affiliate_content v1.0.0

name: affiliate_content description: "Plan, write, and audit affiliate marketing content: FTC-compliant disclosure placement, honest product review formats, and post-cookie tracking and attribution. Use when someone asks about affiliate disclosures, 'do I need to disclose this', affiliate link placement, writing trustworthy product reviews, cookieless affiliate tracking, S2S postbacks, or affiliate attribution setup."

Affiliate Content

Purpose

Help a creator or brand publish affiliate content that stays on the right side of FTC rules, keeps the audience's trust, and still gets every commission tracked. Three moving parts: say the connection clearly, write reviews worth believing, and set up tracking that survives blocked cookies.

Workflow

1. Map every material connection. List each payment, free product, commission, discount code, trip, or relationship tied to the content. If knowing about it could change how a reader weighs your recommendation, it gets disclosed. Paying nothing does not end the obligation: affiliate commissions, free products, and even unsolicited gifts count.
2. Place disclosures to the clear-and-conspicuous standard. Each piece of content carries its own disclosure (an About-page note does not cover individual posts). Put it before the reader reaches the endorsement: at the start of a caption before the "more" cutoff, spoken out loud on audio/video, in show notes next to the link. "Ad", "Sponsored", and "Paid partnership" are clear; "#spon", "#collab", and hashtag piles at the end of a caption are not. A disclosure someone must click, scroll, or hunt for fails the test. Full rules in references/disclosure-rules.md.
3. Build honest review formats. Only endorse what you have actually used. Say what you did not test. Show real drawbacks, not token cons. Keep the review format repeatable: how tested, what worked, what did not, who it is for, who should skip it. Details in references/review-formats.md.
4. Set up cookieless tracking. Make server-to-server (S2S) postback the primary conversion path: the click generates a unique click ID, the merchant's server reports the conversion back against that ID, no browser in the loop. Keep first-party cookies as a secondary layer for same-domain journeys, not the only join key. Details and worked setup in references/attribution-tracking.md.
5. Audit before publish. Run the disclosure check (placement, wording, per-piece coverage), the honesty check (every claim traceable to actual use), and the tracking check (postback verified with a test conversion). If anything fails, fix it before the content goes out.

Output Contract

When this skill produces affiliate content or an audit, the deliverable includes:

• Disclosure plan: exact disclosure wording and its placement for each format (caption, video, audio, show notes, blog), checked against the clear-and-conspicuous standard.
• Content or review draft: the affiliate content itself, with claims limited to what was actually experienced, material connections disclosed inline, and honest drawbacks stated.
• Tracking summary: which tracking method covers each traffic source, where the click ID originates, the postback endpoint, and confirmation that a test conversion was logged.
• Compliance notes: anything unverified flagged rather than stated as fact.

Operating Rules

1. No invented rules or dates. The FTC framework here comes from the Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255, revised 2023) and the Consumer Review Rule (final, effective 2024). Anything you are not sure of gets cut or labeled uncertain, never stated confidently.
2. Never advise hiding, minimizing, or dodging a disclosure. If a disclosure "ruins the vibe" of the content, the content format is wrong, not the disclosure.
3. Reviews must reflect genuine experience. Never write a positive review for a product nobody used, never pay for reviews conditioned on sentiment, never suppress negative reviews. These are banned practices, not just bad etiquette.
4. Disclosure burden sits with both the endorser and the brand. When writing for a brand, include the monitoring and training expectations, not just the creator-side wording.
5. Do not recommend fingerprinting as the primary tracking method. Use explicit click IDs and server postbacks; treat fingerprinting as a last resort with legal review.
6. Keep payout attribution deterministic and written into the program terms. Multi-touch attribution is for insight, not for deciding who gets paid.