There is a particular kind of email that arrives when your blog has been alive long enough to look like a place where things happen. It is polite, it is brief, and it contains the word “collaboration” in a way that suggests neither of you will be doing any actual collaborating. The offer is usually a product you have never used, a fee that is not nothing, and a deadline that is sooner than you would like.

What follows is the rubric I use now. It is not a growth strategy. It is a way to make a decision in about ten minutes and then get back to writing.

The two constraints that are not negotiable

Before anything else, there are two things the U.S. Federal Trade Commission says plainly, and they are worth reading in the original rather than in paraphrase. The first is about disclosure. If you endorse a product and you have a material connection to the brand — which includes being paid, or being given free or discounted products — your endorsement message should make that relationship obvious. The FTC’s guidance for social media influencers puts it this way: “If you endorse a product through social media, your endorsement message should make it obvious when you have a relationship (‘material connection’) with the brand.” A material connection includes “a personal, family, or employment relationship or a financial relationship – such as the brand paying you or giving you free or discounted products or services.”

The second constraint is about honesty, and it is the one people skip past. The same FTC guidance says: “You can’t talk about your experience with a product you haven’t tried. If you’re paid to talk about a product and thought it was terrible, you can’t say it’s terrific.” It also says you cannot make up claims that would require proof the advertiser does not have — the example given is scientific proof that a product can treat a health condition.

Those two constraints are the floor. They are not the whole rubric, but they are the part where the answer is not up to you.

What “clear and prominent” actually means in a blog post

The FTC is specific about placement in a way that matters for a blog. Disclosures should be placed so they are hard to miss, and they should sit with the endorsement message itself. The guidance notes that disclosures are likely to be missed if they appear only on an about page, at the end of a post, or anywhere that requires a click to see.

This is where a lot of small-blog sponsorship posts quietly fail. The disclosure goes in the footer, or in a line at the bottom that says something like “this post contains affiliate links.” The reader who encounters the recommendation at the top of the post has already formed an impression before reaching the note. The FTC’s native advertising guide makes the underlying principle explicit: “A basic truth-in-advertising principle is that it’s deceptive to mislead consumers about the commercial nature of content.” And: “If a disclosure is necessary to prevent deception, the disclosure must be clear and prominent.”

For a blog post, that means the disclosure belongs near the top, in the same visual register as the recommendation itself. Not in a smaller font. Not in a color that blends into the background. Not after the reader has already decided whether to trust you.

The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, which regulates a different market but arrives at a similar place, is even more direct about the failure mode. Its guidance on affiliate marketing says that where content wholly concerns affiliate-linked products, the commercial nature should be clear before the reader engages with it, and that a straightforward way to do this is an identifier such as “Ad” in the title. It also says a disclaimer at the bottom of a post is unlikely to be sufficient, because the links and the claims connected to them may not be obviously identifiable as advertising at the moment the reader encounters them. A generic disclaimer that the author “may” receive a commission is unlikely to be acceptable, particularly where the specific affiliate content has not been highlighted.

So the first question in the rubric is not “can I disclose this?” It is “would the disclosure be hard to miss if I placed it where it needs to go?” If the answer is no — if the disclosure would have to be buried to keep the post feeling natural — the offer has already failed.

The rubric, as a set of questions

I run through these in order. The first two are legal constraints. The rest are craft constraints, which is to say they are about whether the post would be worth reading.

1. Would the disclosure be hard to miss in the post itself? Not on the about page. Not in the footer. In the post, near the top, in plain language. If the answer is no, stop here.

2. Have I used the product long enough to say something true about it? The FTC’s constraint is that you cannot talk about your experience with a product you have not tried. But “tried” is a low bar. A single afternoon with a product is enough to have an experience; it is rarely enough to have a useful one. The question I actually ask is whether I could describe a specific moment of using it, including a moment where it did not work the way I expected. If I cannot, I do not have a recommendation. I have a description.

3. Does the offer require claims I cannot support? This is the one that filters out most of the bad offers before they reach the writing stage. If the brief asks me to describe a product as clinically proven, or to imply it solves a problem it has not been tested on, or to repeat a claim the advertiser cannot substantiate, the answer is no regardless of the fee. The FTC guidance is clear that you cannot make up claims that would require proof the advertiser does not have. But the practical version is simpler: if I would have to hedge every sentence, the post is not worth writing.

4. Would I write this post if there were no fee? This is not a purity test. It is a test of whether the post has a reason to exist beyond the sponsorship. If the only reason the post would appear on the blog is that someone paid for it, the reader can tell. They may not be able to articulate why, but they can tell.

5. Does the offer require me to change how the blog works? Some offers come with expectations about posting frequency, format, or tone that would require the blog to become a different blog. A single sponsored post that fits the existing rhythm is one thing. A sponsorship that requires a new content category, a new voice, or a new publishing schedule is a different thing. The second kind is almost never worth it at small scale, because the cost is not the post. The cost is the disruption to the thing that made the blog worth reading.

Why a small audience changes the arithmetic

At a certain scale, a sponsorship is a transaction between a brand and a media property. The reader knows they are reading a media property. The disclosure is a formality, and the relationship between writer and reader is mediated by the fact that both parties understand the arrangement.

At a small scale, the relationship is different. The reader is not reading a media property. They are reading a person, or at least the sustained performance of one. The trust that makes the blog worth reading is not distributed across a large audience in a way that can absorb a bad recommendation. It is concentrated. A single post that reads as unearned spends something that took years to accumulate, and the reader who feels it does not write a complaint. They just stop coming back, quietly, in a way you will not notice for months.

This is why the disclosure is not overhead on top of the recommendation. It is part of the recommendation’s credibility. A reader who trusts writing at this scale is trusting a person. A disclosure that reads as boilerplate — a line of small print that exists to satisfy a rule — costs more proportionally than it would at scale, because it signals that the writer is thinking about the rule rather than the reader.

The same logic applies to the recommendation itself. A sponsored post that reads as a description of a product the writer has not really used is not a neutral event. It is a withdrawal from an account that only has so much in it.

A hypothetical, clearly labeled as such

I do not have a specific declined offer I can point to with a brand name and a date, because I did not keep records of the ones I turned down, and I am not going to invent one. But I can describe the shape of the offers that fail the rubric, as a composite rather than a case record.

Suppose a company that sells a sleep supplement emails about a sponsored post. The fee is modest but real. The brief asks for a personal account of how the product improved the writer’s sleep, with a link to the product page and a discount code for readers. The deadline is two weeks out.

Run the rubric. The disclosure could be placed clearly, so question one passes. Question two fails immediately: I have not used the product, and two weeks is not enough time to have a useful experience with a sleep supplement even if I started that day. Question three fails as well: the brief asks for a claim about improved sleep, which is a health claim, and the FTC guidance specifically names scientific proof of treating a health condition as the kind of claim an advertiser cannot simply assert. Question four fails: I would not write this post without the fee. Question five is borderline, but it does not matter, because the earlier questions have already decided it.

The whole assessment takes about four minutes. The reply takes two. The rest of the morning is still available for the writing that the blog actually runs on.

What declining is not

Declining a sponsorship is not a statement about the brand. It is not a moral judgment about sponsorship in general. It is not a claim that small blogs should not take money. It is a craft decision, made quickly, in service of the thing that makes the blog worth reading.

The reason to have a rubric is not to feel good about saying no. It is to make saying no fast and non-dramatic, so that the decision does not consume the writing time it is meant to protect. A rubric that takes an hour to apply is not a rubric. It is a second job.

There is also a version of this that applies to the offers you accept. The same questions, run in the other direction, tell you whether a sponsorship is worth doing. If the disclosure can be clear, if you have used the product long enough to say something true, if the claims are supportable, if you would write the post anyway, and if the offer does not require the blog to become a different blog — then the answer is probably yes, and the fee is a reasonable exchange for work you were going to do.

The rubric is not a wall. It is a filter. Most things should pass through it. The ones that do not were never going to be good posts.

One thing to try this week

Write the five questions down somewhere you will see them the next time an offer arrives. Not as a policy document. As a note to yourself, in your own words, about what you would need to be true in order to write the post honestly.

The next time the email comes — and it will — you will have already made the decision. The only thing left is to send the reply and get back to work.

FAQ

Does the FTC guidance apply to a blog with a small audience? The guidance does not set a minimum audience size. It applies to endorsements, and the question is whether there is a material connection between the endorser and the brand. A blog with a small audience is still a blog making recommendations to readers.

What counts as a material connection? The FTC describes it as including a personal, family, or employment relationship, or a financial relationship such as being paid or receiving free or discounted products or services. If you received something of value in connection with mentioning a product, that is the relevant fact.

Where should the disclosure go in a blog post? The FTC says it should be hard to miss and placed with the endorsement message itself, not only on a profile page, at the end of the post, or behind a click. For a blog post, that generally means near the top, in the same visual register as the recommendation.

Is a footer disclaimer enough? The FTC guidance suggests disclosures are likely to be missed if they appear only at the end of posts. The ASA’s guidance on affiliate marketing is more explicit for its market, saying a disclaimer at the bottom of a post is unlikely to be sufficient because the reader may not see it at the moment they encounter the relevant content.

Can I accept a free product and write about it without disclosing? No. The FTC guidance says to disclose the relationship if you got anything of value to mention a product, and to make a disclosure even if you were not asked to mention that product.

What if I tried the product and did not like it? The FTC guidance is direct: if you are paid to talk about a product and thought it was terrible, you cannot say it is terrific. The honest version of the post is the one where you say what you actually found, which may mean the sponsorship is not worth accepting in the first place.

Do I need to keep records of offers I decline? There is no general requirement to keep records of declined offers. The practical reason to keep a short note is for your own pattern recognition — to see which kinds of offers keep arriving and whether your rubric is filtering them efficiently.