Tricia Meyer

Affiliate Marketer, Blogger, and Consultant

Affiliate and Influencer Disclosure Cheat Sheet

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Now that we have had some time with the newly revised FTC Disclosure Guidelines, we are starting to think about the practical application in addition to the big picture. One of the questions that I have been asked the most is about what exactly the FTC has said can and cannot be used for disclosure.

It’s a little tricky because the actual “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising” themselves do not give us examples but rather just the overall rules. So we have to look to other resource documents like “FTC’s Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking” and “Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers” to find specific examples right from the mouths (or keyboards) of the FTC. In addition to the shortened cheat sheet examples I give below, those documents give a LOT of other examples of “natural language” disclosures that can be used when speaking in videos, writing long-form content, etc.

Which Hashtags Can Influencers and Affiliates Use to Properly Disclose?

The FTC has given us three specific hashtags that are approved: #ad, #Brand_Ambassador, and #Brand_Partner. These assume that “Brand” is the advertiser name. The FTC clearly favors #ad, saying that the other two are “more understandable” than just #Ambassador or #Partner. That’s not a lot of specific hashtag examples that the FTC does approve, but they do give us a lot of which they do NOT approve.

Which Hashtags Should Influencers and Affiliates NOT Use?

The FTC gave us a LOT of examples of hashtags that it does not consider to be clear enough for one reason or another. These include:

  • #Brandad
  • #Endorsement
  • #Client
  • #Advisor
  • #Consultant
  • #Ambassador
  • #Partner
  • #FreeProduct
  • #Comped
  • #Hosted
  • #Spon

How Else Can Influencers and Affiliate Properly Disclose?

Although the FTC was stingy with the hashtags, they did give us a lot of other words and phrases that can be used. One of their biggest complaints with hashtags in general seems to be that smushing all of the letters together makes them hard to read and understand. So merely separating out some of the words makes a lot of things more usable. Here are some specific examples that would be in compliance:

  • Ad:
  • Paid Ad
  • Advertising:
  • Sponsored by Brand
  • Promotion by Brand
  • BrandPartner
  • Brand Ambassador
  • Paid Post by Brand
  • Advertisement
  • Gifted by Brand
  • Paid Link
  • Thanks Brand for Free Product

What Other Disclosures are Not Approved?

Although there are a lot of disapproved hashtags, there are only a few other phrases specifically disapproved by the FTC due to them not being clear enough to consumers:

  • Gifted
  • Affiliate Link
  • Buy Now
  • Commissionable Link

Which Disclosures Depend on Context According to the FTC?

In addition to all of that, there are some places where the FTC has said that specific disclosures depend on context. One of these, Sponsored, is particularly interesting because they say it is fine in the Influencer 101 document but then say that it depends on context on the most recent document. Some of the others are going to depend on what they look like when written out (#PaidforByBrand) or what exactly the endorser is getting from the brand (Thank You Brand). Best just to stay away from these in the gray area:

  • #PaidforByBrand
  • Sponsored
  • Promotion
  • Thank You Brand
  • Brand Asked me to try Product
  • Brand_Consultant
  • Brand_Advisor

As a reminder, ALL of these disclosures are still contingent upon following the FULL set of disclosure guidelines (clear and conspicuous, unavoidable, etc). In addition, we sometimes get more specific examples through Twitter chats, FAQs, Letters, and other proceedings. We may even see some updates regarding these words specifically as people ask the FTC questions. See my full disclosure recap post for all the rules plus any recent updates!

FTC Updates Disclosure Guidelines for Affiliates and Influencers

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FTC Guidelines

We have been waiting for this update for a LONG time and it is finally here! The FTC has updated its Endorsement Guides, which are the source of the disclosure rules that affiliate marketers and influencers (among others) must follow. I think my favorite part of this new update is the reference to “dog influencers.” Most of this is what we expected when we saw the proposed guidelines changes back in May of 2022.

I’m breaking this down into two sections– what I think is most important for affiliate marketers and all of the other interesting stuff. It’s 80 pages of Guidelines talk plus another whole site of FAQs, so there is a lot to cover!

First, the tl;dr for Short Attention Spans

  • Affiliate marketing and influencer marketing were heavily targeted
  • Everyone can now be liable–bloggers, influencers, affiliates, agencies, advertisers (no mention of tracking platforms/networks unless they are also acting in the capacity as agency)
  • “Clear and Conspicuous” means “Unavoidable”
  • Advertiser and intermediary responsibilities include 1) provide guidance on the rules, 2) monitor compliance, 3) take  action in the event of non-compliance
  • Reliance on disclosure tools built into social media platforms may not be adequate
  • Review sites cannot accept payment for rankings
  • Effective disclosure is based on who is being targeted as the audience (children, elderly, etc.)

FTC Guidelines Updates Most Important to Affiliate Marketers

  • Saying this loud for the people in the back because I see this wrong on so many “expert” sites. “Affiliate link” is not an adequate disclosure. Which means “Affiliate” also would not be adequate. Other related terms that are not adequate include “Buy Now” and “Commissionable Link.” However, “Paid Link” is adequate.
  • Endorsers can be held liable for a review when they represent falsely that they personally used the product.
  • Tags in social media posts can be considered endorsements that have to be disclosed if the influencer has a material connection to the brand. For example, if you post a picture of your outfit and tag the brands you are wearing but you are also getting paid by them or sent free products. Simply tagging the brand is also not a sufficient disclosure.
  • An influencer cannot simply disclose connections to a brand on their profile page. The disclosure has to be done on the post and be unavoidable when viewing it.
  • Endorsers cannot rely on the built-in disclosure tools of a social media platform if anything in those tools would make the disclosure not satisfy the “unavoidable” and “clear and conspicuous rules.” Use them but add to them if what they have isn’t sufficient.
  • Whether a disclosure is effective will be evaluated from the perspective of the TARGET audience (e.g. kids or elderly or people who speak a foreign language).
  • So what about affiliate managers and agencies? We sort of got an answer. “Advertising agencies, public relations firms, review brokers… and other similar intermediaries” can be liable when they “create or disseminate endorsements” that they either knew or should have known were deceptive. But they can also be held liable when they “hire and direct” endorsers who do not properly disclose. Your company must have “reasonable programs in place to train and monitor the influencers you pay and direct.”
  • What is the standard for monitoring endorsers? They won’t give specifics. They say “reasonable efforts” and if you can’t periodically search for what the endorsers are saying, you should consider having to pre-approve all posts.
  • Affiliate review websites that rank brands higher based on the site accepting money from the brand are deceptive and both the website owner and the brand can be held liable. The site can use affiliate links in general and disclose them as long as payments are not taken for higher rankings. Any “methodology that results in higher rankings for products whose sellers have a relationship to the operator because of those relationships” is misleading.

FTC Guidelines Additions and Clarifications That Are Interesting

  • For disclosures to be effective, they must be “unavoidable.” 
  • Some examples given for adequate disclosure for videos are “This video is paid for by brand” or “brand paid me to tell you about it.” Also “Company X gave me” the product or “The products I’m going to use in this video were given to me by their manufacturers.”
  • Some examples given for social media are “Ad:” “Paid ad” “#ad” “Advertising:” “Advertisement” “Sponsored” “Promotion” “Sponsored by X” or “Promotion by X”. Adding “ad” to the end of the brand name to create a hashtag is NOT enough. (#BrandAd) Saying “thanks” to the brand is not enough but saying “Thanks Brand for the free product” would be. The hashtag #endorsement is NOT sufficient. The hashtags #ambassador and #partner work only if you include the brand name in the hashtag (#BrandAmbassador). The hashtags #comped and #hosted are not sufficient for free travel.
  • Podcasters do not need to disclose content that is “obviously a commercial” and is fine as long as the podcaster upholds any views expressed.
  • A little more information was given about free products. If a brand sends a coupon to an influencer for free product and asks the consumer to feature the brand in their feed, any resulting posts would need to be disclosed. (this is where the “dog influencer” came in)
  • Advertisers are required to 1) provide guidance to endorsers on the rules, 2) monitor compliance, 3) take  action “sufficient to remedy non-compliance and prevent future non-compliance.”
  • Advertisers need to not only instruct endorsers about the need to disclose their connection, they also need to give guidance that any statements made by the endorser are truthful and substantiated. 
  • If the endorser is an “expert” in the field, there are a lot of clarifications about how that should be handled.
  • There is an example about a woodworking influencer who is sent a lathe and for free by a brand and ends up using it in several videos and “comments favorably.” The FTC says that if a “significant minority of viewers” is “likely unaware” that he got it for free, it needs to be disclosed. There isn’t any type of exception made in the example for videos that may be made using that same lathe for years in the future. The Q&A page indicates “each new endorsement made without a disclosure could be deceptive because viewers might not have seen the prior posts.”

Important Links

Free Affiliate Shortcut: Find Merchants Fast

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As an affiliate marketer, efficiency is key. We’re constantly monitoring stats, networks, social media, email…. never wanting to miss the newest thing or promotional opportunities. Because of that, we have to use as many tools and shortcuts as we can to stay efficient.

My new favorite Chrome extension is PartnerMe. It saves me so much time every single week (especially for my cash back site where members are always asking me to add new merchants)! In fact, I was on a consulting call today and one of the client’s biggest sources of frustration is completely solved by this extension!

How Do Affiliates Find a Merchant’s Affiliate Programs?

Prior to this extension, when people asked me how to figure out if a merchant had an affiliate program, I would tell them to first check the footer of the merchant site that they are on. This is still the first thing I do because sometimes that link will provide a lot of information including fee structure. If that didn’t work, however, there were other sites you could go to and plug in the merchant name to see if they had it listed. If they were clicking through another affiliate’s site, I would tell them to hover over the link and see if it was obvious what the network was and if not, do a trace route to see where the link bounced through.

All of that is so much simpler now!

With the PartnerMe Chrome extension, you simply go to a merchant site and then click on the extension icon in the toolbar. If the merchant is on Impact, AWin, Partnerize, Ascend by Pepperjam, Commission Junction, or ShareASale, it will immediately tell you and link out to the publisher signup page for the merchant. They are currently working on adding more networks, and I have to think that if the extension gets more popular, they will be even more motivated to get those added.

Am I getting paid to tell you about this? Nope. My friend Max Johnson from Jamdesk just happened to mention it one day in the PMA Slack and I was intrigued enough to check it out. It’s important enough to me to take a little time and help spread the word about it because I think they can do some great things with this if they get more traction. But even if it just continues to do what it does, I will continue to be a fan!

Want more affiliate marketing tips and tricks? Sign up for my newsletter below to get notified about new posts. As a bonus, you’ll get my 30 Affiliate Marketing Tips in 30 Days series!

From Mastermind to Site to Relaunch (Our Affiliate Marketing Journey)

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Over a decade ago, I reached out to someone I had met at Affiliate Summit, asking if he would be interested in a Mastermind Group. He approached another Affiliate Summit attendee that we were both a little acquainted with but not exactly friends with. Little did we know the friendship that was about to be formed as well as the ways that it would change all of our businesses. 

The Mastermind Group

We started meeting as a Mastermind Group every Friday afternoon in 2011. At Affiliate Summit West 2012, we gave a presentation entitled Mastermind Groups Exposed: Success in Affiliate Marketing. Watching that video back today, I realize just how lucky I was to be with those two. Near the end of the session, someone in the audience asked if we had considered any joint ventures. We responded that just before the panel started, an OPM approached us with a client that he thought we could promote. Those little bitty seeds turned into The Wine Club Group. 

Side note: Just about everything we said in that video from 10 years ago is still relevant to affiliate marketers today. Except now we use Zoom or Google Meet instead of Skype. Not much in affiliate marketing stands the test of time for a decade. But if you are interested in how to start a Mastermind Group, it’s still a great video. You can also find the presentation itself on Slideshare.  Even if you don’t start a full-on Mastermind Group, I would encourage you to join some Facebook Groups or Slack channels that do something similar where you can bounce things off of other affiliate marketers that you trust.

The Site

The site we ended up creating together was Wine Club Reviews and Ratings, later redirected to Wine Club Group (after Google stopped preferring long-tail keyword domains and we decided branding was more important). The premise was that we would review wine clubs but do so authentically. We’d take our own pictures, create our own content, and post our own videos of each club. We started with just the one merchant that the OPM recommended to us but over time started adding others.

We dabbled in wine-related content like wine bottle holders and recipes with wine in them. But we kept coming back to the idea that we needed to keep it simple and review the CLUBS. We even tried a beer review site using the same premise and template, but it just didn’t have the legs that the wine had. (that’s a play on words those of you who don’t drink red wine) Once we even did a Facebook live event where we each drank wine and ate Turkey Dinner Candy Corn for hours. That is definitely a night none of us will ever forget.

We divided up the work based on our strengths. This was a direct result of our time as a Mastermind Group because we had learned so much about what each other could do. I focus on content and social media whereas Todd and Eric do most of the technical work, including WordPress, database, etc. We each jump in with reviews, photos, and videos where it makes sense.

The site served us well for many years. Some months we would hardly touch it all. Other months we would be frantically updating plugins, adding new clubs, and writing gift guides. The site has turned a profit every month since we created it. Sometimes we would see traffic spikes and work together to take advantage of them (like when we were the first medium to create a Girl Scout Cookies and Wine Pairing guide). We knew we needed to give the site a major overhaul but then the pandemic hit and everyone was buying wine online and we didn’t want to break a profitable site. 

The Relaunch

Now that shopping habits are returning to normal, we knew that we needed to redo the site from the ground up. As each of us is much busier now with other jobs and projects, we ended up outsourcing a lot of the template redesign. However, Todd and Eric did most of the work on the database, the plugins, and the redirects.

Although everything isn’t perfect, we know enough not to mess with much more before Google has a chance to re-index everything before Black Friday. The site operates better on mobile, which is a much bigger concern than it was when we initially built it. We learned through watching our analytics over the years which pages need immediate attention and which can be dealt with over time.

So I present to you our new site for Wine Club Group!

wine club reviews

Along with that, I would like to thank the two best business partners a girl could ask for– Eric Nagel and Todd Farmer. They have truly been the wind beneath my wings in many ways for over a decade. (for you young folks, that’s an old sappy song) They’ve taught me so much about affiliate marketing but have also been the most incredible friends.

What’s Next?

Although we don’t meet as a Mastermind Group every week anymore, we now keep in touch daily in a Slack Channel and meet every other week via Zoom to talk about either the site or whatever life has brought us. We still do many of the things we did when meeting weekly as a Mastermind–give each other advice, share each other’s content, brainstorm together, etc. I don’t know what the next decade will bring for us in terms of affiliate marketing, but I can only hope it will be a continued friendship!

Do you have a group of trusted affiliate friends that you can go to for help and you know they will support all of your endeavors? How do you cultivate those relationships? What have you gained from them?

 

Converting from Mailchimp to Aweber

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image of email newsletter

(This post contains my Aweber affiliate links, for which I earn a commission)

When I first started in affiliate marketing, I created my mailing lists on Aweber like pretty much every affiliate I knew. I always liked the company itself. However, as I started integrating my lists into my sites more, I ran into some problems with using RSS feeds that they couldn’t fix at the time. So I moved everything to Mailchimp, where things were great for 6 years.

However, over the last 3 years, my Mailchimp monthly fees have gone up 40%. That’s a considerable increase, especially considering I only use 4 of my 5 lists once a month. First there were some annual increases which I could understand because everything was going up. But after repeated increases and now the discontinuation of a 10% discount, it’s time for me to save some money and move back to Aweber. Here’s my process for converting all of my lists.

Create Your Aweber Account

Obviously this step is going to be important because you can’t do anything without your new lists being ready to go! You’ll need to create an Aweber account (you can sign up for free to start off until you start adding lists and likely need to upgrade to Aweber Pro). You’ll be able to create your first list profile of up to 500 subscribers free just to get the lay of the land. After that, you get an unlimited number of lists and monthly email sends when you start with the $19.99 monthly plan. That price drops considerably (as much as 20%) if you pay quarterly or annually.

Create Aweber Campaigns

This is the part that took me the longest. I needed to create all of my different lists in Aweber plus re-create all of my content, which includes drip campaigns and RSS feed integrations.

While I was able to do some of this myself, I did end up taking advantage of Aweber’s free migration service. I set up a few of the basic campaigns myself but then had them move over my automated campaigns. It took a few days but they were constantly in touch with me about the migration and I was then able to see what they did to pattern my other campaigns after them.

I won’t lie…. I messed things up a couple of times by jumping in too quickly before I read exactly what each different type of email campaign did. There are some slight terminology changes from Mailchimp, so just be sure you take a look at their documentation if you choose to move everything yourself. I don’t think I will have any problems going forward now that I am familiar, but there is (as expected) some learning curve.

Turn Off Signups

The next thing you need to do is turn off any type of opt-ins you have on your site so that you can temporarily stop people from signing up to your Mailchimp list. Depending on how many signups you get a day, you may need to do this on the weekend or late at night. Don’t forget embedded forms, pop-ups, integrations with giveaways, comment subscriptions, and any other place that you are currently getting people to sign up for your list.

Move Current Mailchimp Lists to Aweber

While your data collection is temporarily stopped, grab those lists by doing an “Export Audience” to a csv file for each one.  The csv file will contain a lot of junk that you don’t need anymore (I have no use for latitude and longitude) so you will need to do a little cleanup. After that, you will need to import each of these lists into Aweber.

Replace Your Signups

Now that you are ready for people to sign up for the new lists, you can put all of your popups and embedded forms and all that back. Aweber has a lot of integration options, so you won’t have a hard time finding even more places to entice people to sign up for your lists than you had before. I’m still working on maximizing these opportunities on all of my sites, but the one that is the most intricate (my daily deal newsletter on Sunshine Rewards, which triggers my members getting SR credits when they sign up for it) worked beautifully.

If you are on my mailing list for this site, you will notice that your emails are now coming through Aweber. If you haven’t signed up yet for my newsletter, why not? You’ll get my 30 Affiliate Marketing Tips in 30 Days series!

Was It Worth It?

So far, so good! I’m saving almost $40 a month and haven’t had any major issues. It was really just the time in switching everything over, which I will easily recoup as time goes on. I’m also investigating their Push Notification options, which might be another whole post in the future.

I’ve been running all of my lists on Aweber exclusively for about three weeks and with the exception of just a little bit of overlap in terms of RSS automated emails, I have been really happy. In fact, they have even let me secretly test a little bit of new functionality that is going to make their campaigns even easier to set up. I love that they reached out to me when they saw my account and knew exactly what I needed before I even knew it. It’s been super easy to communicate with them, which is a HUGE plus when you are a non-tech person dealing with tech!

I’m incredibly happy about my switch to Aweber and hope that you will consider them if you are starting new email campaigns or tired of paying too much for your old ones!