New Federal FTC rules may have you and your advertisers in the hot seat.

Do you run advertisements on your personal or business website?

Do you write about products or services that may be connected to your affiliate programs?

If you are a Google Adsense Affiliate you may be doing it and not even know.  Google places ads on your site based on the content of your pages. If you write about a product or service the keywords in your post may be picked up and your site could be served ads from companies and products that you are describing.

So what do you have to do to protect yourself?

Basically that is still up in the air because it seems that anyone could be in violation and not even know.

If you go on vacation and write about a hotel you stayed in and used favorable words about the business and an ad for that hotel shows up next to your article but only for people that live across the country YOU COULD BE SCREWED.

For this reason a blanket disclaimer should be part of any website stating that your content should never be considered when readers are making decisions to purchase goods or services.

A few businesses who serve ads have already started investigating the problem and how they will be required to live up to their side of the regulations.

And all of this started because some website geared towards mommies got free samples of diapers and other products and in return wrote favorable and misleading posts.

Keep your eyes open about this FTC and Federal Legislation it may effect you in just a short time.

For More info see

http://blog.linkshare.com/2009/10/14/analysis-of-the-ftc-guidelines-on-disclosure/