Affiliate Disclaimers and Other Technical Legalese
Ok, so my plan for today was to finally start inserting affiliate links into my website.... Seems like a simple enough task, right?
Well, today I fell into a bit of analysis paralysis, if you will.
Of all the affiliate programs I had available to choose from, that I got accepted into, I decided to go with Amazon. I found a few 4-start $100+ items that got 100s of positive reviews on Amazon, for my niche. (These should be good for $4 to $6 commissions per sale, hopefully... I know this is low and it is possible to earn more if I scour the various affiliate programs out there, but that's OK... I just need to get my foot in the door right now... And once a visitor gets on Amazon, who is to say they won't start adding more items to their shopping cart above and beyond my original product, anyway? I will look into "upgrading" to higher-commission products in the future...)
So I was going to start placing the links on my blog, when I decided to read the terms of use (or participating guidelines - whatever Amazon calls it)....
The one item that stood out right away was:
- No affiliate cloaking / redirecting.
I was going to use a redirect eg) mydomain.com/aff to redirect to my Amazon affiliate links... I figured that it would be easier, if in the future I wanted to swap out my affiliate link with a different one, I could just update the redirect in one place, and it would substitute it everywhere.
If I am reading Amazon's terms correctly, the use of a redirect is not allowed. The user has to be able to clearly see that they are able to click on an Amazon link.
Fortunately, it appears that Amazon has their own link-shortening function... And I guess I'll just have to download a RegEx global-search-and-replace plugin for Wordpress, if I ever want to replace the affiliate link in the problem.
Ok that problem is solved.
But then I came across this concept of the "Affiliate Disclosure", which apparently is required by law as per the FTC...
So I spent some time researching the best way to include one.
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/affiliate-disclosur...
I found this training guide here at WA, and am applying some of the techniques here.
It turns out that the Site Content editor within WA includes an Affiliate Disclosure template.
That, in conjunction with the "Ad Inserter" plugin, appears to satisfy the minimum requirements for the FTC... Right before every blog post, I have a one-liner statement indicating that this web page may contain affiliate links, and to click "here" to view the disclaimer statement about how my site may be monetized by commissions earned through the affiliate links.
Ok, that problem is solved.
Now I have to go through each of my 9 blog posts, and start adding the Amazon affiliate links.
Yesterday, if you recall, I was struggling with the issue of whether or not to use a single "bridge page"....
I had resolved not to use one...
But now that I think about it, if I want to promote multiple products, then it might actually make sense to have a bridge page on which I describe each product in enough detail to add value and help further the visitor's buying decision.
Otherwise, I would only be able to promote one single Amazon product per affiliate link at a time, from within my own blog posts.
I'll sleep on this and think about it.
Before writing this blog post entry, I thought that I had lost a day through analysis paralysis... But actually, come to think of it, I did spend some time on some valuable research and critical leg-work / decision making, as described above.
Hopefully TOMORROW I will finally have affiliate links up on my website!
(I just need to mull over the whole bridge page vs direct affiliate links conundrum in the meantime.)
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