Should Affiliates Disclose Affiliate Links?
There has been a lot of talks about how affiliates need to be more transparent in the affiliate marketing world. In case you missed it, the FTC did ask advertisers and bloggers to become more transparent and disclose monetary gains when adding advertising links to their websites. While the FTC’s main focus was on fake testimonials, its guidelines will cover affiliate marketing as well. Whether you are reviewing affiliate products or just linking to affiliate products on your website, you will need to disclose your relationship with your advertisers.
Anybody who expected the FTC to be clear with its guidelines was mistaken. That’s not how the FTC does its business. The vagueness does give marketers some room to maneuver, but one shouldn’t mistake that for not having any rules. Just because the FTC is not clear about how you need to disclose doesn’t mean you should not. One of the best ways to disclose affiliate links on your website is by adding a disclosure link at the end of each post. That can be done easily on a WordPress website as it’s dynamic and wouldn’t require you to add your disclosure link to all your pages by hand. Services such as CMP.ly can come in handy as well (just in case you don’t want to write your disclosure line yourself).
Another way to disclose links on your website is by adding the words (“aff”) or something similar to your link text. Not something most affiliate are prepared to do, but it’s certainly worth it if you are a professional blogger.
The moral of story here is, you will have to disclose your affiliate links one way or another. The more transparent you are, the better. After all, if your audience trusts you, they don’t mind you making money for your efforts. Of course, splog owners won’t want to disclose and lose whatever they are making. Disclosing your affiliate relationships may be hard at first, but if your readers are not ready to help your website grow, then that’s just too bad. It’s on you to make your content worth your readers’ while.
