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New Affiliate Rules ….. and How They Affect Your eBay Classified Advertising Promotions …. and Any Other Goods and Services You Promote as an Affiliate

New affiliate rules have been imposed by the United States government and they affect anyone selling goods and services as an affiliate for U.S. companies and to U.S. buyers.  That might not include many of my UK readers but it will include all who sell ClickBank and other affiliate products through Classified Ads. on eBay.com.  And it almost certainly won’t be long before affiliates worldwide will have to comply with rules that force them to disclose they are receiving commissions for goods and services bought as a result of their recommendations.

It’s only fair really, when you consider that many of us buy goods and services based on recommendations by people we know and trust.  And very often we don’t question those recommendations or the motive behind them.  So when your favourite seller tells you so and so’s product might set you back tens of thousands of pounds but it will make you millions this time next week, you just go with it don’t you, you buy the product, then you wait for your windfall to appear?

Hopefully you said ‘No’ because it’s vital you always do your own due diligence before buying goods based on another person’s recommendation, especially when that other person stands to make hundreds or thousands of pounds every time you take out your credit card to buy whatever he, or she, tells you to buy!

But the reality is most of us don’t do those basic checks, most of us don’t even realise our favourite sellers are promoting another person’s products, in many cases we think those products emanate from this same person whose goods we’ve bought before and have always found satisfactory.

Unfortunately, that is rarely the case and many recommendations are based on a five or six minute search for something to promote as an affiliate and another two minutes for sending an email inviting people like you, and me, to buy.

And that means many promoters don’t even look at the product they recommend you to buy!

In the U.S. especially that caused lots of buyers to go bust fast, hence the reason the American government jumped in to declare war on affiliates who don’t make it clear they are selling other people’s products and sometimes earning a big fat commission.  No doubt worldwide governments will soon follow suite.

The new rules mean if you promote affiliate products on everyday web sites and blogs, if you promote affiliate products through eBay Classified Ads., you need to put a disclaimer or warning on all of your sites, in your promotional emails, in your eBay Classified Ads., and so on.  Something like this should do nicely:

‘Some of the links on this website are affiliate links which means if you buy a product after clicking on one of those links, I get a commission for recommending the product to you.  However, I work very hard to recommend only high quality products and I always provide back up support and guidance to people who purchase my own products and those I recommend my site visitors buy through affiliate links at this site (or email, advertisement, etc).’

You can copy that text if you like, it’s entirely my own, and you can and should adapt it any way you like to suit whatever affiliate products you are promoting on eBay or elsewhere.