A media kit is not a brochure about you. It is a document that answers a brand manager's questions before they have to ask them, so they can say yes without a second meeting.
Get that wrong and you get silence — which most athletes read as rejection. It usually is not. It is usually that nobody could be bothered to chase you for the information.
The six things that belong in it
1. Who you are, in one line. Position, level, team. "Loose forward, 100+ professional caps, Namibia captain" tells a brand more than three paragraphs of adjectives.
2. Followers, per platform. Not a combined total. A brand wants to know where the audience actually is, because that decides which campaign you fit.
3. Reach, over a defined window. Followers are who *could* see you. Reach is who *did*. Always state the period — "34,000 in the last 30 days" — because a number without a window is not a number.
4. Engagement, calculated against reach. This is where most kits quietly cheat. Engagement against follower count flatters you; engagement against reach is honest, and any brand that has run a campaign knows the difference. Say which one you used.
5. Your results. Caps, clubs, honours, current season. This is what separates an athlete from an influencer, and it is the reason a sports brand is talking to you at all.
6. Existing partners. Brands are reassured by other brands. If you have none, leave the section out — do not pad it with things you were once given for free.
What to leave out
Rate cards, at first contact. Naming a price before you know the campaign only ever costs you money. Let them describe what they want.
Vanity numbers. Total lifetime impressions, "over 1 million views" with no timeframe. Anyone senior enough to sign a deal has seen those tricks.
Screenshots of your analytics. A cropped phone screenshot says "trust me". It is the least credible way to present a real number.
The number that actually decides it
Brands are not buying reach. They are buying confidence that the reach is real.
I have watched better players lose sponsorships to worse players who were simply easier to verify. The brand had a budget, a deadline and five names. They picked the one whose numbers they could check in ten seconds without emailing anyone.
That is the whole job of a media kit. Not to impress — to remove doubt.
Make it current
A PDF you exported in March is out of date in April. Every time you send it you are either underselling yourself or, worse, quoting a number you can no longer support.
If you have a page on octa.social, your media kit builds itself from your connected accounts, so the numbers are right on the day the brand opens it — and you can see that they opened it.