Affiliate Marketing and Transparency

The issue of transparency is one of the biggest issues in the affiliate marketing world. The FTC has been clear about what it needs affiliates to disclose to make sure the consumers have all the facts at hand. But it has also left a lot of wiggle room for many affiliate marketers. In fact, for months, marketers had no idea what the FTC wanted them to disclose. In truth, there is no one rule fits all when it comes to affiliate marketing. There are plenty of ways to make money from affiliate marketing. You can embed affiliate links in your blog posts or spend money sending traffic to your affiliate landing page. You can treat these situations the same way.

Why does transparency matter? You may think that people are more likely to buy from you if they don’t know about your association with a certain company. In fact, research has shown that a certain group of consumers will not buy using your link no matter how much value you provide to them. But it has also been proven that disclosing your associations on your blog is the best way to go. It’s always easy to slap a piece of content together and use cloaking services to hide your track. But that’s really insulting your audience’s intelligence. Today’s readers are more sophisticated when it comes to web technologies, and they can guess what you are doing and why you are doing it. Let’s not forget that not disclosing your associations could always leave you open to legal liability.

Many affiliate programs have also started to introduce transparency rules to cover their legal liabilities. A lot of affiliate marketers are targeting Twitter to make money online. These folks use services such as bit.ly to shorten their URLs. That hasn’t gone down well with tweeters and with affiliate program managers. A lot of companies now require their affiliates to use the full affiliate URL when possible. Considering that you get only 140 characters on Twitter, it’s going to be difficult to follow that rule. But since a lot of people are spamming Twitter with all kinds of affiliate offers, this seems to be the right decision.

So should you disclose your affiliate links? Yes. But not everyone does it the same way. You can always use “(aff)” next to your affiliate links. That’s the ultimate disclosure. You can also just have a page on your website to discuss your associations. What you don’t want to do is leave anything to chance. By explaining to your readers why you are doing what you are doing, and why you won’t let your associations with affiliate programs skew your reviews/content, you can gain your readers’ trust and reduce your liabilities as well. There will be a few skeptical people who won’t trust anything you’ll say. But your job is to earn the trust of your other readers. You can’t make everyone happy. But by not disclosing your links, you raise your risks considerably higher. Not good for doing business on a long-term if you ask me.