如果对时尚感兴趣，Chiara Ferragni、Olivia Palermo、Song of Style、包先生这些时尚博主的名字对你而言一定不会陌生，他们每天在社交媒体平台向他们的粉丝分享他们的日常穿搭。但你是否好奇这些博主的收入来源是什么？
创始于 2011 年的 rewardStyle 作为一个聚集时尚博主的联盟营销平台，可以在某种程度上让这些时尚博主们的内容「变现」。rewardStyle 与各大购物电商网站达成合作协议，并通过邀请时尚博主在他们自身的社交媒体上贴出内容与电商链接，他们的粉丝就可以通过点击链接买到博主们“晒”出来的东西。rewardStyle 则从各个博主为电商网站或者品牌的附加销售额中获取佣金，每位博主也能从 rewardStyle 获得提成。得益于平台，博主凭此获得了不少经济收入。博主们除了通过 rewardStyle 获得附加销售的佣金以外，往往还与品牌达成了合作或推出联名活动，用自己的原创内容赚取广告费。
上周， rewardStyle 首次携手上海时装周于 rewardStyle 亚洲总部为中国时尚产业带来一场深度行业对话，围绕「博主营销：内容为王的自媒体时代」这一主题展开探索。而 SocialBeta 也非常有幸采访了 rewardStyle 创始人 Amber Venz Box 女士，与其一起探讨了 rewardStyle 的创始故事、商业模式的成功因素以及 rewardStyle 在中国的发展计划。
融合时尚和技术，建立联盟营销平台
Amber 告诉 SocialBeta，从学生时代开始她就对时尚很感兴趣。进入大学之后开始尝试时尚买手的工作——带客户在线下的时装店挑选服装。从 2010 年开始，Amber 开始建立了自己的时尚 Blog，在上面记录自己的日常穿搭。Amber 慢慢发现她原来的客户会通过她 Blog 上提供的链接直接购买，而不再通过她线下的买手服务。这让投入时间、金钱、精力的 Amber 发现她的内容不能为其创造营收，而这一问题也普遍存在于她身边做时尚博主的朋友中。
Amber 当时的男友（如今的丈夫）Baxter Box 是一名技术人员，两人在头脑风暴的时候思考着：当粉丝通过他们的链接购买了电商网站或者品牌的产品，则是为这些网站带去了流量，而如何把这些流量转换为收入成为最初建立 rewardStyle 的思路。Amber 和 Baxter 两个人融合了时尚与技术的背景，建立了rewardStyle这一个以时尚为核心的联盟营销平台。希望尽可能帮助博主与电商在创新的市场环境中创造更多价值：他们提供技术，让时尚博主们通过rewardStyle的技术服务实现对发布内容的点击和销售监测，同时也便于 rewardStyle 和电商网站追溯流量来源。而通过 rewardStyle 给这些电商网站或品牌创造的营收，将会以一定比例的佣金提供给 rewardStyle 以及时尚博主。
慢慢地 Amber 发现有大量的时尚博主不仅仅在博客上分享自己的内容，在许多快速崛起的社交网络平台上也积累了不少粉丝。主打图片社交的 Instagram 就是其中一个，然而 Instagram 并不支持直接发布链接。然而当下越来越多人的关注从博客转移到了这个社交媒体，于是rewardStyle 推出了一款名为 LIKEtoKNOW.it 的线上服务。凡是粉丝在 LIKEtoKNOW.it 注册了账户，那么当粉丝给时尚博主通过这款 APP 发布的 Instagram 图片点了赞，就会收到一封与点赞图片内容有关的邮件，点击邮件中的商品照片就能跳转到相应网站进行购买，从而博主也可获得相应的佣金。在 LIKEtoKNOW.it 上线的两年内，已经创造了超过 100 百万的营收，目前 LIKEtoKNOW.it 也已经有了 150 万订阅用户，每天在 Instagram 上有超过 1000 张通过 LIKEtoKNOW.it发布的照片。
目前除了这种合作形式，rewardStyle 还与许多科技公司进行多元化的合作。在近期时装周中，rewardStyle 与 Google 达成战略合作，使得时装周期间备受关注的街拍单品能更便捷地通过线上搜索实现直达购买。Google 通过借助 rewardStyle 针对 Instagram 开发的产品 LIKEtoKNOW.it，实现内容到购买的转化。通过这一模式，读者在 Google 搜索「时装周」或「品牌 + 时装周」等内容时，搜索条下方位置将显示 LIKEtoKNOW.it，从而直接展现出与搜索内容相关的博主和单品信息，并可通过点击链接实现官方渠道的购买。
而事实证明 rewardStyle 已经取得了巨大的成功：目前在平台已经有来自全球 87 个国家超过 10000 名时尚博主，去年有超过 3 亿的消费者通过 rewardStyle 进入合作的电商平台创造了巨大的营收。
提供咨询服务，让博主和品牌双方收益
而 Amber 表示，rewardStyle 的成功除了用科技的方式让博主从内容中获取收益；其次是 rewardStyle 全面专业的客户咨询服务以及 rewardStyle 拥有的全球化资源，可以为博主与电商带来更多元的合作机会。
rewardStyle 是一个邀请制的平台，Amber 表示他们会审核每一个入驻的时尚博主和电商。对于博主而言，rewardStyle 会看他们的原创内容是否吸引人、是否独特、是否能够长期稳定地生产内容。一旦邀请了时尚博主，rewardStyle 便会提供全面的资源扶持他们的成长。很多时尚博主对时尚非常资深，但是他们对如何商业化地运营内容并不那么擅长。rewardStyle 会从不同方面给到策略建议，例如怎样进行假日营销、如何选择最适合自己的电商或品牌等内容。Amber 告诉SocialBeta，他们也会将流量来源等数据分享给博主，帮助他们分析不同社交网络的粉丝偏好属性。不仅如此，在发展五年的历程中，rewardStyle 也会将一些经典案例提供给新晋博主。此外，rewardStyle 每年还会在达拉斯举办 rewardStyle Conference（rewardStyle 全球博主大会），在这个会上 rewardStyle 会邀请来自世界各地的时尚博主共同交流，互相学习，并提供与全球各大时尚品牌直接接洽的机会。
对于电商和品牌而言，rewardStyle 要评估电商网站是否能提供好的商品和服务水准。而当某个电商平台或者品牌需要时尚博主为其站台时，rewardStyle 会提供匹配该品牌定位的KOL名单，通过他们独有的数据监测工具 分析博主原创内容的质量、粉丝互动率、转化率等维度 衡量哪些博主是契合品牌所需要的，此外也会和品牌一同讨论其品牌的市场方向和营销战役目标，综合多方面因素找出最好的解决方法。
聚焦中国市场，带动内容营销领域发展
从去年开始 rewardStyle 在上海开设了亚洲分公司，Amber 对 SocialBeta 表示，「我们对中国市场一直很感兴趣，rewardStyle 在 2012 年成立了关注于亚洲市场的部门。目前，中国已经进入一个内容营销与粉丝经济的时代，消费者对于自媒体和博主创作内容的信赖程度越来越高。我们希望将这一模式的成功应用于中国市场。」Amber 还提到 rewardStyle 将真正开发具有本土特色、符合本土市场和消费者习惯的产品与服务，帮助中国博主和本土电商获得更多成功。
Amber 告诉 SocialBeta 他们目前已在洽谈与天猫和京东的合作关系，将会在近期与入驻这两个平台的时尚品牌合作。对于国内品牌而言，与 rewardStyle 的合作可以使其品牌更快地被消费者熟知并且变得更加国际化；对于入驻天猫的国际品牌，中国对其而言是一个陌生的市场，他们需要 rewardStyle 的支持。除了天猫和京东，进入中国市场的海淘电商网站如 Matchesfashion、Forward 等电商也需要一个了解中国情况的平台为其打开市场。
小结
从 2011 年发展至今，rewardStyle 在不同时期也面对着不同的挑战。早期，时尚博主和电商网站对内容营销这件事不以为然，在当时对双方的教育成本是最高的。现如今的困难则来源于大量社交媒体的涌起，消费者也开始分散于不同的平台，对于品牌和时尚博主而言这都是一个巨大的挑战。时尚博主需要根据不同的社交媒体生产适应于各个平台的内容，并且内容需求量也变得巨大；而对于品牌而言，找到各个平台内的 KOL 并且了解不同社交媒体的粉丝属性也是困难之一。对于 rewardStyle 来说，他们需要给时尚博主提供如何更高效生产内容的方法，并填补品牌和消费者之间的信息空缺。
rewardStyle 从一开始就解决了一个行业内的刚需，而深谙时尚门道和技术门道的两位创始人，一来深知时尚主题内容运营之道；二来强大的技术背景又把其内容转化为服务，为时尚博主、品牌、电商三方都解决了各自的需求，并彼此作为长期的盈利方式。虽然市场变化非常迅速，但是 rewardStyle 让我们看到其作为一个良性可循环商业模式的未来，将充满各种可能性。
以下附英文采访原记录：
Q:Tell us how you went about starting rewardStyle.com?（能和我们谈谈您个人是如何开始经营 rewardStyle.com 这个网站的吗？）
A:For as long as I can remember, I have loved fashion. In college, I had a stylist business, I would take clients into a store and style them head to toe for a vacation, special event, or help them find some new looks for their everyday wardrobe. I would earn a commission from the store, every time my clients purchased something.
A few months later, in early 2010, I decided to launch a personal fashion blog.I think it will help my off-line business which was personal shopping.
The blog saw quick success but I realized that by documenting and sharing all of my styling work, I had cut myself out of my own business. My clients could just go to my blog to get all of the style advice and product information they needed- they no longer had to book an appointment with me.But it was tough for me because I can't make any money and I was spending money for the blog and photographer.At that time I asked other friends how they made mmoney,they said they got free clothes and they went to those events.So I realized no one was really making money.
At the time, I was dating my now-husband, Baxter. He and I brainstormed ways for me to make money on my blog and came up with the concept for rewardStyle. We thought that it would help transition my off-line business to on-line business.Whenever someone would buy something from my blog, I would get rewarded by earning a commission. It was a revolutionary idea as no one had catered tools to bloggers, so we quit our jobs and launched the company in 2011.It really means a lot to me since it was my hobby then became my marketing tool,even it became something profitable.Baxter quickly realized we were generating revenue.We were doing something that helped influencers making money based on their content whether you posted on your blog,facebook,instagram or wechat or weibo.
Q:How tough it was at the beginning and how did you solve those problems? Also, could you please tell us the current development course of rewardStyle.com?（在早期的时候遇到了怎样的困难，是如何解决的？能否和我们聊聊 rewardStyle.com 的发展历程？）
A:It was tough at the beginning because no one took bloggers seriously, not even the bloggers themselves! We had to convince them to use our tools and that they could actually earn a legitimately income doing what they loved - writing about fashion and lifestyle.
Once we convinced a few of the top US bloggers to try our tools, they were hooked. We gave influencers the infrastructure that empowered them to make money on their blogs. With rewardStyle, they were able to create trackable product links and get paid on the most objective measure of their influence: retail sales.
But challenges and difficluties changes over time.Today what we are faced with is that there are too many social platforms and they all have different functions and personality：China’Weibo and Wechat,Korea'Instagram,US's blog,facebook and Snapchat.We should cover across them.
As for the influencers' difficulty: there are many KOLS so it reasults in a very competitive situation.Secondly,there exist so many platforms and they need to post proper content on different platforms with small team.
For brands,types of KOLS changes when their demand change.KOLs didn’t know the history and culture of them.
Q:What do you think are the most important factors for rewardStyle.com's success？（您认为rewardStyle.com 模式的流行以及成功有哪些必不可少的因素？）
A:We are solving a real problem and we continue to innovate. it is one thing to be a hot new thing for a year or two but that has never been our goal. Our goal always has been to create a sustainable system for our influencers, our retailers and our consumers.
We focus on the long game. We continue to invest heavily in our team, our products and our partnerships and we do so while staying true to our mission- to empower everyone in our ecosystem: influencers, retailers and consumers.
Third, we have had a real business from day one. We have been generating revenue from day one. When you do that, you have more control over your destiny.Revenue strategy is alsovery important.
Fourth, we hire people with complimentary strengths. From a founder perspective, Baxter was tech, I was fashion. We learned early that the total is greater than the sum of our parts. It is critical to combine complimentary skill sets to be successful and we continue to do that with every new hire and partnership.
Finally, we love it. We are passionate, the people we hire are passionate, our influencers are passionate, and our retailers are too- of course, when you drive 7% of all traffic for the largest retailer in the country, it is hard for them not to be passionate.
Q:Does rewardStyle.com have any standard about choosing fashion bloggers and brands？Could you share it with us？（rewardStyle.com 对时尚博主和入驻的品牌分别有怎样的要求，可否分别谈谈？）
A:rewardStyle is an invitation-only platform, that means that we vet every retailer and influencer on our platform. We look for original content that is engaging, beautiful, and has a unique point of view. For retailers, we look for great products, strong customer service, and a seamless e-commerce site.
Brand can apply on rewardStyle but it must be trustworthy and offers good experience to our customers.We make sure we can do suatainable business.
Q:How does rewardStyle.com help fashion bloggers and brands keep a long-term cooperation relationship with each other?（rewardStyle.com 如何保障时尚博主和品牌之间保持长久的合作关系？）
A:rewardStyle helps bloggers and brands manage their relationships through our online platform and dedicated team. With rewardStyle, you only have to visit one destination to monetize your social media, website, etc. We take out all the hard work and make the process of connecting and developing relationships easy.
Q:How do those brands choose proper fashion bloggers they want to cooperate? Will rewardStyle.com give them some support?（品牌主在 rewardStyle.com 上面如何挑选合适的时尚博主，rewardStyle.com 是否会给予建议和帮助？）
A:Brands before rewardstyle will get a handful of KOLs:what we do is to scale them.They actually don't have a drag relationship with KOls.And also many KOls are talking about their brands about different items.So it is impossible for a human level to build a right business relationship.They use us to know how to choose KOls. We should know that how long they will need KOLs, how frequently they publish and what the quality of publishing.
rewardStyle measures and tracks blogger's performance, so we help brands determine which bloggers they should collaborate with to have a successful campaign based on the brand's marketing objectives. We know if a blogger does well for beauty or fashion or interior. We help set up the contracts and monitor the execution, which makes it easy for the brand to have a successful campaign.
Q:Could those fashion bloggers cooperate with brands on their own initiative？（时尚博主在 rewardStyle.com 是否都是出于被动的角色，时尚博主可否主动和品牌达成协作？）
A:Fashion bloggers are extremely busy running their business, from styling, photography, website design, social media management, so rewardStyle streamlines the process to work with brands. We handle the relation business for them.Most of our influencers prefer to deal with us because we understand their business and can help coordinate better with the brands than they can on their own.
Q:How does rewardStyle help those influencers?（rewardStyle 会给博主提供哪些方面的帮助？）
A:We helped them by those 3 ways:
First of all,we provide them technology.They allow us to track their content.So it allows the publisher's beautiful content to connect commerce and content for the consumer.So it is different from those inspirational content which people can act on it.We also provide consulting.The second part consulting is very important because a lot of influencers don't have business background and many of them didn't set professional blog very long.So we offer some business help them how to own pocessional business.Once we accept the KOl,we invest our resources to their potentials.We have been working for 5 years ,so we have some case studies.We also use data to help them know the strategy for frequncy of posting. We offer them infomation about customers interest and brand preference. We also building their network: every year we hold an event named rewardStyle conference.We will gather them together.Influencers can connect other influencers in other countries and brands can see those impact.
（SocialBeta: Can you elabrate the part of technology?）
We have publishing tools.Different from the traditional media you see today, the volume of KOLs' content is very large.KOLs post their content on weibo and wechat or instagram.So it is such a huge demand.There is also huge demand for customer service.介绍liketoknowit.We track the brand and the kol give the kol commssion.
Bloggers can create clickable links from their content (pictures, text, etc.) that lead directly to retailers and brands. When a reader clicks through and makes a purchase, both the blogger and the retailer can track that purchase and send a commission to the blogger for the lead.
For a long while, this system worked out just fine, and RewardStyle continued to grow in both influencers and retailers. Then Instagram came along.
As Instagram picked up steam as a major platform for influencers, RewardStyle was left with the challenge of connecting sales from influencers to retailers without the ability to track links — as you know, Instagram doesn’t allow links on pictures.
To overcome this obstacle, RewardStyle launched LikeToKnowIt, a platform built specifically for Instagram. Bloggers signed on to the LikeToKnowIt platform have a specific link for their profile (the only link allowed on Instagram) that takes their followers to a unique web page.
This page lists each item that appears in every image of the influencer’s Instagram feed, complete with shoppable, trackable links so that the influencer gets paid out.
LikeToKnowIt also lets users sign up for a newsletter, which pushes every photo they like on Instagram directly to their inbox.In the past two years since launch, LikeToKnowIt has generated more than $100 million in revenue, with 1.5 million users subscribed to the system and more than 1,000 LTKI posts created every day.
The third thing is the partnership.We have KOLs in 87 countries and 10,000 are worldwide.We know how to capture the images and retail perpormance and how many people are driven by different social networks.That is the partnership we can give for the KOLs:the data and Google.It really upgrade their profiles.So we can conclude with that building technlogy consulting and go to parterships.It really can grow business.Indivisually sometimes it can't bring great impact but together as an organized group they would have incredible comsumer impact.Last year,over 300 million consumers engaged to click to retailers' website because of our influencers' content.
Q:rewardStyle.com grows its business in Chinese market and what challenge will it meet?（rewardStyle 进入中国会面临怎样的挑战）
A:China is such an exciting market because of the fashion-forward consumers and large e-commerce site. Also, KOLs are very popular in China and so many people get inspiration from their content on weibo and wechat.rewardStyle has worked with Chinese influencers since we founded the company in 2011.From 2012-2015,we have 2 people working for Asia market from Texas.The reason we are here because we are doing international business from Dalas and now we want to work with the brand on Tmall and JD(国外国内品牌都重视中国市场）and local brands.Not only we support them from here but also make them international.So part of our partnership of Alibaba is because we can make some brand become international.Asia office takes 10% of our business during that period.
The challenge with any business to keep up with the changing environment, so for China, its the social media landscape's evolution that our team has to pay close attention to.
Q:Expect Google，does anyother technology company work together？（rewardStyle 是否会和其他科技公司合作帮助业务的推进，了解到此前和谷歌合作边搜变买的服务？）
A:Rest of the world，we have in that market for a long time.So we create technology liketoknowit.the lltki is the application linked to instagram.customer register the service,when they like the photo on instagram,they get email and tell them where can they buy those items .We have a partershipwith facebook for 2 years,we are the only one that is allowed to xx tool.That technology side in conjunction of our business.So those tools will be expanded next year.
