As we’ve discussed at our IFB conferences over the past year, the landscape of fashion blogging has come a long way from the self-publication-for-the-people days of yore. Today, personal style blogs have incredible potential as businesses and  drivers of consumer trends. We all know of the mega-popular blogs who regularly receive gifted product and collaborate on design projects and promotions with big-name brands and designers, but what about the rest of us?

Reward Style has emerged as a cool and lucrative tool both for top-tier bloggers as well as up-and-comers who are not necessarily household names, but fast becoming influencers among their readers and peers. Reward Style allows it’s members to link out to shopping sites from their blog, and earn a commission if readers purchase items through their links. To maintain a standard for their clients, rS is not available to everyone. Though some might view this as alienating, I think it’s a wonderful motivator for those who are serious about taking their personal blog to the next level. To get the inside scoop on Reward Style, I interviewed their president, Amber Venz.

How was the concept of Reward Style born?

I started my fashion blog, VENZedits.com, in April 2010 as an extension of my personal shopping business – I wanted it to be my fashion diary and styling portfolio. I started out posting 3 times a day and I was telling all of my secrets to my readers. I quickly realized that I had cut myself out of my own business- my clients were now buying the products I suggested off of my blog and not booking appointments with me anymore.

I decided to monetize my blog so I did what any blogger would do- I went to every blog I knew and snooped around to see how they were making money. I ended up becoming a member of about eight ad networks. I had a spreadsheet with the logins, passwords, which ads were where; it was an administrative nightmare and a total time-suck.

After about seven months of that, I teamed up with a technology company and explained to them what I was dealing with and we developed rewardStyle.com.

This site was built around what I needed as a blogger: I wanted all my advertisers in one place, one login, one reporting system, one check. I wanted to get paid like I used to as a personal shopper, the ability to compare commissions between stores on a single product, a way to track my click-to-sale conversion so I could see what all of these links were worth to me.

As a small start-up, we listen to what our users need. You want to be able to link to ASOS? Let me call them. You wear a ton of J.Crew? Good news, they called us. You do not want to have to bit.ly your links to see what is working? We will build you an analytics page right into our site.

Who is reward style available to?

rS is an invitation-only monetization tool for fashion, lifestyle and beauty bloggers around the globe. We work with bloggers who are looking to make money on their content and are blogging at a professional level, meaning their content is original, gramaticaly correct, visually pleasing and consistent. We consider a number of factors in our decision process including reader engagement through social networks like twitter and facebook, number of posts per week, and if the content is a good match for what rewardStyle has to offer.

In what ways can bloggers use Reward Style to monetize their blog / social media outlets?

We provide fashion, beauty and lifestyle bloggers with relevant product links for whatever products they have decided to talk about, feature or wear. These links allow bloggers to get paid online the same way personal shoppers do offline. My background is in personal shopping and if I took a client into a boutique, I would get a commission on whatever that client purchased. This is the concept we have taken online. If you direct a reader to a retailers site, we allow you to get paid a commission on whatever that reader purchases at that site for a pre-determined number of days (generally 30 days, although this term varies by store).

Bloggers are working as personal shoppers by styling and suggesting products and we, as bloggers, are keeping the masses shopping by creating a desire for products. (You are welcome, retailers.)

Everything about rewardStyle is performance based; we allow bloggers to get paid exactly what they are worth to these brands and retailers.

Who are your top e-tailers using Reward Style?

We are currently working with about 300 fashion and beauty advertisers- here are a few of our top performers:

• Shopbop
• Net-a-Porter
• J.Crew
• Asos
• Madewell
• Neiman Marcus
• Zappos
• Endless
• Outnet.com
• Topshop

What advice would you give to bloggers who want to step up their game?

• Purchase a unique URL (get off .blogspot, .wordpress, .tumblr)
• Set up google analytics and track your progress.
• Set up a Twitter and Facebook account for your blog and be active on both to grow your audience.
• Post at least four times a week (but always remember, quality over quantity- four times is not mandatory). This will help with your analytics and it will establish some consistency so your readers know what to expect.
• Show original content- re-posting a magazine spread does not show talent and can not be monetized.

What do you guys think? Do you use Reward Style already? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Every blogger is looking for the secret sauce. The perfect combination of great content, engaged readers and steady traffic. While we totally understand that blogging is more than a numbers game, everyone wants more eyes in front of their great content. And why shouldn’t you?! You spend hours crafting informative, useful and entertaining posts, people should know about it!

But getting traffic is a daunting task and there’s so much information in cyberspace about how to go about getting it. Organic traffic from search engines is a great (and often overlooked) way to get readers to your blog. Google, Yahoo and Bing  serve results to searchers looking for information and rank them according to relevance to what a searcher is looking for. By creating a useful post and optimizing it, your blog can appear at the top of the ranks and get the traffic your content deserves.

 

Here’s the IFB Primer on how to optimize your content and strut to the top of the Google ranks!

 

By Ryan Shell of Fashables

Ever since Klout was mentioned on stage at the Independent Fashion Bloggers Evolving Influence Conference (some) fashion bloggers have been trying to figure out what Klout is, and what kind of impact it will have. This post will give you a high level understanding of Klout, and what it should or shouldn’t mean to you. Before we go any further and you start worrying about how high or low yours score is, there’s something I must say. Engaging your readers and followers and putting out great content… those are factors you should worry about, always. Win in those areas and your Klout will rise.

What is Klout?

In short, Klout is a new company that is assigning users of social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) a score. Without getting overly technical, Klout uses a set of complex algorithms to give you a score from 1 to 100 (higher the score the “better”) that brands can utilize to measure influence. Specifically, they utilize three categories to determine your score.

Klout Categories

With brevity in mind, I’ll keep the definitions for these three Klout categories relatively simple.

• True Reach – the size of your audience that is actively engaged with you.
• Amplification Probability – the likelihood that your messages will get shared (Ex. RT on Twitter, Like or Comment on Facebook) and generate conversations.
• Networks Influence – this is the measure of how influential your followers are and is the hardest of the three categories to control.

Combined, these three categories use more than 35 variables to determine a Klout score, some of which include (this get’s a bit nerdy): Followers, Mutual Follows, Friends, Total Retweets, Unique Commenter’s, Unique Likers, Follower/Follow Ratio, Followed Back %, @ Mention Count, List Count, List Followers Count, Unique Retweeters, Unique Messages Retweeted, Likes Per Post, Comments Per Post Follower Retweet %, Unique @ Senders, Follower Mention %, Inbound Messages Per Outbound Message, Update Count, List inclusions, Follower/Follow Ratio, Followed Back %, Unique Senders, Unique Retweeters, Unique Commenter’s, Unique Likers, Influence of Followers, Influence of Retweeters and Mentioners, Influence of Friends, Influence of Likers and Commenter’s

Does the Score Matter?

Rather than ramble on with more technical jargon, let’s address how this score impacts you as a fashion blogger.

1. If you have no desire to work with brands and are simply having fun with blogging, your Klout score won’t matter much to you.
2. If you aspire to monetize your blog you need to pay attention to your score, as it is one of many elements brands may potentially use to analyze you, as a good fit for their marketing needs.

If you are a 2

If you relate to number 2 from the list above, yes, it’s true that you should pay attention to your Klout score (to an extent). It’s also very important that you not get caught up in sending X tweets per day and sweating when you don’t get Y retweets per day.

For my day job I’m one of those marketing folks that will, at times, need to find influencers for certain categories. When doing so I’ll check a person’s Klout, but I also look at a variety of other factors before listing someone as an influencer.

Things such as the quality of content you distribute and the type of brand ambassador you have been/could be plays a big factor when adding people to an influencer list.

Does Size Matter?

Keep in mind that Klout measures influence, and a person with 400 followers that causes his/her audience to react can easily be viewed as more influential than someone with 5,000 followers that never react. The size of your audience doesn’t guarantee a high Klout score; it’s all about influence (causing action).

In the End

Klout measures influence, but what was said towards the beginning of this post should be what influences you, “Engaging your readers and followers and putting out great content… those are factors you should worry about, always. Win in those areas and your Klout will rise.”

I hope this post has in some way shed some light on Klout. If you don’t know your Klout, but want to, click here to get started.