rates that are conspicuously round across every deliverable (it reads as invented on the spot), and a kit with no usage terms at all, which tends to mean the creator has not yet been burned by a brand running their post as an ad for a year.

Step 3: Decide between a file and a link

This is the step people skip, and it determines more about the kit's useful life than any other decision.

In practice the answer is both, with the link as the thing you actually send. A kit is forwarded internally more often than creators realise, and a link means the person who eventually decides is looking at today's numbers rather than at whatever was true when you first pitched.

Step 4: Lay it out so the checklist is findable

The order in media kit examples holds: who you are, your numbers, past work, rates, contact. A few layout rules that survive contact with real readers:

• Per-platform numbers, never combined. A single "250K across platforms" reads as concealment.
• Audience breakdown above the fold on whichever screen it lands on. It is the most-requested item.
• Your email in text, not behind a button, not in an image, not only in a link tree.
• Numbers large enough to read on a phone. A surprising share of first reads happen on one.
• Label every figure with its source. Pulled from the platform, computed from posts, or entered by you.

Step 5: Decide now how it gets updated

This is where most media kits die. The build is a pleasant afternoon; the maintenance is a chore with no deadline attached, so it does not happen, and six months later the kit in circulation is describing a smaller, differently-shaped account than the one you have.

There are only three honest options. Put a recurring reminder in your calendar and actually keep it. Accept that the kit is a snapshot and say so on the page, with the date it was compiled. Or build it somewhere that re-pulls its own numbers, so the maintenance question stops existing. The third is the only one that does not depend on future-you being more diligent than present-you.

Where KitVerify fits

KitVerify is step one and step five handled for you. You paste your Instagram handle; followers, recent posts and engagement come back through the official API and are labelled Synced, with the date they were pulled. You do step two — positioning, past work, rates, audience breakdown — because nothing can write those for you. The result is a link and a PDF, and the link keeps re-reading its numbers on a daily cadence.

Its limits are worth stating. It does not find brand deals, pitch on your behalf, handle contracts or invoice. It builds the document and keeps it true. If you work with a manager, the same underlying record is what they maintain across a roster — see creator management software for that side of it.

Building one takes about as long as reading this, and needs no account: the media kit generator starts from a handle.