As you may have heard, the FTC just announced that all bloggers must disclose any payments they receive for reviews (article). Although I disagree with this and think that the Government should mind their own business, if you want to avoid legal issues you should probably just do it.
I wonder if we can get the Government to disclose everyone they take money from? (like that will ever happen)
Disclosure Page
Although the FTC said that a blogger must disclose the payments they receive they did not say how. So until they give a concrete way to do so, the best way would probably be to make a disclosure page for general items.
Although the ruling was not for “general items”. It is just smart to do and covers you in the future if they decide to extend that ruling.
This is something that I had thought of doing before when I saw that Chris Brogan does it. You can see here on his about page that towards the bottom he discloses all advertisements and affiliate programs.
I had always admired that and thought that it was just a good thing to be honest about. If you are an honest blogger you have nothing to hide, so why not just disclose those things. I doubt that most people are that naive to think that you do not get any money from your ads or some of the products you review.
So here is the disclosure page I created for myself. I do not have too many items yet but I know that list will grow.
Simple and Honest
Try not to get too complicated. I would not advise telling exactly how much you get for each review or affiliate product but just list that you get something.
Notice on Chris’s page and mine Amazon affiliate is a general description not each product. Most of the cases with Amazon products I am not being paid to do the review. I am doing the review because I used the product. In reviewing it I may use an affiliate link.
This would be different than when Kmart gave $500 for certain bloggers to go into the store and buy some stuff as long as they blogged about it (very smart).
In this case you would want to disclose so right in the post. This is something that many are already doing. For instance Shoemoney did it when he got the offer from Kmart and so did Chris Brogan.
In this case it made sense to disclose the amount as well. The bottom line is to just keep it simple and honest. Don’t over complicate it. Chances are that your readers will respect you more for it and not really care.
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