What should a media kit include and how do I set my rates?

What belongs in a media kit

• ✔Short positioning statement and niche
• ✔Audience size, demographics and engagement across platforms
• ✔Two or three case studies with actual results
• ✔Clear packages and deliverables
• ✔Rates or a starting-from figure, and contact details

Price the usage, not just the post

A single image used organically for 30 days is a different product from the same image used in paid ads for a year. Quote deliverables, term, territory, exclusivity and whitelisting separately — this is where most creatives leave money on the table.

Negotiation is part of the job

Brands expect a counter-offer. Knowing your floor rate, your capacity and what you will trade (longer term for higher fee, fewer platforms for exclusivity) turns negotiation from stressful into routine.

What actually belongs in a media kit

A media kit should answer a brand's questions before they have to ask them: who you are, who follows you, what you make, and what it costs to work with you. At minimum include a short bio that states your niche clearly, audience demographics and platform breakdown, a handful of your strongest content examples relevant to brand work, past partnership examples if you have them (with permission), and a clear rate card or 'starting at' pricing structure. Keep it visually clean and to two or three pages — a media kit that takes five minutes to read will get skimmed, not read.

Update your media kit every few months as your audience and content evolve. A kit with stale numbers or outdated content examples signals to a brand that you are not actively managing your business.

Pricing usage, not just the post

The single biggest pricing mistake creators make is quoting a flat fee for 'a post' without specifying what the brand can do with it afterward. The base fee should cover the work of creating and posting the content on your own channel. Anything beyond that — the brand repurposing your content on their own social accounts, running it as a paid ad, using it on their website or in print, or extending how long they can use it — is additional usage that should be priced separately and stated explicitly in your rate card or contract. Think of the content itself and the rights to use it as two separate products you are selling.

Negotiation without underselling yourself

When a brand comes back with a lower budget than your rate, you have real options besides simply dropping your price: reduce the scope (fewer deliverables, a single platform instead of three, a shorter usage window), or hold your rate and let the brand decide if the fit is right at that price. What you should avoid is quietly doing the full original scope for less money just to keep the relationship, since that resets the brand's expectation of your value going forward and makes the next negotiation harder, not easier.

It also helps to know your floor before you enter a conversation — the rate below which the partnership is not worth your time once you account for shoot time, editing, revisions and usage rights given up — so you are not deciding under pressure in the middle of a negotiation.

Contracts and getting paid on time

Even small brand deals deserve a short written agreement covering deliverables, deadlines, usage rights, exclusivity if any, payment amount and payment timeline. Requesting a deposit before you begin work on larger partnerships is standard practice and protects you if a brand cancels mid-project. If a brand consistently pushes back on putting terms in writing, treat that as a signal about how the rest of the relationship will go.