Declaring a financial relationship
-
As an Employee
-
As a Media Publisher
-
Publishing Paid Content?
-
Declaring Affiliate Links
- Many readers will be inclined to type in the URL of the merchant directly, thinking quite wrongly that that way they might receive better pricing.
- Other affiliate marketers will quite likely try to buy the product after quickly creating a new affiliate account
- Less people would have clicked the link
- Some people would have tried http://www.pageflakes.com
- I am sure a few would just search Google rather than click an affiliate link
The most simple relationship is employee <> employer - if you work for a company you are blogging about occasionally, maybe it is a good idea to mention it.
There might be a potential problem when you change employer, and you are linking through to older content which gives a confusing view of your relationship.
Using the Disclosure Policy Plugin you can instantly change your disclaimer from “I am employed by [company]” to “I was formerly employed by [Company from 2004 until June 2006“
It has become fairly standard practice for popular media blogs, especially those involved with technology and investment to declare their financial relationship with the companies they blog about, or who advertise with them.
Advertising changes fairly frequently, as do investment portfolios. The ability to change a financial disclaimer globally across 1000s of pages of content, in direct relationship to the companies mentioned within the content has tremendous advantages.
At time of writing, this has been quite a topical, and somewhat controversial subject in the blogosphere.
My own opinion is that whatever commercial content you have, the primary consideration has to be relevance to your readers, whether you make a disclosure or not.
There are all types of ways you can use the Disclosure Policy Plugin to reassure your readers about your primary purpose.
This is actually more controversial than paid content. So many Alexa 100 companies use affiliate links of one kind or another, including links between divisions of the same company.
Many bloggers place (aff) after an affiliate link, but risk losing commissions for 2 reasons
As an example on the first page of this website I included an affiliate link to Pageflakes. I didn’t place (aff) after the link. It was highly relevant to the subject, and I fully endorse the quality of their product. I could have just provided a normal link, but why throw money away that Pageflakes are willing to pay for new free subscribers?
It is quite likely if I had placed (aff) after the link.
If you feel inclined, Disclosure Policy Plugin can be used to make full disclosure about affiliate links at the end of a post.
You could also use it to make a more vague disclosure, mentioning that you monetise the content with both advertising and the occasional affiliate link, but not be specific. Regular readers would probably notice which ones are affiliate links, but they probably value your content enough to click the link anyway.
Copyright statement
A copyright statement can be inserted in every document automatically. Not only would this be present on a website, but also in full content RSS feeds.
Internet copyright is a very complicated subject. On one day a legal professor will claim that publishing your content by RSS implies consent to share that content with others. A few days later we hear about large media companies cracking down on linking to copyright infringing material on media sharing sites which provide that content in RSS feeds that are being shared.
Commercial email statements
Due to CAN-SPAM, it is standard practice for a commercial operation using email as part of its marketing to include a statement that the emails they send are of a commercial nature.
The same companies are also using blogs for commercial purposes, and allowing subscription to that RSS content by email… without a commercial email statement.
Legal disclaimers
Is it enough to have disclaimers on your blog? Your content is being syndicated all over the internet. At the very least you might want to include a short statement and a link through to a comprehensive document with every piece of content you publish.
Links through to related content on your website
Whilst it is possible to relate one piece of content to another using tagging (folksonomy), it is much harder to highlight a key article relating to a product, service or company.
Related content on a 3rd party website
You could create a related resources box automatically at the end of your posts.
Advertising
You can use Disclosure Policy Plugin for keyword based advertising, especially for products or services you mention on a regular basis.
I do plan on expanding the functionality and releasing that as a sister project.
This site and associated subscription content is commercial, and contains a few affiliate links, but unlike most plugin sites, no donate button. Relevance is always considered before any potential financial gain
