How to Cope with New FTC Affiliate Compensation Guidelines

As of Decem­ber 1st, 2009, you must dis­close on your web­site or blog if you are being com­pen­sated for endors­ing a prod­uct or ser­vice. Also if you are an affil­i­ate of the com­pany sell­ing the prod­uct. That’s the gist of what I’ve uncov­ered by doing a lit­tle research.

There’s a lot of infor­ma­tion to be had online, from penal­ties to legal doc­u­ments sold to post on your site. I am not a lawyer, but I doubt you will get penal­ized if you have a link to an Ama­zon prod­uct on your blog and you neglect to men­tion that you are an affil­i­ate of Amazon.

As with graphic design and copy­writ­ing, if you use some­one else’s stuff (images or text), that’s a no-no and you would prob­a­bly get a “cease and desist” order to stop using it if caught. So please don’t steal someone’s hard work. Cre­ate your own instead. It’s much more fun and rewarding.

So if you pro­mote a prod­uct or ser­vice that you are going to ben­e­fit from, it would be nice if you men­tioned that. If you’re not being com­pen­sate, you could men­tion that too.

For instance, if you click on this link for ProBlog­ger, a very help­ful and infor­ma­tive book on blog­ging, and then buy the book, I get a lit­tle change. I actu­ally have bought the book and am read­ing it. And I do rec­om­mend it. It has been very help­ful in set­ting up my Word­Press blog and when I start earn­ing a six fig­ure income, you will be among the first to know.