Affiliate Disclosures and Why You Need One

There is no rule that requires you to issue affiliate disclosures. However, you should have one if you are a professional affiliate marketer who plans to succeed in the affiliate marketing and networking niche. Affiliate disclosures are 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 out of redirected traffic or visitors. You may wonder if that will be detrimental to your sheer existence as an affiliate marketer. Here are the reasons why you need affiliate disclosures.

•	The world is a much more open and free place today than it was ever in recorded history. Information is not censored. Everyone has access to every bit of information that is available on all public domains. Even the governments around the world cannot hold onto their secrets, classified information that is apparently 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 not aware of people writing reviews to generate traffic and to redirect visitors to products or services sales pages and earning a commission. Many people might not be aware of how exactly affiliate marketing works. But paid news and paid reviews is not an invention of the post social media era. People know such practices exist.

•	Having affiliate disclosures will make you appear upright and truthful. People will appreciate the fact 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 and hence people don’t even consider clicking on affiliate links. Disclosures will instill a sense of frankness upfront 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 so people give the benefit of doubt to the review since the declaration is already in place.

•	Finally, affiliate disclosures establish 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 to earn money. 

