The end of the ugly affiliate link
5 min read The Mahhala Team Official
You spent the week on the essay. You cut the paragraph you liked best because it didn't earn its place. Then you got to the part where you recommend the things you actually use, and the writing stopped. In its place: a marketplace link with a tracking tail longer than the sentence it sits in, or a shopping widget in a font you didn't choose, dropping your reader onto a landing page with six pop-ups and a countdown timer.
We think taste extends to how you present a recommendation. The reader who trusted you through two thousand words is about to trust you with a purchase, and that is exactly the moment most newsletters hand them to the cheapest-looking thing on the page. So today we shipped something for writers: a board you build here that renders inside your post.
What a board embed is
A board on Mahhala is a collection: products from independent stores, saved by one person, in the order they chose. Ours look like this.
An embed puts a board like that inside your own page. Three steps:
- Open your public board and choose Embed from the ⋯ menu at the top right. (The board page in your dashboard has an Embed button too.)
- Pick Light or Dark. A live preview shows how it will look.
- Press Copy code and paste it into your site's HTML wherever you would put any other embed, like a YouTube video.
The code is an iframe plus a one-line script. Ghost, a self-hosted WordPress site, and any editor that accepts an HTML block take it as is. An editor that allows only its own embeds (Substack's does, as of this writing) will not, so there the board's share link does the job: one clean link under your words instead of six.
That is the whole mechanism. What it does for the reader is the point.
Why it reads as editorial instead of monetization
No account wall. Your readers browse the board and click through to the stores without signing up for anything. If you want to link them to the board itself, use its share link (the one the Embed dialog hands you); that page is open to anyone, read-only, no account needed.
No cookies. The embed sets no cookies on your reader's browser. We can't, actually: a frame on someone else's site is not somewhere our session can live, and we built it so it never tries. What we do record is in the Privacy Policy.
Your light, your dark. The board arrives in our type, Instrument Sans, in a light or dark flavor you pick to match the page around it. It does not bring a logo bar, a search box, or a sign-up prompt. It is a grid of the things you chose and nothing else.
One link per card, to the store. Each card is one link, and it opens the store's own site in a new tab. No cart on our side, no checkout, no detour through a deals page. The reader leaves your post for the store you were recommending, which is what a recommendation is supposed to do.
It keeps itself current. Add a product to the board here and the embed in last month's post picks it up. Remove one that sold out and it leaves. A board that holds more than twenty-four items shows the first twenty-four and a link to the rest. Make the board private or empty it and the embed shows a short notice rather than a broken frame.
The money
Here is the part writers usually have to squint at. If you already carry affiliate ids, from Impact, CJ, Rakuten, Awin, or ShareASale, a Shopify Collabs link a store gave you, or a Skimlinks account, add them under Settings → Affiliates. When a store on your board runs an affiliate program, a click on that card carries your id, and you earn the store's own commission at the store's own rate. A short disclosure line renders inside the embed whenever a board can earn, so your readers are told before they click.
We take no commission. Not a cut of yours, not a referral fee from the store. The arrangement is between you, the store, and the network you already belong to; we are the clean page it happens on. And if you carry no ids at all, the embed works exactly the same, minus the disclosure line.
One more door
We're young. Our catalog is independent stores, vetted by people before they are listed, and it is smaller than the marketplace you have been linking to. A board here is one more door for your readers, not a replacement for the links you already use. But it is the first one we know of that reads like you wrote it.
If you publish and recommend, build one board this week and paste it under something you are proud of. Browse what others have made on the collections page, and the Help Center has the embed steps written out, along with what we record and what we don't.