How to say you earn a commission without losing the reader's trust

You have written the sentence. You have deleted it. You have rewritten it shorter, then longer, then moved it to the bottom of the email where it sits in a smaller size, and now you are staring at the send button feeling slightly grubby about a piece of writing you were proud of an hour ago. Every creator who has ever shared a referral link has had this exact twenty minutes.

The fear is about the wrong thing

Most people assume disclosure suppresses clicks. Perhaps it does, marginally, among readers who were never going to buy anything and who resent the existence of commerce. What it definitely does is remove the possibility of a much worse outcome, which is a reader discovering the arrangement afterwards from somebody else.

Here is the genuinely hard part, and it is not legal. A disclosure cannot repair a recommendation that was not honest to begin with. If you would not recommend the thing without the commission, no amount of correctly placed small print makes the email acceptable, and readers work this out faster than anyone expects. They notice that you never mention any downside, that the tool appears in every third post, that your enthusiasm arrived the same month as the programme did.

The second hard part is that rules vary. Advertising standards bodies in the UK, the US and the EU all have their own guidance, and the platforms layer their own requirements on top, such as paid-promotion toggles on video and specific tagging on social posts. Nothing in this piece is legal advice. Check what applies to you where you publish, and when in doubt, be more explicit rather than less.

Two versions of the same sentence

The wording matters less than the position. Compare the instinctive approach with the version that survives being noticed.

Writing the line

You need one sentence, not a paragraph. Long disclosures read as nervous, and nervous reads as guilty. Work through this in order and you will have it in five minutes.

The version that reads best

Take a concrete example. You are writing to a list of 900 people, of whom perhaps 60 sell something of their own. The paragraph before your link reads: "I moved my shop and my link page to store.fan in March. If you sign up through my link, store.fan pays me a commission on your first year and it costs you nothing extra. The free plan stays free, so you can look before you decide." Three sentences, ordinary voice, no apology.

That version is easy to write because the underlying arrangement is easy to describe: a ladder from 25% to 50% depending on how many of your referrals paid in the last 30 days, running for each referral's first 12 months, transferred into your own Stripe when their payment clears. Arrangements that are awkward to disclose are usually awkward for a reason. If you want your reader to check the claim rather than take your word for it, link them to the plans and the affiliate programme and let them read it themselves.

The mistake most people make

Disclosing once and then assuming the disclosure travels. Your email said it plainly, and then the same link went into a pinned comment with no context, onto a slide in a workshop, into a PDF you hand out. Each of those is a separate act of recommending, and each needs the sentence. The link card on your storefront is the one people forget, because it feels like furniture rather than a message. It is not furniture. Somebody will click it having never read your email, and the card is all they will see. If you are unsure what counts, the FAQ is a reasonable place to start and your own regulator's guidance is the place to finish.

The whole problem dissolves once you accept that the sentence is not a confession. You use a tool, you tell people about it, the maker pays you for the introduction, and the reader pays the same either way. Written down like that, it takes one line, and the twenty minutes of agonising can go back into the part of the email that is actually about your work.