Unveiling All the Secrets of RewardStyle and LiketoKnowIt

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Hello lovelies!

Today I’m Unveiling All the Secrets of RewardStyle and LiketoKnowIt with all the pros and cons of what this platform has to offer. Keep on reading to find answers to some of the most burning questions you ever had about RewardStyle and how this platform works. I packed this post with precious insight info and my personal experience so it’s going to be a juicy read. I’m addressing everyone! From those who want to apply for RS, those who’ve been rejected or already joined in to those readers who are just curious to get the scoops. 🙂

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Unveiling all the Secrets of RewardStyle and LiketoKnowIt

WHAT IS REWARDSTYLE

I’ll be addressing those who want to apply for RewardStyle but also those who are using it. It takes a while to get your way around the platform and you have to be constantly on top of the strategies, techniques and overall updates.

If you are a content creator using affiliate links is one of the best way to monetize your blog or Youtube channel. Reward Style is one of the most popular affiliate networks used by the majority of content creators (myself included). Reward Style connects with hundreds of department stores, online shops, individual businesses.

Thanks to Reward Style I can use affiliate links from different retailers such as Nordstrom, Sephora.com or Sephora.fr, Beautylish, Selfridges, Harrods, Chanel, Pat McGrath, Escentual, Cult Beauty and the examples may go on.

RewardStyle is an invitation only affiliate network that used to focuses primarily on fashion, lifestyle and beauty. Now they also cover domains like food, beverage, health, wellness, technology, home department, luxury, travel and family . This means that if you are creating content about any of these categories you can earn money by using RewardStyle. They also own the Liketoknow.it program on Instagram that makes shopping outfit and home photos really simple.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW BEFORE APPLYING

A frequent mistake that many content creators do is to apply for  RewardStyle too early. What this means? There’s a limited number (around 5-6) of times that you can apply for RewardStyle before being forever banned from ever applying again or joining the program.

This means that you should take your time in building up content on your platform and gather a decent number of followers. Think about it for a sec! How much money do you expect to makewhen you don’t even have a faithful audience that will support you by shopping through your affiliate links? That’s why RewardStyle will only accept you when they consider it will be beneficial for both parties.

I couldn’t say that 3 months is enough to build an audience and work on your blog, Youtube chanel. It’s up to you to realize (check your Google analytics) when your platform is big enough to make money from affiliate links.

Follow and check out the content of those who are already affiliated with RewardStyle and use LiketoKnowIt so you can have a general idea. Try interacting with them as much as possible as many are willing to share information or tips on what they did to get accepted into the program.

By creating an E-mail List you’ll also know how how big is your faithful audience. This is your team… the readers who support you, shop through your affiliate links because they trust your recommendations and they find value in your content.

RewardStyle is looking for content not only on your platform but also on a social media platform. I didn’t even have a Instagram account when I applied but apart from my blog with 9 years of content, I also had the Facebook page. My blog weighted a lot because I never focused that much on social media anyway, as people tend to buy more from you main platform rather than social media.

Once you’ve applied don’t sit impatiently waiting for a reply. Best case scenario, they’ll get back to you in a couple of days but they can also keep you boiling for a few months. I know people who got a reply after 6 months and continued to work at their platforms even harder during this time.

Take your time and creating quality content and building a faithful audience before you APPLY to REWARDSTYLE. I wish you the best of luck!

HOW TO GET ACCEPTED

Use Bright and Clean photos. Pay attention to the quality of your photos. Use apps that you help you edit your photos and make them stand you. I’m not talking about retouching your face to look like a plastic doll, but about luminosity, background, effects and so on.

Have a Clear Niche. Although I started Chicprofile with fashion, gossip and beauty topics, it didn’t took me long to choose the last category. Actually even beauty is such a wide segment so I choose luxury & high end beauty as a clear niche.

Post constantly. Make sure to update your blog, Youtube channel or Instagram feed constantly. Posting now and then won’t cut it and it won’t bring you more than peanuts when you’ll be accepted. What’s the satisfaction of getting accepted by RS if you can’t even make $100 a month?

Get a decent audience! Make sure you have more than just a hand of followers that will support and shop through your affiliate links. You may have 10k followers but only 100 will shop through your links. The click through rate is the not the same for everyone and usually 2-3% is considered more than decent. Do the math and see how much would you make especially on those retailers that offer 5%-10% commission (from which RS gets its cut).

Get Referred by a Current Member. If the recommendation comes from a RS member, especially if she’s one that sells a lot, then you may be lucky. Is just like a friend putting in a good word for you so make sure that person has good credentials. It can do you more harm than good. If you are refereed by someone who barely cashes a check,  but she’s in because she was refereed by a famous influencer, it can affect your application.

PROS & CONS OF USING REWARDSTYLE

EARNINGS

Some say RewardStyle pays well but that actually depends on your niche. If you are into fashion, clothing and even men’s wear you’ll have higher commissions and better deals than those niched on beauty. The commission rates vary between retailers but RS definitely offers more benefits to those who have fashion as their niche.

Keep in mind that even though they work with Sephora.com there are countries where you are redirected to Sephora.fr. While I’m in London, I can’t favorite items from Sephora US therefore it drastically diminished my earnings. Overall RS does offer the best commissions out there so that’s definitely a pro.

PAYMENTS

RewardStyle pays you every two weeks, sending money easily to your PayPal account, which will charge you a tax. Getting paid 2 times a month sounds too good to be true? Where’s the catch? 🙂

In your RewardStyle dashboard under Rewards category section you will have 4 subcategories. Let me shed some light here because not many address this subject which is quite important.

Payment Due is where you’ll see your payments occur on Friday (every 2 weeks) only if you have a minimum of $100 USD closed commissions.

Lifetime Paid is where you can see how much money RS paid you since you joined them.

Open Earnings represents all the sales you’ve made. You can’t claim these money until the commissions for these sales are closed and then you’ll see them under the Payment Due section. Open Earnings is a tricky section because even though you see your commissions gathering up and feel excited it doesn’t translate into instant money.

Lifetime Open & Closed is the sum of all 3 categories above. It representing your total amount of commissions that were paid (Lifetime Paid), closed commissions about to be paid (Payment Due) or open commissions (Open Earnings).

Why is Open Earnings the most tricky category? Because influencers see the commissions gathering up there and think this is how much RS is going to pay them next. Partially that’s true because you’ll see those money on the Payment Due section, but not all at once and not anytime soon. 🙂

It may take months before commissions are closed because some shops have a 30 or 60 days return policy. You’ll have to wait that time before the retailer says you can claim the commission. Unfortunately that’s not all! Some retailers require a minimum threshold before they close the commissions and transfer the money to RS to pay you.

While the standard policy is that you’ll be paid after 3-4 months, in reality takes longer. Maybe I’m the ugly duckling but my commissions close even after 8-10 months. I don’t know the insights (I wish I did) but I always have open commissions exceeding the max limit of 3-4 months. The good news is that I can reach RS team and have them look into this.

They’ll take it with the retailers and work on closing your commissions but that will take weeks as well. Be prepared to see  a good amount of Open Earnings which will not be transferred into Payment Due for the next 6-10 months. Basically I learned the hard way that I shouldn’t count on RewardStyle payments every 2 weeks. You may see thousands of open commissions but you’ll be paid only 10% of the entire sum. Sometimes that’s peanuts, not even enough to cover your blog expenses if you have a huge platform. Here’s how you can diversify your income sources.

I wish I could get at least 50% of what I’m seeing now in my Open Earnings section, but that never happened. So the dream of many influencers crashes when they realize the Open Earnings / Open Commissions is not that solid as they thought. After I joined RS, my first paycheck came almost 5 months later, when I was already in London. I thought I could count on getting revenue after 3-4 months but it wasn’t so. Just make sure you have a different source of revenue until the money will come “flooding” into your bank account. 🙂

SUPPORT TEAM

Once you join RewardStyle family you’ll get your own personal assistant, who’ll guide you through the platform and answer you questions through e-mails. Once I moved to London I even got to meet my assistant in person 2 times and visit RewardStyle offices. After that I got transferred to another assistant who I was lucky to meet in person and talk about strategies and useful tips.

They offer great support, via e-mail, by answering your questions or getting you transferred to someone else who can deal better with your issue. I love that I could get to meet my assistant in person sometimes as she always gave me great tips, updated me on the latest and we worked together on strategies.

Reward Style also does an annual conference to which I haven’t participated but I’ve been told is a great source of information. They also host events so there’s quite a wide variety of options to keep you up to date. I was invited to a personal consultation when someone who was handling SEO came out from US and that was a very beneficial meeting. I made sure I always brought my laptop so they could install or show me directly on my platform whatever we were talking about.

You’ll get emails from RewardStyle team every week with popular sales going on, strategies, best times to post on the app etc. They’ll give you a heads up when a huge sale like Nordstrom Anniversary Sale or SEPHORA is coming up so you can prepare your content. For a content creator who lives outside of U.S. this is extremely valuable information as not many know when U.S. events and sales are happening. How about the 21 Days of Beauty at ULTA that even though I know it exists I can completely forget about it. 🙂

The downsize for me as a content creator niched on luxury beauty is that their emails are mostly tailored for fashion bloggers. While I do get updated on the major sales, the majority of their e-mails are targeted to fashion content creators who are bringing in the most sales. This makes perfect sense but I wish RewardStyle will cater more for his other content creators.

It would be amazing if they will split their content creators into categories based on their niche and send them target e-mails. I know they probably don’t have enough empoyees for this yet but it would be so much more beneficial if I can just received e-mails for my niche.

While many fashion pieces are available in stores for a longer period of time, makeup limited editions can sell out within an hour. That’s why I would love to received customized emails only for the beauty sector, or to be able to subscribe only to their Beauty Section somehow. It gets even harder for those creating content for food, beverage, tech, home decor and so on.

EASY TO USE / WIDGETS

You’ll find the RS dashboard quite easy to use and navigate. Under the APPS section you’ll have your most useful tools to play around. Link Ninja is the most used tool by everyone as it provides a simple bookmarking button that allows you to link products directly from an advertiser’s site. It also allows you to tweet, favorite, obsess and pin the products directly onto your Pinterest, Twitter and so on.

My second favorite is SHOP THE POST which you’ve all see me using in every article under the Availability section or at the end of the post. This widget allows me to pick up the favorite products I click on before with Link Ninja and insert them directly into the post, making it easier for reader to just click and shop.

Once you click on that heart icon it means that you’ve favorite the product and it will appear in your SHOP THE POST gallery.

This is how it will actually translate inside the post!

You may favorite different widgets, depending on your niche but also on the layout or theme of your blog. I will dedicate another article for Strategies and Tips on how to make the best of RewardStyle platform because there’s so much to talk about! 🙂

PERKS FOR TOP INFLUENCERS

Influencers can get deals, sponsorships and work with brands through Reward Style. I haven’t used this method as you know I’m an independent content creator, therefore I don’t offer sponsored content for brands. I don’t know the exactly requirements one must have in order to start collaborating with brands but I’m guessing you must be scoring very well on sales.

Usually U.S. influencers are being favorite because there are brands who are interested in selling only to U.S. market or pushing the sales for that particularly audience.

BEING EXCLUSIVE

This works both as a pro and con so it depends on which part of the wall you are. RewardStyle is the number one affiliate network for bloggers out there. The application process is harsh and they want to choose the best to join their community. Many have described it as a blogger club that can be a little hard to get it but once you do you’ll be rewarded.

LIKEtoKNOW.it

You also get to diversify your income by using LIKEtoKNOW.it app which everyone can dowload for free. It takes time to train your audience into properly using the app but will be worth it. Everyone can shop directly the products used in the photos you posted on the app. It’s quite easy to use as well and you can do it directly from your RewardStyle app.

Yes, there are 2 different apps RS and LIKEtoKNOW.it and can be confusing when you are new to this platform. There’s always someone from the support team to guide you at first and you have tutorials and articles for that too.

This app is very rewarding for fashion influencers and you may find many benefits. I admit I didn’t use this app too much because is not worth it if you don’t have a huge following on Instagram. As you know I don’t like to put my eggs in one basket and especially depend on any social media platforms. You have to have a huge following on Instagram to really see results. I know people who used to have 60K followers a few years back and they gave up using it. When Instagram made changes to its algorithm things kinda went sideways so you are basically at the mercy of this platform.

RETAILERS WORLDWIDE

Working with so many international retailers is definitely a pro. You can link to retailers from different categories from drugstore brand to some of the most luxurious department stores. You can blog from anywhere and link to the most important retailers worldwide.

Lately they have lost some pretty important names which unfortunately they counted among my top retailers, like Neiman Marcus or SAKS but the lists goes on. If your targeted audience is U.S. or UK you are pretty much covered with the retailers they are offering, but when it comes to other countrires there’s not much to link to.

While you can still link to Sephora France, Douglas Germany or Sephora Italy you’ll be pretty much left in the open for other countries’ representative retailers. This means that if your audience is from Romania you won’t be able to link to the local retailers as RS doesn’t yet have them on the list. So here we are again being separated by the geography. Check out  7 Smart Ways Content Creators Can Grow their Platforms (What’s Working Now) no matter when you are based.

While Reward Style is working on updating its database and include more retailers you may want to grow your U.S. or UK audience.

One of the other cons for this category is if you are a beauty content creator niched on drugstore products. Major retailers like Boots or Superdrug are not affiliated with RS yet. Neither are indie brands or small retailers but the good news is that many of them have their own affiliate program.

CONCLUSION: I hope I was able to answer many of the questions I got on this topic. Future posts on how to use RewardStyle effiently for your platform will follow soon, as well as strategies and tips. My advice is to apply to RewardStyle affiliate network when your platform is ready, even though it may take you months or years. I can’t stress enough the importance of having high quality content and faithful audience. These things take time to build so don’t lose your focus. In case you haven’t been accepted by RS you can always apply for other affiliate programs and work on growing your platform.