"Affiliate marketing" has, deservedly, the reputation of being the sleazy end of online publishing. Most of the writing labeled with that phrase is hyperbolic, badly disclosed, and produced by writers who have never opened the product they are recommending. That version is a real category. It also is not the only one. The unsleazy version is small, slow, and pays modestly — but it works, and it does not require any of the things that make the bad version feel bad. Here is the version I run.
Why most affiliate content reads badly
Three reasons, and they are mostly structural.
The economics push toward volume. A traditional affiliate writer is paid per click or per conversion, regardless of whether the recommendation is actually good. The incentive is to publish more pieces, faster, covering more products, with less due diligence on each. Quality and rate-of-output trade off, and the platform rewards the wrong side of the tradeoff.
The keyword research is upstream of the recommendation. Bad affiliate writers find the keyword first ("best vpn 2026," "top cashback credit cards"), then decide what to recommend based on which programs pay the highest commission for that keyword. The product is downstream of the search intent. The reader can usually feel this, even if they cannot articulate it.
The disclosures are perfunctory. Many affiliate-heavy sites bury a generic "this site may contain affiliate links" sentence in the footer and call it compliance. FTC guidelines require disclosure to be "clear and conspicuous" — placed where the reader actually sees it, before the recommendation, not after.
Three rules I follow
One: I only recommend products I personally use. The list is small — five products as of this month. The discount broker I hold my taxable account at. The budgeting spreadsheet template (mine; not an affiliate). The tax-prep software I have used four years. The note-taking app I use for research. The website host that runs this site. I do not recommend a product I have not used for at least six months.
Two: the recommendation is the article, not the inverse. I write the piece on its merits — "what I would actually tell a friend about choosing a budgeting tool" — and the affiliate link appears once or twice inside it, with disclosure, where the reader naturally encounters the named product. I do not write pieces designed primarily to host affiliate links. If a piece would work without the link, the link belongs in it.
Three: I disclose at the top. Not in the footer. Not in a tiny grey font. A clearly worded sentence at the top of any piece that contains an affiliate link, saying so. The reader knows before they read.
Affiliate marketing done well is a thin sub-genre of useful writing. Affiliate marketing done badly is search engine pollution. The difference, mechanically, is which one you wrote first.
What honest disclosure looks like
At the top of an article that mentions my discount broker, the disclosure reads:
This article contains affiliate links to my brokerage of choice. If you open an account through one of these links, the broker pays Wealthronic a referral fee at no cost to you. I have held my own taxable account there since 2019 and would recommend it regardless of the affiliate relationship. See the full editorial & affiliate disclosure for how this site is funded.
That is 67 words, takes up about 130 pixels of vertical space, and is impossible to miss. No reader has ever complained about it. Several have written to thank me for it.
What this actually pays
Across the most recent twelve months:
| Source | Clicks | Conversions | Commission |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brokerage | 820 | 31 | $1,860 |
| Tax-prep software | 410 | 62 | $740 |
| Website host | 240 | 9 | $320 |
| Note-taking app | 180 | 14 | $170 |
| Total | 1,650 | 116 | $3,090 |
$3,090 across twelve months. About $258 a month. As a share of the site's total revenue, affiliate income is roughly 18%; the rest is display ads, newsletter pro tier, and a small amount of freelance writing the site lists me for. The number is not the point. The point is that all $3,090 came from articles that would have existed without the affiliate links, recommending products I would have recommended without the commissions.
If you are thinking of starting
Three pieces of advice.
- Start with the products you already use. Open the websites of the five products you have used most heavily for the longest. Check whether each has an affiliate program. Most consumer software does; most boutique products do not. Apply, get accepted, get your links.
- Write the piece you would have written anyway. If you cannot picture writing the same piece without affiliate links, do not write it. The piece will read as exactly what it is — a vehicle for a payout — and your readers will gradually leave.
- Track click-through rates per product, not totals. The broker in my table converts at 3.8%; the website host at 3.75%. The note-taking app converts at 7.8%, much higher, despite paying less per conversion. Knowing which products convert in your hands lets you steer future articles toward the recommendations that actually serve readers.
None of this is a path to $50,000-a-year affiliate income. The high-volume version of affiliate marketing — the kind that does produce six-figure incomes — is structurally different and, mostly, the bad version I described at the top of this piece. The honest version is a slow trickle that pairs naturally with writing you would have done anyway. It is small money, cleanly earned. That is what I run.
