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SideIncomeHQ
Disclosure policy

Our disclosure policy

Plain English: if we are paid, or could earn a commission, we tell you. Every time.

An affiliate link should never change a verdict. If it does, the review was the product all along.

SideIncomeHQ editorial
Why this matters

Check any review site for the tools it recommends against. A publisher that never says 'don't buy this' is not reviewing anything.

Affiliate links

Some links on SideIncomeHQ are affiliate links. If you click one and buy, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

This never changes which products we recommend or what we say about them. Affiliate links use rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow".

Sponsored content

We accept paid placements. Any sponsored article is clearly labelled as sponsored at the top of the page, and its outbound advertiser links use rel="sponsored". We retain editorial control and will not publish anything misleading.

What we turn down

A disclosure policy is only worth reading if something is actually being refused, so here is the list. We decline undisclosed paid links at any price, because an unlabelled link is a liability for the buyer as much as a dishonesty toward the reader.

We decline casino, adult and payday content, which is off-topic for a side-income site and helps nobody. We decline AI-spun rewrites of pages that already rank.

And we decline anything that promises our readers guaranteed income, which is the single claim this entire site exists to argue against. None of those are pricing conversations.

How commission affects our recommendations

It does not change a verdict, and there is a way to check that rather than take our word for it. Look at how often we recommend against a product, and look at how many of our recommendations earn us nothing at all.

Several of the tools we recommend most strongly, Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, Google Trends, Keyword Planner, Bing Webmaster Tools, pay no commission to anybody. Every tool review on this site also carries a "skip it if" section naming the reader who should not buy it.

A review site that never tells you not to buy something is not reviewing anything.

What we cannot promise

Prices, free-tier limits and feature sets in this category change several times a year, and we are not notified when they do. Every tool page carries the date we last checked it; use that date before you use the content.

We also hold no first-party income claims of our own: where this site cites results, they belong to a named outside expert with a source link you can open, not to us.

If you find something on this site that is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did.

Why we do this

Beyond being the right thing to do, it is required. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission's endorsement guides require clear disclosure of material connections between a publisher and the products it promotes. We follow those guides.

Questions

Email [email protected] and we will answer. The two guides where this matters most are making money from home and the online-business guide: both name paid tools, and both carry this policy.

Source: FTC Endorsement Guides

We recommend free tools we earn nothing from more often than paid ones we do.

SideIncomeHQ editorial
Why this matters

That is the easiest signal to verify here: count how many of our recommendations carry no commission at all.

A disclosure buried in a footer does not meet the standard

Where the disclosure sits decides whether it counts. The endorsement guides ask for disclosures a reader cannot miss: with the endorsement, in plain words, and not relegated to a separate page or a block of small print that has to be sought out.

That converts a vague duty into something a publisher can check on their own page. Read the page as a stranger, find the point where a recommendation is made, and see whether the relationship is visible from there without scrolling or clicking.

What this does not say: The guides describe principles rather than a pixel-level specification, so judgement about a specific layout is still required.

FTC's Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking (2026-09-05)

Sources

  1. FTC's Endorsement Guides: What People Are AskingFederal Trade Commissionread 2026-09-05

Want your tool or offer in front of this audience?

We take a small number of sponsored posts and advertising placements each month, every one of them labelled. Tell us what you are promoting and we reply within two business days with rates and the next open slot. Everything we publish sits on SideIncomeHQ, and the archive is open before you decide.

Enquire about a sponsored post

Rates and formats come back with the reply. Every placement is labelled.

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