How Style Bloggers Earn Sales Commissions, One Click at a Time

Updated Feb. 11, 2015 11:33 p.m. ET

Kat Tanita, a photogenic 26-year-old, regularly poses for pictures on the streets of New York, modeling her style of classic, feminine clothes and accessories. Three times a week, she uploads the professional-quality shots to her blog, With Love from Kat, where they generate almost half her annual income.

The money comes from the dozen or so links Ms. Tanita places at the bottom of each post that whisk readers to retail sites selling the products she is wearing, as well as similar-looking items often at lower prices. Every time a reader clicks and buys from a linked retailer, for the next month Ms. Tanita will get a cut of the sale, whether it’s an item featured on the blog or any product the retailer sells. And the typical reader is none the wiser.

Commission-generating links are the nuts and bolts of “affiliate marketing,” a mechanism that is one of the most common, least visible ways the Internet funnels blog readers onto retail sites. A $40 trench coat Ms. Tanita linked to last fall sold out, she says, and hundreds of people bought a romper she posted.

Ms. Tanita declined to disclose how much money she earns from her affiliate posts but says it is enough to support herself. “I couldn’t imagine four years ago that I could be making a living off of outfits that I’m wearing,” she says about the start of her blog. “It’s kind of crazy.”

For many of the personal-style bloggers flocking to New York Fashion Week, which starts Thursday, affiliate links are a major source of income. This fashion-forward crowd might buy the products they link to, and they also regularly get merchandise directly from brands and retailers. Some link to things they don’t actually own, on a “wish list” or “gift guide.”

Affiliate programs, used by many online retailers, blogs and media sites for a decade or more, are gaining new ground for bloggers as they expand to social media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter .

Terms of the deals typically are based on how many readers a blog has, and how much interaction it gets. Commissions range from 3% to more than 20% of sales. For bloggers, also known as “influencers,” whose readers are loyal and eager to shop, there is real money to be made. Hundreds of bloggers earn tens of thousands of dollars a year from affiliate relationships, people familiar with the industry say. A few make that much in a month.

Affiliate links bring shoppers directly to the merchandise, unlike a print ad or editorial mention in a glossy magazine, where readers have to hunt the product down for themselves, says Bryan Galipeau, director of social media for Nordstrom . The department store’s affiliate program is run by a team of four full-time employees working with several thousand bloggers and social media personalities.

Another advantage: Shoppers see the advice that bloggers dispense as independent and unbiased. “There’s a level of credibility that bloggers bring,” Mr. Galipeau says. “It’s an unedited perspective.”

Julia Engel, a 24-year-old San Francisco resident with a style blog called Gal Meets Glam, says she thinks her readers understand how affiliate marketing works and don’t mind. “People are always going to ask me where something is from, and I’m always going to answer,” says Ms. Engel. “So if I can be credited for that purchase, it’s a win-win situation.”

Self-employed personal style bloggers have been embraced by the notoriously closed fashion industry, were the programs are a natural fit with the industry’s brand-centric, advice-heavy culture. Links are subtler than in-your-face display ads, and they are far simpler than the elaborate partnerships some brands have brokered with bloggers in exchange for sponsored posts, personal appearances and social-media mentions.

Acting as middlemen between retailers and bloggers, and helping attract more of each, are affiliate networks. In exchange for its own fee or percentage, a network provides the necessary technology to create links and track purchases, and writes commission checks. It verifies whether a blogger is worth doing business with, and brokers new relationships and deals.

A network gives bloggers access to “retailers that normally they might not be able to get in with,” says Adam Weiss, general manager at Rakuten Affiliate Network, formerly called LinkShare and a unit of Rakuten Marketing.

RewardStyle, a leading network based in Dallas, is among the easiest to use, many influencers say. It offers bloggers a widget of a scrolling gallery of linked product shots, which they may want to embed at the end of each post, making it even easier for readers to click and buy. When a linked item is sold at multiple retailers, RewardStyle tells the blogger how much commission each retailer is willing to pay.

The network accepts only about 10% of those who apply, says Amber Venz Box, RewardStyle’s co-founder and president. In all, it says it works with about 9,000 bloggers, magazines and other publishers and more than 4,000 retailers, including Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and Net-a-Porter. RewardStyle affiliate links resulted in $282 million in sales for retail partners in 2014, the company says.

Last spring, RewardStyle introduced a way to shop from Instagram, which doesn’t allow clickable links in captions. Shoppers can sign up for a RewardStyle tool called LIKEtoKNOW.it: If they “like” a RewardStyle blogger’s linked photo on Instagram, RewardStyle will send them an email with affiliate links to help them buy the products. Although RewardStyle offers to collect links and send just one email a day or week, 95% of shoppers request the information immediately.

Email recipients “want the information and they want it now,” says Ms. Venz Box. They aren’t thinking about whether a blogger makes a commission like some store salespeople. In its first nine months of operation last year, LIKEtoKNOW.it led to $10 million in sales.

Data is a huge part of affiliate marketing’s success. Retailers can measure exactly how much they get in sales from affiliate links, and bloggers know where their readers want to shop and what they buy.

Kimberly Pesch, 31, learned the audience for her blog, Eat.Sleep.Wear, likes items they don’t have to try on, such as shoes and sunglasses. When she posts something expensive, like a Chanel handbag, she will typically also offer similar alternatives—“an affordable piece,” says Ms. Pesch, who lives in Los Angeles.

It sounds easy to make money in affiliate marketing, but Taylor Davies learned firsthand it isn’t. In 2012, Ms. Davies, a 29-year-old full-time editor at The Luxer, an e-commerce site, put a few of the links on her blog, Shut Up I Love That. She found it difficult to reach the $100 commission threshold required for RewardStyle to issue her first check. “You don’t automatically start making money,” she says. “If people aren’t interested in what you are saying, there isn’t going to be much of an impact.”

Ms. Davies decided to go with ShopSense, a network that pays based on clicks, not purchases, and says she now earns from five to 10 cents per click, or about $100 a month. “I learned my audience, much like me, they click on things because they want to see it and investigate it but they don’t buy it,” Ms. Davies says.

Write to Elizabeth Holmes at elizabeth.holmes@wsj.com

How Style Bloggers Earn Sales Commissions, One Click at a Time