Adding Affiliate disclosure to your pages is essential. You should have one if you are a professional affiliate marketer who plans to succeed in the affiliate marketing and networking niche.
What Is Affiliate Disclosure?
Affiliate disclosure is a short statement declaring that the review, report, or opinion published on a webpage or website is authored by someone who is an affiliate and gets paid a commission on sales, subscriptions, or signups that result from redirected traffic or visitors.
Why You Need Affiliate Disclosure.
You may wonder if that will harm your sheer existence as an affiliate marketer. Here are the reasons why you need affiliate disclosures.
The world is much more open and accessible today than ever in recorded history.
Information is not censored. Everyone has access to every bit of information available on all public domains.
Even governments around the world cannot hold onto their secrets, classified information that is protected by people, state-of-the-art security systems, and legal provisions charging the leakers with sedition, treason, and even waging war against the nation.
In such a world, it is akin to blasphemy if you believe that unsuspecting internet users are unaware of people writing reviews to generate traffic, redirect visitors to products or services sales pages, and earn a commission.
Many people might not be aware of how exactly affiliate marketing works. But paid news and reviews are not an invention of the post-social media era. People know such practices exist.
It increases trust
Having affiliate disclosure will make you appear upright and truthful. People will appreciate that you are not concealing your reality of being an affiliate marketer.
This will help you to make your point without being judged wrongly. For instance, positive reviews often get trashed as paid articles, so people don’t even consider clicking on affiliate links.
Disclosure will instill a sense of frankness up front, and people will read the review for what it is.
There will be some who would suspect the authenticity of the review after reading the disclosure, but it becomes too obvious.
Hence, people give the benefit of the doubt to the review since the declaration is already in place.
You will be seen as an authority.
Finally, affiliate disclosure establishes a reviewer as an authority in the niche. Affiliate marketers don’t write about anything and everything.
They do have their niches. Authority leads to reviews being taken seriously. People realize that affiliate marketers are aware of other products and services in the same category since it is such knowledge and application of the knowledge that helps them earn money.
The law requires it.
Most countries require you to disclose your relationship with the offer or the company you endorse.
It’s illegal not to include a disclosure when you use affiliate links or otherwise promote a product after being compensated for it.
These guidelines apply to blogs and social media posts, videos, podcasts, and all forms of digital advertising.
You can read the FTC guidelines here.
Conclusion
That is it, and those are three reasons why you need to add affiliate disclosure to your content, landing page, and sales page. Whenever you send someone to a link, they need to know that you will get paid if they do so.