Forest Software

Web, SEO and IT & Business Advice for the Smaller Business

Last updated on January 16th, 2018 at 11:48 am

I was thinking the other day about the need for an affiliate disclosure for this site and decided that now was the time to produce one.

Affiliate Links

Some (about 2 or 3 percent ) of the outgoing links on this site are “affiliate links” whereby if you buy something from the site you are visiting we end up with a small commission. To the best of our knowledge none of the sites we link to in this manner charge you, the visitor, any extra when you buy something. We do not earn anything if you just visit the external site, and we are happy with this as, if you don’t want to buy something we don’t see why we should get any money.Affiliate income

The majority of the affiliate links on this site are via the main providers of such links such as Tradedoubler, Commission Junction and Affiliate Window. We understand that these companies check the sites that they work for before they agree to let companies use their systems.

We use this income to help defray the costs of running the site (as do many sites on the Internet).

It’s our promise to you that we only use affiliate links if we think they will be useful to our visitors and do not influence what we say on the pages. For example the led office light blog post on our site was written as a result of an upgrade to the office lights when we decided to use led light bulbs rather that “normal” lights to save money on the running costs and then decided to link to the supplier (as you would if you are happy with a supplier) and realised that they operated an affiliate scheme.

We are in the process of marking the pages with these affiliate links with a message that we may earn some money from the link and our intention is to mark any new such links in the future as they are placed.

Adverts

You may also notice other adverts on our pages. These operate slightly differently from the affiliate links and are provided by Google via their Adsense program. These links usually pay us a small amount if you click on them (the amount of money we get depends on how much the external site is willing to bid to appear on the page). We get this money regardless of whether you buy from the external site of not – please note that we encourage you only to click on the link if you think you will find it useful and not because you think it will earn us any money.

There are a few, a very few, adverts on the site where we are paid depending on the number of times it’s displayed ( called in the trade CPM ).

Other Links

The remainder of the external links on our site are freely given, they may be a client, a supplier that we have used in the past or sites that have been recommended to us by friends. We haven’t been paid for these links and neither do we earn any money from them on an ongoing basis. They are there purely because we think the might be useful to you, our visitor.

Summary

Hopefully the information above has given you a guide about some of our external links. If you are interested is having such links on your own site a good place to start may be our “can I earn money from affiliate links” page.

About this blog

Over the years we have published many articles based around the questions that we get asked from small businesses relating to marketing, SEO, general business advice and other subjects.  You can find a list of related articles grouped by subject below or can even search for a word or phrase or browse our recent articles.

We hope that you find our articles useful.

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