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Part of Affiliate income for 2027: disclosures, real reviews and a launch plan that holds
Affiliate Income Guide: Choosing What to Recommend
An affiliate income guide to choosing what to recommend, testing it against real use, placing links after the caveats, and disclosing commissions clearly.
The hard part of this work is not the link. It is deciding what to write about, and then writing something that would still be worth reading if the commission disappeared. This affiliate income guide starts with that decision, not a program.
Most people start at the other end: find a program, find a product, produce a page about it. That order produces pages nobody trusts and nobody finds, and it is the reason so much affiliate content earns nothing.
What to take away
- Start from a question you are already being asked. The recommendation follows the question, never the program.
- Write the recommendation so it could be wrongwho it suits, who it does not, and what would change your mind.
- Put the disclosure where the recommendation is, in your own words, before the link.
Start from what people already ask you
The best sources of material are already sitting in your own inbox and comments. The question that comes up every month, the thing you had to work out yourself, the mistake you watched several people make, and the choice you personally agonised over.
Those questions have three properties that make them worth writing about. Somebody has a real decision to make, so they will read carefully. You have direct evidence, because you made the decision yourself. And the answer is specific to your subject, which is what makes it something other than a page anyone could produce.
If nobody is asking, there is probably no decision, and without a decision there is nothing for a recommendation to do.
The gate before anything else
One question, asked honestly: would you recommend this if there were no program at all?
The gate before any program
Would you recommend it with no program?
write the same paragraph anyway
stop, wording cannot fix it
The test is whether you would have written the same paragraph before you knew there was money in it. If the answer is no, stop. Nothing further in this page will fix it, and no amount of careful wording covers a recommendation you do not believe.
Two related refusals worth adopting permanently. Never order a comparison by what it pays. And be willing to point somewhere that pays you nothing when that is the right answer, because the ability to do that is the entire reason your recommendation is worth anything.
What a recommendation needs behind it
Before writing, you should be able to answer all of these without looking anything up.
- What did I actually use it to do, and under what conditions?
- What did I observe firsthand, rather than learn from specifications?
- What alternative did I consider, and why did I choose this?
- What limitation or failure did I encounter?
- Who should not use it, and what evidence would change my recommendation?
Answer these before writing
- How does it fail?
- Who is it wrong for?
- What did you consider instead?
- What was awkward or broke later?
- What would stop your recommendation?
If you cannot answer the first or the fourth, you have specifications rather than experience, and a page assembled from specifications competes with a thousand identical ones and holds nothing a reader could not get elsewhere.
Structure it so it could be wrong
A recommendation that cannot be falsified is an advertisement. Build in the parts that make it checkable.
| Element | What it does |
|---|
Elements that make it checkable
- Who this is for, stated up front
- Who it is not for
- What you used it for, how long
- Drawbacks in your own words
- The alternative you considered
- What would change your mind
- Visible date of last check
| Element | What it does |
|---|---|
| Fit | Names who the recommendation suits and the decision it helps with. |
| Evidence | States what you personally tried or observed. |
| Limits | Identifies drawbacks, conditions, or situations where it falls short. |
| Alternative | Explains when another option—or no purchase—is better. |
| Reconsideration | Says what new evidence would change the recommendation. |
For example, a hypothetical review might say: “I recommend this for a solo creator who needs to schedule posts, based on my own use. I would not recommend it to a team that needs approval workflows, and I would change my view if it repeatedly failed to publish scheduled posts.”
Where the link goes
Placement is an honesty question before it is a conversion one.
Where the link belongs
- Reader arrives
- Caveats and drawbacks stated
- Reader has enough to act
- Link placed here
- Destinations routed centrally
Put the link at the point in the page where a reader has enough information to act, which is after the caveats rather than before them. A link in the first line, before anything has been established, tells a reader what the page is for and they are right.
Keep the number of links small and the destinations obvious. A page with a link on every noun is not more useful, and it makes the whole page read as machinery. And route links through something you can change centrally, because in a year you will want to alter a destination without editing thirty pages.
Disclosure
If you earn a commission on a recommendation, say so. That covers affiliate links, referral codes, products given to you for review, and anything else that would change how a reader weighs what you wrote.
Disclosure that travels
- Covers affiliate links and referral codes
- Covers gifted review products
- Sits before the link
- Plain language, in the piece
- Not a site-wide footer
- Survives excerpting and feeds
- Follow the strictest rule
Put it where the recommendation is: before the link, in language a normal person understands, in the piece itself rather than in a site wide footer or a cluster of tags. Check that it survives being excerpted, syndicated, or read in a feed reader, because the disclosure traveling with the recommendation is the whole point of it.
In the United States, FTC guidance calls for a material connection, such as an affiliate commission, to be disclosed clearly and conspicuously. For an affiliate recommendation, make that disclosure hard to miss and easy to understand, place it with the recommendation, and put it before the link rather than burying it in a footer or behind a click.
In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission keeps a running set of answers to creators' questions in its endorsement guides material. Those guides are one item on a longer affiliate income checklist covering terms, dead links, and failed pages.
The text those answers are drawn from is the Guides Concerning Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, at 16 CFR Part 255. It is short enough to read once and worth having read. Where a program's rules, a platform's rules and the law all apply, follow the strictest.
Before you publish
- Would this page be worth reading with every link removed?
- Is the disclosure visible before the first link, without scrolling past anything?
- Is there at least one specific thing here that could not be written from a specification sheet?
- Have you said who should not buy it?
- Is the date of your last check on the page?
- Do you know what you would do if this product got worse next year?
The last one matters more than it looks. Affiliate pages are not published, they are kept, and a recommendation you made once carries on speaking in your name until you go back and change it.
Before you publish
- Worth reading with every link removed?
- Disclosure visible before first link?
- One thing not from a spec sheet?
- Said who should not buy it?
- Last-check date on the page?
- Know what you would do if it worsened?
Common questions
How many programs should I be in when I start?
One or two, for products you already use. Every additional program adds terms to track, a payout threshold, a set of content restrictions and a maintenance burden, and the mechanics of how commissions actually reach you are covered in the guide to affiliate income.
Should I write comparison pages or single reviews?
Whichever matches the decision the reader is making. Someone choosing between two known options wants a comparison. Someone who has never heard of the category wants an explanation first, and a list of ten items is usually a sign that nobody had a decision in mind.
What if my audience is small?
Then commissions on other people's products are probably the wrong income line, and something you own is likely to earn more from the same trust. That trade off is set out in digital products and in the argument for memberships.
Do I need to keep records of this income?
Yes. Keep a ledger of gross commissions by program, record fees separately, and save payment statements and other records that support your income and expenses. The IRS generally advises keeping supporting records for at least three years, though some situations require longer. For a sole proprietor, affiliate business income generally goes on Schedule C (Form 1040); a payer may send Form 1099-NEC or another information return, but report the income even if no form arrives. More tax guidance is covered in creator taxes.
