How to promote ClickBank and BuyGoods offers without paid ads

“How can I promote ClickBank products without using ads?” comes up on Quora and affiliate forums year after year. Most answers list platforms and stop there. What they leave out are the rules that actually close affiliate accounts: the networks' own terms, the FTC's disclosure and claims rules, and each platform's policy on affiliate links. This guide covers the channels and the rules together.

The network rules to read before you post anything

Each network has terms that apply whichever channel you use, and breaking them can cost you your commissions:

The penalties are real. ClickBank's client contract lets it suspend funds, adjust commissions and close accounts, and BuyGoods reserves the right to suspend or terminate an account immediately for any violation. Vendors add rules of their own: one Digistore24 supplement vendor bans affiliates from bidding on its brand and product names and from impersonating the brand, and requires paid traffic to pass through the affiliate's own page first. Read the affiliate page of every offer before you promote it.

The channels, compared

1. A review site on your own domain

The slowest channel, and the only one you fully own. In Ahrefs' latest study, only 1.74% of newly published pages reached the top 10 within a year, and ClickBank's own affiliate blog tells affiliates to expect at least six months.

Google's guidance on reviews describes what it wants: evidence of your own experience, such as photos, audio or links, benefits and drawbacks based on your own research, and links to more than one seller. Its spam policies name the opposite: “thin affiliation”, meaning reviews “copied directly from the original merchant without any original content or added value”, and using generative AI to publish many pages that add nothing for users. Being an affiliate is not the problem; Google says “not every site that participates in an affiliate program is a thin affiliate”.

2. YouTube reviews

YouTube says affiliate content doesn't violate its Terms of Use, but its spam policies still apply to channels built around affiliate links, and 3 strikes within 90 days can end a channel. Show the product and what you did with it: under the FTC's Endorsement Guides, if you say you use a product, you must actually have used it. Disclose the affiliate link both in the video and in the description near the links.

3. An email list

Your email list is the only audience you own outright. A common way to build it is a free guide or checklist offered on a simple landing page, sometimes called a bridge page, with the offer sent later. The rules are strict: ClickBank and BuyGoods require CAN-SPAM compliance, BuyGoods bans text-message promotion outright, and Digistore24 bans email to anyone who has not asked for it. Under the CAN-SPAM Act, both the company whose product is promoted and the sender can be held responsible, with penalties of up to $53,088 per email.

4. Pinterest

Pinterest's commercial content guidelines ask you to be open about which pins are commercial and where your links lead, and its community guidelines ban repetitive, deceptive or irrelevant content made to earn money. Abused link shorteners may be blocked, so link to a page you control. If you plan to boost pins later, note that Pinterest ads do not allow weight-loss supplements at all.

5. Medium

Medium's rules allow affiliate links in posts as long as you disclose them. They also count “posting content primarily to drive traffic to, or increase the search rankings of, an external site, product, or service” as spam, and Medium can remove content without notice. Write posts that are useful on their own, with the link as a footnote rather than the point.

6. Quora, Reddit and forums

Quora is blunt: “Affiliate links are not allowed”, and self-promotion is acceptable only as part of a sincere, helpful and direct answer. Reddit treats repeated or unsolicited promotion, automated or manual, as spam, and each community adds its own rules. Answer the question fully, link to your own helpful page only where the rules allow it, and never post the affiliate link where it is banned.

7. Press releases on news sites

If you have a budget but no ad account, a review-style press release is the fastest way to get a page about an offer onto a recognizable domain. In web searches for “Sugar Defender reviews”, “Mitolyn reviews” and “ProDentim reviews” in September 2026, the results included releases on GlobeNewswire, ACCESS Newswire and Yahoo Finance. The ones we opened carried affiliate disclosures, and one Yahoo Finance copy had already been removed.

Know three things before you pay. Acceptance varies: outlets screen supplement claims, and some refuse the category. Links should be nofollow or sponsored, because Google's link spam policy names “links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites”. And copies can disappear; why press releases disappear explains why and how to protect yourself. For the format itself, see how supplement brands rank for “[brand] reviews”.

8. Sponsored articles on news sites

A sponsored article gives you a full review-style page on a news or magazine site. It must be labeled: the FTC's native advertising guide gives “Ad” and “Sponsored Advertising Content” as labels readers understand, and links should carry rel="sponsored". Google's site reputation policy targets third-party pages published mainly to borrow a host's rankings, so check the section before you pay. Best parasite SEO sites compares paid and free hosts, and how to buy parasite SEO posts lists the checks.

9. Creators you pay or send product to

Paying a creator, or sending free product, is the fastest route to an audience that already trusts someone. Under the FTC's influencer guidance, the disclosure belongs in the video itself as well as the description, and under the Endorsement Guides both the advertiser and the endorser can be liable for misleading claims.

Supplement offers: what you can't copy from the sales page

Many ClickBank and BuyGoods offers are supplements, and their sales pages are not a safe source of claims. The FTC's health products guidance says all parties who take part directly in marketing a product must make sure its claims are truthful, and the FTC has sued affiliate marketers over supplement claims before.

• Don't call a supplement "safe" or "free from side-effects"; ClickBank's promotional guidelines rule out both.
• Don't repeat claims that the product treats, cures or prevents a disease, even if the vendor makes them. Our guide to promoting supplements without Meta ads shows the difference between a disease claim and a structure/function claim.
• Don't use testimonials to claim what the vendor itself can't prove; ClickBank prohibits it.
• Don't say you used the product unless you did. The FTC's Endorsement Guides require an endorser who claims to use a product to have been a genuine user when the endorsement was given.
• Don't publish fake reviews. The FTC's rule, in force since 21 October 2024, covers reviews by people who do not exist, including AI-generated ones.
• Don't build fake news sites. In 2011 the FTC went after affiliate "news" sites selling acai berry weight-loss products, saying almost everything about them was fake.

How to disclose affiliate links

The FTC's answers for affiliates put it simply: “The closer the disclosure is to your recommendation, the better.” Put a line at the top of the page and next to the links; a disclosure on your home page alone is not enough.

Use plain words. The FTC suggests wording like “I get commissions for purchases made through links in this post” and warns that consumers might not understand what “affiliate link” means on its own. In videos, say it in the video and repeat it in the description near the links. For search engines, add rel="sponsored" to affiliate links; it is the value Google defines for paid links.

What to avoid

• Cloaking: showing platforms or search engines a different page from the one buyers see. Google's spam policies call it "the practice of presenting different content to users and search engines with the intent to manipulate search rankings and mislead users."
• Bidding on the vendor's brand name if you later run ads. ClickBank bans bidding on third parties' trademarked terms, and vendors often ban it on their affiliate pages.
• Text-message promotion, and bought or scraped email lists.
• Posting affiliate links where they are banned, such as Quora, or hiding them behind shorteners.
• Publishing AI-written review pages at scale without adding value; Google's spam policies list that as scaled content abuse.
• Uploading promotional PDFs to government or university sites. They have shown up in supplement review searches; it is spam, not a channel.
• Promoting on Telegram without ClickBank's approval.

A realistic starting plan

1. Pick one offer and read its affiliate page, including the rules on brand bidding, email and traffic sources.
2. Use the product if you plan to review it; first-hand evidence is what both Google and the FTC expect.
3. Publish one honest review page on your own site, with your own photos, pros and cons, and a disclosure at the top.
4. Start collecting email addresses from day one with a useful free guide.
5. Choose one platform, such as YouTube or Pinterest, and post consistently under its rules.
6. When you have a budget, add a labeled press release or sponsored article to get a page on a known domain for the searches you care about.
7. Give every channel its own tracking link, so you know which one makes sales.