What Information Needs to be Disclosed in an Affiliate Disclaimer
What Information Needs to be Disclosed in an Affiliate Disclaimer
There have been a lot of rules and regulations imposed on affiliate marketers over the past few years. One of the main rules is that bloggers and website owners need to disclose when a link they post on their website is an affiliate link and they need to disclose if they can or do receive compensation for what they post. These regulations are confusing to some but here are a few things to note regarding what information needs to be disclosed in an affiliate disclaimer.
If you're not sure on what you have to disclose, it's best to be completely honest. It's better to disclose information that isn't needed than it is to not disclose what is needed.
Don't make affiliate links or ads look like the regular content of your website. For example, if you make a blog post and use an affiliate image that links to a product or service you'll be compensated for and you don't disclose that, it's going to look like any other image on your website which people may be more apt to click. The same thing goes for making affiliate links the same color as the rest of the text on your website.
One of the biggest issues is making your website visitors know that there may be affiliate ads or links on your website. Affiliate links use tracking cookies to track a user so that you get credit if they end up buying the product or service at a later date. In your website's privacy policy section, you need to state that and tell users what they need to do if they want to opt out of being tracked.
Make sure that people know what an affiliate link is. Those who aren't in Internet marketing or don't know the ins and outs of the Internet very well might not know what an affiliate is or how the process works. Make sure you use language that everyone can understand when making a disclaimer about your affiliate links and ads.
Any time you receive money or anything of value for making a post or if there is even a chance that you could make money off of it in the future, then it's best to disclose it.
On the surface, all of the regulations can be seen as a pain by website owners and bloggers. It can get annoying to have to stop what you're doing, add in extra words to disclose something and move on but it does only take a few seconds of time and it's worth it to know that you're doing everything you need to do to stay within compliance.