How to Share Affiliate Links on Your Squarespace Website
If you have been in the online world for a minute, you have probably used some products or taken some courses that you LOVE and want to recommend to other people. If those products or courses have affiliate programs, you can earn commissions by sharing what you love!
To find out if a business or product you love has an affiliate program, check for a link in their website footer to apply to their program. If you don’t find one there, you can google “business name affiliate program” or just reach out and ask them! Once you apply and are accepted, you will get your own custom links that you can share on your blog (or in your newsletter or on social media or on YouTube, etc…)
Before you start sharing those links, there are some legal requirements you need to follow and some tricks you can use to make it easier to share, manage, and track your affiliate links.
In this post, I will explain how to:
Include an affiliate disclosure on your blog posts
Add an affiliate disclaimer to your website
Tag your affiliate links as “sponsored”
Create custom “short links” for your affiliate URLs
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this post is not legal advice. Always consult with a lawyer to ensure your website is legally compliant.
Include an Affiliate Disclosure on Your Blog Posts
Here in the United States, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) legally requires businesses to disclose that you will be compensated if someone buys something after clicking on your affiliate link. It’s also just a good ethical move to let people know you are being paid to make a recommendation. (Hopefully you have built enough trust with your audience that they believe you are making a recommendation you stand behind and it’s not just for the money, but that is between you and your audience!)
Here is my affiliate disclosure statement, which I need to include because many of the links in this post are affiliate links!
You can manually add a disclosure on your Squarespace blog posts as long as it’s clear and visible. You need to include it before you share your affiliate links, and all affiliate links must be clearly identified.
I used to manually add the disclaimer to blog posts and shade the text section gray so it stood out, but every time I edited the post, the shading would go away ☹ (Blogs still use the old Squarespace editing experience which is a little kludgy.)
Now, I use Will Meyers’ Section Loader Supreme Plug-in* for my affiliate disclosures which makes it a breeze! (This is what I used to create the disclosure above.)
Here is how it works:
Create a separate page on your website that includes JUST your disclaimer text
Add the plug-in code to your site header and footer code injection areas
Add a code block wherever you want to display your disclosure and enter one line of HTML code which pulls the disclosure text into your blog post
I love using this plug-in because I can easily add the disclosure anywhere on my blog posts, and if I want to tweak the text or styling, I can do it once and it will update everywhere!
I also use the Section Loader Supreme Plug-in* to load other sections on my website that I want to repeat in many places, like a newsletter sign up, lead magnet promo, etc.. so it was well worth the $25 investment!
Add an Affiliate Disclaimer on Your Website
It’s also a good idea to include an affiliate disclaimer on your website that lists all of the affiliate programs you participate in. This adds an extra layer of protection against someone accusing you of shady sales practices for not disclosing your affiliate relationships. You can check out my Website Disclaimer that includes an affiliate disclaimer section.
I use Termageddon* for my website policies which automatically updates them as needed when laws change. When I become an affiliate for a new business, I manually add that business in my Termageddon dashboard and it updates my Website Disclaimer for me (pretty cool!).
Tag Your Affiliate Links as “Sponsored”
All affiliate links on your website should be tagged as “sponsored”. This tag tells Google that you have a sponsored relationship with the company you are linking to so your affiliates don’t get accused of “buying links” to boost their SEO. (And if they are going to pay you commission for sharing their stuff, you want to do right by them!)
How do you do this on Squarespace? Once again, I am going to recommend a plug in from Will Meyers called the Affiliate Link Genie*!
Here’s how it works:
Add the plug-in code to your site footer code injection area
Add “#rel=sponsored” to the end of all of your affiliate links
Behind the scenes, Will’s code does website magic so Google knows which of your links are sponsored
This plug-in is WELL worth the $15 investment because the alternative is to use an HTML block every time you want to include an affiliate link on your website, which is messy. And, there is no way to add sponsored links to buttons without this plug-in! (But if you want to go that route, google “add sponsored links to Squarespace” to find old school instructions to use the HTML for this.)
Create Custom Short Links for your Affiliate URLs
Affiliate links can sometimes be long and complicated and are not easy to remember. If you create a memorable custom short link, you can quickly share it with someone without having to go check your list of affiliate links. It’s best practice to use your own domain (or something similar) to create these short links which are often called, branded short links.
For example, my custom short link for the Affiliate Link Genie Plug-In is https://shannah.link/genie*. (The full link is https://www.will-myers.com/products/p/affiliate-link-genie?peachs_apc=shannah-albert*. Quite a mouthful!)
A short link is a placeholder URL that is set up to always redirect to the longer URL when it is used. You can use your own domain or purchase a new domain just for this purpose. (I purchased shannah.link for my short links, but this is not required!)
Another reason to create custom short links for affiliate links is that affiliates sometimes change the programs they use which means they get all new links! If you have a custom short link, you can just update the redirect and your short link still works wherever you have shared it. This is helpful for your blog, but even more helpful if you send out links in a newsletter because you can’t change them once they are out in the world!
A final reason to use custom short links is that if you use a URL shortener (like Dub or Rebrandly) you can track the number of clicks you get on your affiliate links, and where those clicks come from.
I wrote a separate blog post that explains how to create short links and the options for branded short links that you can read here: How to Create Free Short Links to Use on Squarespace
The Net Net
Using affiliate links to share the things that you love is a great way to connecting your audience with great products, support people who make great products, and earn a little income on the side. Just make sure to legally disclose your affiliate relationships and tag your links as “sponsored”. Creating branded short links for your affiliate URLs can help you manage your links and track how many people you are referring to your affiliates.
