Stay Compliant with the FTC with Cmp.ly

In case you missed it, which you shouldn’t have considering all the outrage and buzz that the move created, the FTC decided a few months ago that it was time for bloggers and social media professionals to be more transparent with their efforts. Essentially, as a blogger, it’s your duty to disclose your material connections. If you get a product to review or giveaway, you need to let your visitors know exactly what you are doing. The move has made life a bit more difficult for bloggers, but it’s designed to protect consumers against fraud and deceptive reviews. While the FTC is not expected to come after all bloggers at this time, you still want to stay compliant just in case a major crackdown takes place. Thanks to CMP.ly, you can now make your blog compliant and keep yourself out of trouble.

Once you sign up for the service, you are going to be provided with a shortened URL that you can use to link to from your blog. Currently, 5 tops of disclosures are covered through this service. But you can always create custom disclosures using CMP.ly. There is nothing ambiguous about these disclosure documents. Once you have chosen the one that applies to your post or your blog and add it to your posts, your readers are not going to have any doubt where you stand in connection with products that you are displaying on your blog.

I personally have tried this service for some of my sites and decided to stay away from it on some other blogs. It really comes down to what you are doing on your blog. Since BloggingOT is a part of exxponent network, our team has decided to have a universal disclosure for everything that we do in our blog network. However, if you own a single blog and want to make sure you are compliant with the FTC guidelines, it can’t get any easier with CMP.ly.