Affiliate Promotion Guidelines

• Say you earn a commission — clearly, up front, in the same medium as your recommendation.
• Only say things that are true today — check the price, the plan names, and the feature before you publish.
• Never promise an outcome — no income, revenue, time saved, or booking numbers, for you or for a customer.

Everything below is the detail. If a situation is not covered, ask us at hello@ottocal.com before you publish. We answer quickly, and it is much cheaper than a reversal.

Both the FTC's Endorsement Guides in the United States and Canadian competition and consumer-protection law require that a material connection — being paid a commission — is disclosed so an ordinary member of your audience notices and understands it before they act on your recommendation.

In practice:

• Same medium, same moment. A visual claim needs a visual disclosure. A spoken claim needs a spoken disclosure. Video that shows and says it needs both.
• Before the link, not after.Above the fold, before the “more” cut-off, before the call to action — not in a footer, a bio, a pinned comment, or a separate disclosure page.
• Plain words.“I earn a commission” works. “#affiliate”, “#collab”, “#sp”, “thanks to my partners”, and asterisks on their own do not.
• Readable. Adequate contrast, adequate size, on screen long enough to read. A one-second flash of small grey text is not a disclosure.
• Every instance. Each post, each video, each email, each ad, each landing page. Disclosing once does not cover a series.
• Platform tools are a supplement, not a substitute. A built-in “paid partnership” label is good; add your own words too.

Wording you can copy:

You can say, because it is true and checkable:

• What Ottocal does: booking and scheduling, client CRM, in-app video meetings, and AI-assisted recaps and follow-up in one workflow.
• Current plan names and prices, taken from the pricing page on the day you publish.
• Your own honest experience, if you have actually used the product. Say so if you have not.
• The referral offer: 20% off the first 3 months with your code.

Do not say:

• Any earnings, revenue, booking-volume, or time-saved figure presented as a promise or a typical result — including about your own affiliate commission.
• “Guaranteed”, “risk-free”, “instant”, “passive income”, or anything with the shape of a get-rich-quick offer.
• That Ottocal is HIPAA-compliant, a legal or tax service, a lender, a licensed advisor, or that it satisfies any professional licensing obligation.
• Features, integrations, certifications, or security claims we have not published. If you cannot link to it on our site, do not claim it.
• That an offer is expiring, limited, or exclusive when it is not.
• Anything comparing Ottocalto a named competitor that you cannot substantiate from that competitor's own current public materials.

You may run paid advertising on your own accounts, at your own cost, subject to these rules and the ad platform's own policies. If you advertise on Facebook or Instagram, read Meta's Advertising Standards first — money-making and business-opportunity offers are one of the most heavily reviewed categories there, and an affiliate ad that leads with earnings is the archetype of a rejected ad.

• No brand bidding.Do not bid on “Ottocal”, misspellings, or Ottocalplus a modifier (“ottocalpricing”, “ottocalreview”, “ottocalalternative”) in search, social, or app-store advertising. Add our brand terms as negative keywords.
• No direct linking. Meta requires your ad to point to a landing page you own with your own substantive content. Send traffic there, and put your referral link and disclosure on that page.
• Your ad must read as yours. Do not use our name as the advertiser, page name, or display URL, and do not build creative that a reasonable person would take for an official Ottocal ad.
• Disclose in the ad and on the landing page. The disclosure rules above apply to paid creative in full.
• No prohibited targeting.No targeting or copy that implies knowledge of a person's health, finances, immigration status, or other protected attribute — Meta's personal-attributes rule catches “struggling therapists” framing as readily as anything explicit.
• No audiences under 18, and no placement alongside content aimed at children.
• We do not reimburse ad spend, and approval as an affiliate is not approval of any particular ad.

• Message only people who gave you permission. Purchased, scraped, rented, and appended lists are prohibited outright.
• In the United States, CAN-SPAM requires accurate headers, a non-deceptive subject line, identification as an advertisement where applicable, a valid physical postal address, and a working unsubscribe honoured within 10 business days.
• In Canada, CASL requires express or properly-scoped implied consent before you send, plus sender identification and a working unsubscribe in every message. Consent cannot be buried in other terms, and penalties are severe. If you are unsure whether you have consent for a Canadian contact, do not send.
• SMS and voice have their own consent rules. Do not use either for affiliate promotion unless you know you comply.
• No unsolicited direct messages, connection-request pitches, comment spam, forum drops, or posting your code in threads where it was not asked for.
• Send from your own domain and your own sending infrastructure, never in a way that appears to originate from Ottocal.

• Write the name as “Ottocal” — one word, capital first letter.
• Use logos only as we supply them. No recolouring, stretching, outlining, animating, or recreating, and no lock-ups with your own mark.
• Never register a domain, subdomain, handle, app name, or business name containing our name or a confusing variation.
• Screenshots must show the current product. Replace or blur any real client data, including in demo footage.
• Describe yourself as an affiliate or referral partner — not a reseller, agent, distributor, or representative.

• Your link sets a first-party cookie on our domain. If the visitor creates a workspace within 60 days, the referral is yours.
• Attribution is last touch. If your reader later clicks another affiliate's link before signing up, that affiliate is credited.
• Cookies are fragile. Private browsing, cookie clearing, tracking protection, and signing up on a different device all break the trail. Your code does not depend on cookies at all, which is why we recommend giving people both.
• Do nothing to force or fake a click. Cookie stuffing, hidden iframes, auto-redirects, pop-unders, typosquatting, and extension injection void all affected commission and end the partnership.
• Do not add your own tracking parameters that rewrite or strip ours, and do not send traffic through a redirect chain that drops the referrer.

• Promoting without disclosing the commission. Every post, video, email, page, and ad that carries your link or code must say you earn a commission, in the same place and format as the recommendation itself.
• Self-referrals and referrals you control. You cannot earn on your own workspace, an alias, a household member, a company you own or control, or an account you signed up on someone else's behalf.
• Bidding on our brand terms. No paid search, paid social, or app-store ads on "Ottocal" or close variants, misspellings, or Ottocal plus a modifier, and no using our name as a display URL.
• Impersonating Ottocal. No sites, ads, profiles, emails, or support channels that read as official Ottocal properties, and no domains or handles containing our name.
• Earnings, income, or outcome guarantees. No promises about revenue, bookings, savings, or results — yours or a customer's — and no "guaranteed", "risk-free", or get-rich framing.
• Claims we haven't made. No inventing features, prices, certifications, integrations, security posture, or regulatory approvals. Pricing and features change; check the site before you publish.
• Unsolicited messaging. No purchased lists, scraped contacts, cold bulk email, unsolicited DMs, SMS blasts, or comment spam. CAN-SPAM and CASL apply to you, and consent has to be real.
• Paying people to sign up. No cashback, sweepstakes entries, giveaways, points, or other incentives in exchange for using your link or code unless we approve it in writing.
• Coupon and deal-site placement. Your code is for your own audience. Do not submit it to coupon aggregators, extensions, deal forums, or any site that intercepts checkout traffic you did not send.
• Forced clicks and tracking manipulation. No cookie stuffing, hidden iframes, auto-redirects, pop-unders, typosquatting, toolbar or extension injection, or any tracking the visitor didn't choose.
• Placement next to prohibited content. No promotion alongside adult content, hate speech, harassment, illegal goods, malware, pirated material, or content aimed at children under 13.
• Giving regulated advice in our name. Do not present Ottocal as legal, tax, medical, lending, or investment advice, or imply it satisfies a licensing, HIPAA, or lending compliance obligation.

We monitor brand-term ad placements, review referral patterns for self-referral and click fraud, and follow up on reports from customers. Depending on what we find we may ask you to correct a placement, void the affected commission, place payouts on hold while we look into it, or end participation.

A first honest mistake — a missing disclosure, a stale price — is normally a conversation and a fix. Self-referral, click manipulation, and impersonation are not, because they are deliberate.

Reversal, forfeiture, and offset mechanics are set out in the Affiliate Program Agreement. Commission on a reversed cycle returns to your allowance rather than being consumed, so a refund does not cost you a month of earning potential — only that month's $10.

Send anything you are unsure about to hello@ottocal.com with your referral handle. Pre-clearing a campaign is free; unwinding one is not.

Guidelines version 2026-08-19.