Affiliate links on a bio page

Not legal advice, and the specifics depend on where your audience is rather than where you are. Three things are true across the major jurisdictions.

1. The obligation is yours, not the network's. Regulators pursue the person who published, and "the affiliate programme did not tell me" has never been a defence anywhere.
2. It applies to a bio page. There is no exemption for a page that is mostly links, and the fact that a bio page is short makes the disclosure easier rather than optional.
3. Your programme's terms bind you separately. They are usually stricter than the law, they specify wording, and they are enforced by termination rather than by a warning. Amazon in particular has terminated accounts over placement and wording.

Most people treat disclosure as a tax on conversion and try to make it as small as possible. That is both the legally risky version and, counterintuitively, the one that converts worse.

A disclosure written like a person talking reads as confidence. A disclosure hidden in grey six-point text at the bottom of the page reads, to anybody who finds it, as something you were hoping they would not.

What works

• Before the click, not after. Somebody who finds out on the destination page has already been influenced by the recommendation, which is the precise thing the rule exists to prevent.
• Near the links. A line at the top of the section is fine. A line in the page footer, three scrolls below the links, is the arrangement regulators have called out by name.
• In words people use. "Some of these earn me a commission at no extra cost to you" is understood by everybody. "#ad #aff" is understood by people who already knew.
• Visible without interaction. Not behind a tooltip, an accordion, or a hover state that does not exist on a phone.

One line, once, above the block of links. It costs you a sentence and it removes an entire category of risk.

This is the part nobody writes about, and it is where affiliate income from a bio page actually goes.

An affiliate link is a URL pointing at somebody else's system, and it can stop working in at least five ways that leave the page looking completely normal:

• The product goes out of stock, or is discontinued.
• The merchant leaves the network, and every link to them dies at once.
• The programme changes its URL structure, and old links redirect to a homepage with no tracking on it, which is worse than a 404 because it looks fine.
• Your tracking ID is regenerated, and the clicks stop being attributed.
• The merchant's site moves to a new domain and drops the parameters.

None of these emails you. The page looks identical, people keep clicking, and the income is simply zero. On a page with fifteen affiliate links, checking them by hand every month is a chore nobody sustains past the second month.

Four decisions, in the order they matter.

1. Group the affiliate links together. One disclosed section beats a disclosure repeated beside every link, and it lets a visitor understand the arrangement once rather than reading the same caveat eight times.
2. Say what the thing is, not what it is called. "The lamp I use for every video" is a recommendation. "Neewer 660 PRO II" is a product listing, and people can find product listings without you.
3. Fewer, and only ones you actually use. A page of forty recommendations is a catalogue, and nobody trusts a catalogue. The value you are trading on is that somebody believes your opinion, and that does not scale to forty items.
4. Let the order be decided by clicks. Which of your recommendations people actually want is not knowable in advance and changes with the season. Ordering by hand means guessing monthly and mostly not bothering.

If you are also selling something of your own, selling access covers the fee arithmetic on each route, and how many links covers the pruning that makes any of this work.