When the US Federal Trade Commission shook up its marketing rules in late 2009 — requiring sellers to declare affiliate relationships with the suppliers of products they were promoting — you could feel the vibrations spread across the Web.
Marketers were understandably concerned that revealing that they were being paid to promote goods would affect their sales. Readers would lose trust, become more cynical about the quality of the products they were offering and require harder persuasion to make a purchase.
In practice, there’s little evidence that that happened. Affiliate marketing — either by email or online — didn’t stop at the end of 2009, and top sellers haven’t been driven out of business by the need to mention their commissions.
In part, that’s because many were doing it already. It might not have been required but many affiliate marketers had long been putting the letters “aff” in brackets after an affiliate link. They felt that letting people know that they received a fee for a purchase was just the right thing to do.
Continue reading ‘Build Trust By Declaring Your Affiliate Relationship’
