Are you an affiliate marketer, blogger, or website owner?
Did you make money promoting other people’s products?
Are you disclosing your affiliate links properly?
FTC could go after you – if you didn’t clearly stated that you will be getting paid for reviews and endorsements.
Trust me – you don’t want to put yourselves into this kind of legal nightmare.
So, here’s where affiliate disclosure statement come in.
In this post, you’ll learn about what is affiliate disclosure, why we need it, and how to properly display it in your website using a ready-made wordpress plugin.
What is Affiliate Disclosure Statement & Why We Need It
Back in 2009, FTC released an endorsement guideline that if we embedded affiliate link(s) in our website contents (such as reviews, endorsements, sponsorships, etc), we’ll need to disclosure to our readers we’re getting compensated if they end up buying something through our affiliate link(s).
This is to provide transparency to our website’ readers – so that they don’t felt deceived if they bought something through our recommendations.
Imagine if you bought a product after reading a review about it, and only to realize that the review itself is a paid endorsement, and the author is earning a commission from your purchase.
Would you feel cheated that the author didn’t disclosure his/her relationship with the product vendor?
We hate it when others try to deceive us – so we shouldn’t do this to our readers as well.
And this is why we need to add affiliate disclosure statement in our content – if we are making money promoting other people’s products.
How & Where to add affiliate disclosure statement
Now that we know the what and why of affiliate disclosure statement.
It’s time to examine how and where should we insert the affiliate disclosure statement into our website.
But, before that, you’ll need to understand these two important rules about affiliate disclosure statement.
Rule #1: Affiliate disclosure statement must be clear & conspicuous
As stated in FTC’s endorsement guideline, you must disclose our relationship to the product vendor we’re promoting clearly and conspicuously, and let your readers decide how much weight to give to your endorsement.
Meaning that you must say-it-out-loud if you want to embed an affiliate link in a product review.
Because your readers must have enough information to know that you’re getting compensated for promoting the product.
Rule #2: Affiliate disclosure statement must be at visible location with no additional effort required
The location of your statement has to be at visible and obvious location.
So, you can’t put it in obscure places, such as, buried it on a separate page or hide behind a link, or in a “terms of service” agreement.
Your readers shouldn’t have to make an extra click in order to see the disclosure statement.
Therefore, the best bet you have is to place it at the top of your post / page, before the content of the post / page begins.
While we can manually add the disclosure statement at the beginning of a post / page, but that would be too troublesome – especially if there is a possibility that we might forgot to do so.
Wouldn’t it be best if there is a WordPress plugin that can automatically insert affiliate disclosure statement into every single post in our website.
Well, you’re in luck!
The Simple & Easy Way to Add Affiliate Disclosure Into Your Website
Simply login into your admin dashboard, and click on Plugins > Add New
Search for “WP Affiliate Disclosure” and install it. Once the installation is completed, activate the plugin.
( Alternatively, you can also download “WP Affiliate Disclosure”plugin here )
Once the plugin is activated, click on the “WP Affiliate Disclosure” link in your dashboard menu.
To add your affiliate disclosure statement, simply click the Create New Rule button.
Next, insert a name, and then hit Create button.
Once a new rule has been created, hit the Edit button to start edit your first rule settings.
Under the Edit Rule page, you should notice a section called “Disclosure statement”
Here’s where you insert your disclosure statement.
You can add links, images, customize the HTML elements – pretty much whatever you want.
Next, you can choose where should the disclosure statement being displayed.
You can show it before the post contents, or/and after the post contents.
How to Display Disclosure Statement Only on Selected Posts
Sometimes not all of your blog posts contains affiliate links, and you don’t want to show the disclosure statement on those posts.
Well, you can configure the plugin to show only the disclosure statement if the post contains certain category or tag.
You can even specify the exact post(s) that you would want the disclosure statement to show.
Once you’ve set it up, there should be an affiliate disclosure statement being displayed at your blog post.
Conclusion
Congratulations! Your website now have an affiliate disclosure statement, and it should communicate a clear message about your relationship with your product vendors.
Hopefully this would build your readers trust in you as well as the products you’re promoting.
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