An affiliate link is an ordinary link with your identifier stuck on the end. Everything else in affiliate marketing, the cookies, the approval rules, the commission tables and the disclosure law, exists to settle one question: is that identifier still attached when somebody finally pays?
I am not in any affiliate programme. There is no tracking ID anywhere on this site, and links to providers go out with rel="nofollow" and nothing appended. So this guide is written from the outside, by someone who has read the terms closely because he has to decide whether and when to apply. Everything below is mechanics or a dated quotation from a programme’s own page. There are no income figures: I have none, and the ones this site used to print had no source.
What this is based on: the public affiliate pages of Amazon Associates, Shopify, Bluehost and Hostinger, the US Federal Trade Commission’s endorsement FAQ, the UK Advertising Standards Authority’s affiliate guidance and Spain’s e-commerce law, all read on 21 September 2026. I pay Hostinger for hosting and once ran a Shopify store that has since closed. I have never been a Bluehost customer. I am an affiliate of none of the four.
Six things that have to go right between a click and a payment
The usual explanation has three steps: someone clicks, buys, and you get paid. There are at least six, and the published terms show where each can fail.
- You are accepted, sometimes only provisionally. Amazon hands you a link and evaluates your application only after you have referred three qualifying sales.
- The reader clicks, and the programme records it, usually with a cookie tied to your identifier.
- The window stays open long enough. Amazon ends the session 24 hours after the click, with an 89-day allowance for items already in the basket. Shopify tracks for 30 days, or up to 400 days when the referral starts on a free trial. Bluehost states a 30-day cookie. Hostinger’s page doesn’t state one.
- Nobody else’s link gets in the way. Amazon’s session also ends when the customer clicks through another associate’s link.
- The sale survives validation. Bluehost says commissions are “processed promptly within 45–70 days after a sale”. Shopify credits them once a month, on the 22nd, for the previous month’s referrals.
- Your balance crosses the payout minimum. Shopify’s is $10. The other three pages I read don’t publish one.
Beginners think about step two. Most of what goes wrong happens in steps one, three and five, and all three are settled in documents most people never open.
Four programmes, in their own words
Rather than another list of “best programmes”, here is what four programmes in hosting, e-commerce and retail publish about themselves. Watch the last column: what a programme leaves off its page is information too.
| Programme | What it says it pays | Tracking window | Getting in | Getting paid | Not on the page I read |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Associates | Rates by product category, in a separate Commission Income Statement | 24 hours from the click; basket items count if ordered within 89 days | Three qualifying sales within 180 days of applying, then an evaluation “within a day or two”; a rejected ID can’t be reinstated | Not covered on the pages I read | Payout minimum and schedule |
| Shopify | “Up to $150 USD per qualified referral” on paid Basic, Grow or Advanced plans; amounts “vary by referral location” | 30 days; up to 400 days for referrals that start on a free trial | “Open to anyone with an audience of merchants”, but “not every application is approved” | $10 minimum balance; credited monthly on the 22nd | Nothing essential |
| Bluehost | “$65 for each qualified sale”; recurring commissions “for some hosting plans” | 30-day cookie | “Anyone with a blog or website can join”; no need to be a customer; can be declined over guidelines or traffic | Processed 45–70 days after the sale; PayPal or direct deposit | Which plans pay recurring; the payout minimum |
| Hostinger | “It starts at 40% and grows depending on sales volume” | Not stated | Verification before dashboard access | Not stated | Cookie length, payout minimum, payment methods |
Hostinger’s row is the most telling, because I am their customer and still can’t work out what a referral would be worth: a percentage with no cookie length, payout minimum or payment methods is a headline, not a term. Bluehost’s recurring commission applies to “some hosting plans” without saying which. Shopify’s “up to $150” is a ceiling that varies by country: the best case, not the typical one. I left Amazon’s category rates out on purpose; without conversion and traffic data, which I don’t have, a rate tells a new site very little.
The Amazon sequence, and why it favours sites that already exist
Amazon’s order of events deserves a slow read. “Once you’ve applied, you have 180 days to refer a sale through one of your Associates links.” Then: “Once you have referred three qualifying sales, we’ll evaluate your application within a day or two.” Miss that, and “We’re unable to reinstate your account or Associates ID after it’s been rejected”, although you are “welcome to reapply when you have established your site”.
Put that next to the 24-hour session and the arithmetic is unkind to a new blog: three purchases, mostly within a day of a click, inside six months that start when you apply, not when your posts get found. Applying is not the first step. You do it once you have pages people reach while deciding what to buy.
The same policies contain the best one-line description of a useful affiliate page I have read anywhere: “Original content utilizing third-party materials must contain significant commentary, analysis, or transformation to any materials you include.” Google says much the same from the other side. Its spam policies (updated 28 August 2026) describe thin affiliation as product descriptions and reviews “copied directly from the original merchant without any original content or added value”, and add that “Not every site that participates in an affiliate program is a thin affiliate.”
What programmes say they want from your site
- Amazon: “Your Site(s) must contain original content and be publicly available via the website address provided in the application.”
- Shopify describes its typical affiliates as people who “Own and manage an active website”, “Have an established audience”, “Create original content focused on commerce or entrepreneurship” and “Have experience with Shopify or other commerce platforms”.
- Bluehost says an application can be declined if “your site doesn’t meet Bluehost’s guidelines or lacks sufficient traffic”, and states that you don’t need to be a customer to join.
Bluehost’s rule is about eligibility, not honesty. Nothing stops you promoting hosting you have never put a site on. I think you shouldn’t, and here I won’t. What I can write about from use is in the inventory of my own two blogs, and that list is short on purpose.
Disclosure: the US, the UK and Spain each have a say
Most readers here are in the US or the UK, and I write from Spain, so three sets of rules apply the day I add a paid link.
United States. The FTC’s endorsement guides FAQ tells affiliates to disclose the relationship “clearly and conspicuously on your site”, and adds: “The closer the disclosure is to your recommendation, the better.” The shortest acceptable version: “‘Paid link’ right next to an affiliate link should be an adequate disclosure of the nature of the link.” And the reverse case: if you link to a retailer as a convenience and aren’t paid, “Then there isn’t any connection you need to disclose.” Amazon separately requires the sentence “As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.”
United Kingdom. The ASA’s guidance on online affiliate marketing (updated 22 March 2023) applies CAP Code rules 2.1 and 2.3: marketing must be obviously identifiable and make its commercial intent clear. Its recommended label is “Ad”, and it reports that the word “affiliate” was not widely understood by consumers in its research, so “affiliate link” alone may not do the job. An article wholly about affiliate-linked products should make that clear before anyone engages with it, for example with “Ad” in the title.
Spain. Article 20.1 of the LSSI, Spain’s e-commerce law, says electronic commercial communications “deberán ser claramente identificables como tales”: they must be clearly identifiable as such (consolidated text in the BOE).
Separately, Google asks for affiliate links to carry rel="sponsored", with nofollow also accepted (qualifying outbound links). That governs how crawlers treat the link, not what the reader is told.
So the day a programme approves me, and not before, that link gets rel="sponsored nofollow" and, right next to it, a label British and American readers would both understand, along the lines of “Paid link: I earn a commission if you buy”, plus Amazon’s sentence if it is an Amazon link. An article built mainly around paid links says so at the top. The old version of this site put a grey “Affiliate link” label on 29 links that paid nothing at all: the wrong word for British readers and untrue for everyone.
Where an AI assistant helps here, and the summary that would have misled me
For this guide I had an AI assistant pull clauses out of long policy pages and line them up, which it does well. It also produced the most useful warning of the exercise. Asked for the three-sales rule from Amazon’s operating agreement, it said the agreement didn’t address it. Accurate: the rule is on a help page. Had I stopped there, the most important constraint in this guide would be missing and the summary would still have looked complete. A summary tells you what is on the page you gave it, and nothing about the page you should have given it.
Nor could it tell me whether Amazon’s required sentence also satisfies the FTC, because the FTC’s FAQ doesn’t address that wording. I won’t pretend it does; I would use both. And I don’t let a model choose what to recommend, imply I have used a product, or invent the small detail that makes a review sound lived-in. How I keep drafts honest generally is in my process for writing with AI without publishing filler.
One more thing the old site got wrong: it called an email list “your most reliable affiliate income”. There is no newsletter here, the old footer form never worked, and Amazon’s policy allows its links in email only “provided, that such communications are solicited”. Other programmes set their own rules.
Why I’m not in a programme yet
Two reasons, and neither is modesty. The first is the Amazon sequence: this blog is being cut from a hundred posts to around twenty-five, most survivors are still being rewritten, and nothing here yet would produce three sales within six months of applying. An application I can’t back up would burn an Associates ID that Amazon says it can’t reinstate.
The second is that the list of things I can recommend from use is short: shared hosting and a VPS at Hostinger, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, and the AI assistant I build with. The last time this site pretended to have a longer list, it crowned tools I had never opened. When a programme behind something on that short list fits an article I would write anyway, I’ll apply to that one, and the article will say so next to the link.
For how affiliate links sit alongside ads and your own products, see how a small blog actually makes money. For what went wrong here, with the counts, see the affiliate mistakes I made on this blog.