Disclosure and paperwork for affiliate beginners

You must tell readers when a link earns you a commission, and that requirement applies from your very first page - it is the one piece of compliance that is genuinely non-negotiable and genuinely simple.

What disclosure actually requires

Say plainly, where the reader will see it before they click, that you may earn a commission from links on the page. Clear language, near the links, not buried in a footer nobody scrolls to.

This is a requirement in most markets and a condition of most affiliate programmes independently of the law. It is also, in practice, good for conversion rather than bad for it: readers who understand how a site is funded trust its recommendations more than readers who work it out for themselves afterwards.

Do I need an LLC to be an affiliate marketer?

You can begin as an individual in most places, and many programmes accept individual applicants directly. The business-structure question becomes real once there is income to account for.

What that structure should be depends on where you live, what you earn, and rules that change - which makes it a question for someone qualified in your own country rather than for an affiliate website. The point worth making here is only this: it is not a barrier to starting, and treating it as one costs people months.

The programme terms matter more than most people expect

Each programme's terms define what counts as a valid referral, which traffic sources are allowed, and how you may describe the product. Breaching those does not usually lead to a legal problem; it leads to unpaid commissions, which is the outcome you were working to avoid.

Read them once at the start. Ten minutes before building six months of content around a programme is the cheapest insurance available.

Claims are the real risk

The genuine exposure for a review site is not paperwork, it is saying something untrue about a product or about likely results. Stating income figures you cannot support is the common version of this, and it is entirely avoidable.

The discipline that removes the risk is simple: describe mechanisms rather than promise outcomes, quote prices and terms only from the seller's own published material, and say where a figure came from. That is also better writing, which is a convenient overlap.

Where the disclosure should physically go

Put it where a reader meets it before the first affiliate link, not only in the footer. A line near the top of the page, in the same size text as everything else, is the version that satisfies both the rules and the reader.

What does not work: tiny text, a link to a separate page that nobody opens, or wording so vague that a reader could finish the page without understanding the arrangement. "Contains affiliate links" is clearer than a paragraph of legal phrasing, and clarity is the actual requirement.

Does disclosure hurt conversion?

It does not, and the evidence for that is simply that every large review publisher discloses prominently and continues to earn. Readers already assume commercial motivation; stating it removes suspicion rather than creating it.

What does hurt conversion is a reader discovering the arrangement themselves after trusting the recommendation. That converts an ordinary commercial relationship into something that feels concealed, and the recommendation goes with it.

Keeping records from the start

Keep a simple record of what you earned and from where, from the first commission. Not because anyone will ask immediately, but because reconstructing a year of small payments from several programmes afterwards is genuinely unpleasant work.

Most affiliate programmes provide statements you can download. Saving them monthly takes a minute and removes an entire category of future problem.

What programmes require of you in return

Most affiliate agreements ask for three things: accurate description of the product, disclosure of the relationship, and staying inside the permitted traffic sources. All three are reasonable and all three are easy to breach by accident.

The accidental breaches are worth knowing. Describing a product using outdated pricing from an old version of the page. Running the programme's own brand terms in paid search when the agreement forbids it. Promising an outcome the seller never claimed. None of these feel like violations while you are doing them, and all three can void commissions already earned.

The defence is the same one that makes the writing better: quote the seller's own published material, say where it came from, and check it when you update the page.

The one rule that covers most of this

Write as if the seller, the reader and a regulator will all read the page - because on a page that ranks, eventually all three do. That single test resolves nearly every question about disclosure, claims and tone without needing to memorise any rules.

Back to starting out · This site's own disclosure · Choosing a programme