Affiliate Internet Marketing and the new FTC Guidelines

I recently blogged about the new FTC Guidelines, which “address endorsements by consumers, experts, organizations, and celebrities, as well as the disclosure of important connections between advertisers and endorsers”. The revised guides require “disclosure of material connections between advertisers and endorsers”. While the intent of new guides appear to be more focused on bloggers who get free products and get paid to endorse a product, the language is sufficiently broad enough that it applies to bloggers that embed affiliate links, even if your review of the product is neutrally biased and not really a testimonial.

Prominent internet marketers seem to agree. Ken MacArthur and SiteFling, both have posted a notice on their blogs disclosing of their affiliate relationships.

The power of Thematic hooks

As I begin to wrap up my first child theme using the Thematic framework, I must admit that I’m beginning to really appreciate the power of theme hooks. At first I was modifying the css to get where I wanted to be, for example altering margins, using the background url directive to add my custom header image. But when I got to the point where I wanted to suppress the display of the blog title and description, that is when I first found out about Thematic add and remove actions.

Oh sure I could have just used “display: none” in the css blog title class/ids so that the blog title didn’t display over my custom image, but that’s kind of ugly. Using remove_action in my functions.php file is much more elegant.

function suppress_header_elements() {
remove_action('thematic_header','thematic_blogtitle',3);
remove_action('thematic_header','thematic_blogdescription',5);
}
add_action('init','suppress_header_elements');


And the bonus is that the blog title description value still populate my title and meta description tags as desired for SEO optimization.

Theme hooks is not a concept unique to Thematic but embedded in Wordpress itself. Using theme hooks in your child theme, the idea is that you can isolate your customizations in a single file in a functions.php file (it may be called something different such as custom_functions.php with other frameworks).

Although I had altered the css to add my image, I wanted to additionally add clickable button images as well that I already had defined in a css file. No problem, I just created a new function called add_buttons in my functions.php file, echo’ed out the HTML and then added the add_action line:

function add_buttons() {
echo ....
}
add_action('thematic_header', 'add_buttons');


It wasn’t completely smooth sailing as I ran into this error when I tried to use the admin (error text modified to remove site identifying info)

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/mysite/public_html/blog/wp-content/themes/childtheme/functions.php:43) in /home/mysite/public_html/mysite.com/blog/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 865


Most of the information you get googling this error suggests there is extra spaces prior to the php start tag in the wpconfig.php file. That wasn’t the case here, but it was a good clue. Turns out I had an extra blank line after the closing php tag in my functions.php file. When I finally figured out to remove that, the errors went away.

FTC new guidelines on product reviews in blogs

This just in. I just heard on NPR that the FTC has released new guidelines regarding blogs that “endorse” products. Product reviews is a common blog post, popular with searchers who are researching a potential purchase, and yes bloggers sometimes get paid for the reviews or at least get free stuff. The FTC thinks these relationships the bloggers have with companies, need to be fully disclosed. Fines can be pretty hefty, up to $11,000 per infraction.

Not surprisingly, the twittersphere has picked up on it quickly. I found a tweet pointing to a cnet article discussing the impact on twitter and facebook users.

Seems that affiliate links is outside the scope of these new guidelines, but more careful reading is needed.