Minding Our Business: How We Use Affiliate Links
We believe that companies should be as transparent as possible about their financial dealings. At home/school/life, we’ve tried hard to find ways of supporting the magazine that we feel good about, and we will never trade editorial coverage for money, period. We know we're pretty picky about things like advertisers and product reviews, but we're comfortable with that. We pay our writers, buy photos, and keep our website up and running in a few different ways. We don’t make a lot of money from affiliate links, but because they can be so controversial, we want to be upfront about our affiliate links and how we use them. You probably know that affiliate links work a lot like referral fees: If you click on a book recommendation on our blog and buy the book through Amazon, a small percentage (usually less than $1) from your purchase goes into the home/school/life account. Do you have to click on the links? Nope — see below — we try to give you enough info so that you can Google the product yourself if you prefer not to support the magazine this way. But we sure do appreciate it when you do use them.
In the coming months, you’ll see a few more affiliate links in posts — and you’ll know that you’re seeing them because there will be a note at the end of every post that contains them, letting you know that there are affiliate links in that post. Why would we start including affiliate links when we haven’t used them much in the past? Well, we’d like to be able to hire another full-time writer for the magazine and possibly start moving toward putting out a print edition, and we’re hoping that these kinds of links might help move us closer toward that goal.
Here’s what we promise about affiliate links:
- We only support affiliate links with companies that we have personal, positive experience with.
- Any time we use an affiliate link in the post, we will let you know that post contains affiliate links. (If you aren’t sure, hover over the link and look for an amazon at the beginning — those are giveaways that the link is an affiliate link.)
Here’s what we won’t do:
- Give vague information that forces you to click on an affiliate link if you want to see what we’re talking about. (We’ll say “Possession may be Amy’s all-time favorite book” or "this grass green bulky (superwash, yay!) yarn" never a sneaky “This may be Amy’s all-time favorite book" or "this yarn." We're not going to force you to click on an affiliate link to follow the conversation.
- Not link to something if we can’t use an affiliate link. We love these grammar mugs, the podcast On Being, and pretty much every knitting pattern Martina Behm has managed to come up with, and we're going to talk about them even though none of them are home/school/life affiliates. — We’ll only use affiliate links in situations where they happen to exist for something we’re writing about anyway.
Here’s who our affiliates are:
(We’ll update this list if we add or drop affiliates in the future.)
- Amazon :: This one is probably pretty obvious, but we’re big fans of the variety of books and movies available on Amazon.com. And, you may have noticed, we recommend a lot of books.