How I Modified My Blog to Comply with Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Guidance

Have your heard about the FTC’s new Guides Con­cern­ing the Use of Endorse­ments and Tes­ti­mo­ni­als in Adver­tis­ing?  It’s a bit dif­fi­cult to get the specifics of what is required of blog­gers to do.

I found this inter­view of a FTC spokesman that helps give an overview of the FTC’s intent.  The way I under­stand it, it means that you need to dis­close your affil­i­ate rela­tion­ships and your bias in post­ings on your blog.  There is debate on the web as to whether every affil­i­ate link needs to be labeled, however.

I also read an arti­cle that gives some assis­tance with what to do.  Based on the advice in this arti­cle, I went to the ref­er­enced DisclosurePolicy.org to gen­er­ate the words for the dis­clo­sure pol­icy on this web site.  The dis­clo­sure pol­icy site guides you through sev­eral ques­tions to gen­er­ate the appro­pri­ate word­ing for our blog.

Once you’ve answered all the ques­tions, you can copy and paste the words on a page of your blog.  I copied my the result­ing gen­er­ated pol­icy on my About page.  I cus­tomized the ver­biage to add the list of affil­i­ate rela­tion­ships that I have on this blog.

I took addi­tional steps toward dis­clo­sure by adding the DisclosurePolicy.org badge on the left sidebar:

as well as adding an addi­tional dis­claimer after every post on the blog:

Note: This web site is for the pur­pose of dis­sem­i­nat­ing infor­ma­tion for edu­ca­tional pur­poses, free of charge, for the ben­e­fit of all vis­i­tors. We take great care to pro­vide qual­ity infor­ma­tion. How­ever, we do not guar­an­tee, and accept no legal lia­bil­ity what­so­ever aris­ing from or con­nected to, the accu­racy, reli­a­bil­ity, cur­rency or com­plete­ness of any mate­r­ial con­tained on this web site or on any linked site.

I also clar­i­fied that the links on the left side­bar are to our “Spon­sors” rather than sim­ply “Resources” as they were labeled before.

All this is an effort to be “truth­ful in adver­tis­ing” and to make it clear the rela­tion­ships this blog has in being affil­i­ated with its spon­sors.  This blog has made every effort to choose these spon­sors well and and seeks to pro­mote only whole­some and hon­est sponsorships.

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