Don’t Get in Trouble: Use Disclaimers
Honesty and integrity when dealing with your readers are fundamental principles that will serve you well as a blogger (and in life). Your visitors will no doubt appreciate it.
More importantly, being honest and transparent will also help you stay out of trouble with your employer (if you have one) and even with the authorities.
Include an Employer Disclaimer
If you work for a large corporation, it’s likely that your employer has employee guidelines for blogging and social media engagement. You should review and respect these rules to avoid being the nth blogger to lose a job because of what he or she wrote online.
These guidelines vary from company to company, but they usually boil down to not revealing company secrets or unannounced products, not being a jerk to other people online, not engaging in slandering your competitors, and similar common-sense advice.
What some people may not be aware of is that most large corporations also require you to disclose your work affiliation. In other words, you’re required to include a disclaimer on your blog that identifies what you write as your own opinions and not those of the company that you’re presently employed by.
As an example, the About section of my programming blog includes the following disclaimer:
I’ll start with a disclaimer that is required by both my employer and my type of job. It’s my personal blog, which is entirely independent of IBM. My articles and comments are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer positions, strategies, or opinions.
For your own blog you could use or adapt the following standard disclaimer:
Disclaimer: The posts on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent [COMPANY]’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
Disclaimers such as these may appear silly to technical people, but they can help get you out of trouble with your employer should a complaint be filed against you.
Include a disclaimer like this in your sidebar and/or About section if you’re employed by a company that requires you do so. On Twitter, where space is limited, a simple “Tweets are my own.” should suffice.
Include an Earnings Disclaimer
If you think being fired for blogging is bad, how about being investigated by the feds?
In short, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) expects U.S.-based bloggers to clearly disclose any commercial affiliations with third-party products they’re reviewing or promoting. If your post or review includes a link to an affiliate product, including Amazon affiliate links, you need to disclose that fact to your readers. If the book, game, software, or any other product or service you are reviewing was obtained for free, you need to let your readers know that, because this may affect your judgment of the product. You’re also not allowed to make any false, misleading, or deceptive claims.
If you are a U.S.-based blogger, it’s worth checking out the latest guidelines on the https://ftc.gov website to ensure that you’re operating within the boundaries of the law. Non-U.S.-based bloggers may or may not have similar rules in place, depending on their country, but it’s worth adopting the same standard of transparency that’s asked of our peers in the States. You could add the following to your sidebar:
Some of the links contained within this site have my referral ID, which provides me with a small commission for each sale. Thank you for your support.
Also, include a disclaimer at the bottom of each relevant post to explain your connection to the specific product that’s being promoted. This can also help you from a legal standpoint when it comes to readers who subscribe to your posts and may not see your sidebar disclaimer.
If you post a review of a book you received for free from a publisher and are including affiliate links to Amazon, you may want to include the following disclaimer (or a very similar one) at the bottom of your post:
Disclaimer: I received this book for free from the publisher for reviewing purposes. This doesn’t affect my judgment of the book nor influence my review. Furthermore, my site is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. Thank you for your support.
Feel free to copy or adapt this disclaimer accordingly, depending on your specific circumstances and blog post.
If you link to Amazon books and other products often, it might make sense to embed the Amazon relevant portion of the disclaimer permanently in your sidebar. This way you’ll automatically be covered if you forget it in a post that just happens to link to Amazon with your affiliate ID.
You might assume that these kinds of disclaimers will kill your click-through rate. In my experience, this isn’t the case. It may paradoxically help bolster the number of clicks for the products you mention, possibly because disclaimers increase your perceived trustworthiness.