Category: Website Planning

One of the worst situations you can find yourself in as a website owner is to be on the wrong side of the law.

Online laws, regulations, and guidelines were designed to protect consumers and apply to any person who markets, sells or promotes goods and services online. Every website owner risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about legal requirements will not prevent you from being slapped with a legal notice.

New laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you plan to promote anything on your site for material gain, you need to follow certain disclosure guidelines to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection agencies, such as the Better Business Bureau, also known as BBB. Do a search online for “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.

(Better Business Bureau)

The introduction of these laws affect several business activities, including:

• Any type of advertising, including contextual advertising
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Product Creators
• Bloggers
• etc.

Without certain legal pages on your website (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank or JVZoo won’t allow you to sell digital products, PayPal could shut down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook will disapprove your applications, and you won’t be accepted into most advertising and online marketing networks.

You may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to litigation.

The purpose of this article is to help make you aware that your website are required to comply with certain legalities according to laws that govern online business practices, the importance of being compliant with the terms of service of external providers whose services or products you may be offering online, and that there are easy solutions that can help your site become fully compliant, such as the plugins listed further below.

Does Your Site Comply With All Legal Requirements?

Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we cannot provide legal advice. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with all laws in your country or region.

Why Making Your Website Compliant Is Important

Consider what the implications to your business would be in the following scenarios:

• Someone has a heart attack after using your online fitness program.
• The skin care products you promote as an affiliate gives someone who purchases from your link an adverse reaction.
• You’ve told subscribers that you will not sell their information, but you have not defined what you plan to do with the information you have collected.
• Someone steals your content and puts it up on their website.
• There is no statement on your website making your site users aware that you are an affiliate for the product you’re endorsing and could get paid a financial benefit if they purchase through your affiliate link.
• You don’t spell out the terms and conditions of your return policies.
• Someone claims your testimonials are all fake and decides to sue you as a result.
• You haven’t disclosed in a product review that you were given a free copy of the product.
• Your site contains adult-related information and you didn’t take sufficient measures to keep underage children from accessing it.

Consider too these actual case studies of costly compliance breaches:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would have to give up personal information to complete an offer they were promoting. Cost = $390,000.
• A social networking app developer copped a massive $800,000 fine for collecting personal information from mobile device address books without the owners’ knowledge and consent – including storing children’s private information.
• Facebook’s Terms Of Service prohibits users from scraping Users IDs. Many marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
• An independent 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred randomly-chosen websites, more than 90% had infringed at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were in breach of at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% had breached at least 3 of Google’s policies. Although the website owners could technically be sued by Google, more than likely what could happen, is that they would be issued cautions or lose access to the Google program they had infringed, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).

Can you see how easy it is to risk being targeted for litigation?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• PPA (Pay Per Action) Marketer
• Multilevel Marketer
• Affiliate Promoter
• AdSense Publisher
• Product Marketer
• Amazon Associate
• e-Commerce Store Owner
• Adult Content Publisher
• Provider Of Freelance, Coaching Or Consulting Services
• Online Seller Of Any Product Or Service

It’s vitally important to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your online business is fully compliant with the law.

Compliance With 3rd-Party Services - ToS, Policies, etc.

Compliance with 3rd-party companies terms and policies is important.

You must let your site users know that your website complies with all necessary laws and professional guidelines. This not only improves trust and confidence in your site, it’s also a requirement of most companies you will do business with online.

For example:

Google requires you to display legal information when using their products or features. This includes using services such as Google Analytics …

(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)

Earning revenue online with your WordPress site using Google AdSense advertising …

(Google AdSense online advertising policy requirements)

Or promoting your products using Google AdWords …

(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)

If you plan to sell information-based products with merchants like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant sites, you will need to add a number of legal pages before your products can be approved for sale …

(Policy requirements for selling via ClickBank)

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires you to add clear disclaimers and statements to visitors, especially if you plan to use testimonials or product endorsements …

(Federal Trade Commission – consumer policies and regulations)

New FTC Regulations Require Your Site To Comply

FTC regulations governing the conduct of businesses online were introduced in March 2012. Search online and you will see that many sites are still unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As has already been the case, this often ends up with the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting companies in an effort to get other businesses to comply.

If you plan to do any kind of money-making activity online, therefore, it’s best not to take any chances. Even if your business does not operate in the U.S. we strongly recommend protecting your business interests by ensuring that your website is compliant with all FTC guidelines and regulations.

Various business resources provide guidelines for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help your business meet FTC requirements. See the resources section at the end of this article for more information …

(Structuring your disclaimers and disclosures correctly is important to avoid running foul of the law)

Social Media Apps Also Require Compliance

If you are planning to create applications that integrate with your site, social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and many others will require you to provide information about various legal pages …

(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)

• If you are not sure whether you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of service providers like Google, Facebook, etc., then assume that you most probably are.
• If you plan to promote products or services on your site as an affiliate marketer, or generate revenue with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon advertising, or using Google AdWords pay-per-click ads to drive visitors to your pages, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you need to provide on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements - don’t risk having your accounts suspended.
• If you have ever wondered whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to avoid becoming a litigation magnet.

(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party services require you to comply with their terms of use)

Basic Legal Pages You Should Add To Your Site

If your web site lacks in aspects of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.

At its most basic, adding the following compliance pages to your website will help your site stay out of trouble with most consumer protection authorities and 3rd-party providers, and help to avoid potential legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “cease and desist” notices):

• About Us Page
• Contact Page
• Privacy Statement
• Terms Of Use
• Disclaimers
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance

In addition to the pages above, you may want to look into including one or more of these pages:

• Affiliate Agreement (e.g. if you provide an affiliate program)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Compensation Disclosure
• External Links Policy
• Health Disclaimers (if your website provides general content about health or medical areas)
• Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
• Audio/Video Terms Of Use (if you provide users with access to media on your site)

Types Of Disclosure Pages

Adding the right web content disclosure information is important. For example:

• No Material Connection – Disclosure that informs your readers that you’re not receiving any type of compensation for writing the content.
• Affiliate Links – Informs visitors that you will derive some form of financial or similar type of benefit if they buy through one of your affiliate links.
• Review/Sample Copy – Disclosure that informs your readers that you have received a review or sample copy of the product or service you’re reviewing or writing about by the author or developer.
• Sponsored Post – Disclosure that lets your readers know that you were compensated in some way to write the article.
• Third Party Advertising – Lets readers know that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to comply with the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring online publishers to show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.

How To Add Compliance Pages To Your WordPress Site

Ideally, you will have your lawyer prepare the content of your legal documents. Once you have this, there are several ways to include them in your website.

Upload Legal Pages To Your Site

If someone prepares the legal verbiage for you as standard web pages (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your web server, or have someone upload them for you.

We recommend creating a legal directory on your server and uploading your legal pages to this folder (e.g. using FTP) …

(Create a ‘legals’ folder on your web server and upload pages using FTP)

You can then easily add a link to your pages in WordPress using a custom WordPress menu …

(WordPress Menu)

Where To Display Legal Web Pages On Your Site

Make sure that your legal pages are fully up-to-date and clearly accessible to your visitors. You can insert links to your legal pages into your WordPress sidebar (or place them in the footer of your website or blog) so that visitors have access to legal information from every page …

(Display links to legal pages to visitors on all of your website’s pages)

We have created a detailed tutorial on adding links to pages on your sidebar menu using widgets here:

• How To Add Widgets To The WordPress Sidebar

Store-Bought Legal Templates

You can easily find downloadable attorney-drafted forms and agreements by searching online, or by going to websites like the ones listed below:

Find Legal Forms

(FindLegalForms.com)

More information:

• Find Legal Forms

Another option is to download a package of cut & paste legal templates created by attorney Scott Talbert to protect businesses online …

Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages

(Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages – Website Legal Pages)

These legal templates were created by an attorney and feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with simple search and replace to add your own business name and URL, then pasted into your web pages.

The legal forms included in Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Templates include:

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer: multi-discipline professional disclaimers
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance
• Privacy Policy: Google, DoubleClick DART, etc.
• Terms of Service & Conditions of Use: includes inter- & intra-page redundancy, Contra Proferentem provision, reservation of rights, and exclusive social media admonition.

You can either create a new page on your website for every legal form you want added to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your pages and publish or upload the pages to your server as previously described.

To learn more, go here:

• Website Legal Pages

Legal Pages – Plugins

As well as using legal templates, another option for adding legal pages to your website is to use WordPress plugins.

Here are some legal WordPress plugins worth looking into:

WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress

(WP Legal Pages)

If manually setting up legal pages for your site seems too time-consuming for you, then consider installing WordPress Legal Pages …

This is not a free plugin, but it’s a very affordable and well-supported premium plugin that will help make the task of creating and implementing legal pages on your website much easier and save you many headaches.

Here are just some of the benefits of using the WordPress Legal Pages plugin:

• Pre-written Templates – Over 20 built-in legal page templates created by professional lawyers.
• Very Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of your basic legal pages in around 3 minutes with just a few mouse clicks.
• Fully Customizable Pages – The plugin includes fully customizable and easy to edit legal form templates (e.g. Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
• Editable Pages – Full WYSIWYG editor lets you edit all legal pages just like any WP page.
• Shortcodes – You can add shortcodes to any of your website or blog pages and the information will then be automatically inserted into your content when you publish.
• Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like every other page on your website.
• Forced Options – Force page or post lockdown. When a user agrees to the terms, the page unlocks, giving them access.
• Additional Features – New plugin features get added when new versions are released.

When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a menu item will appear in your main dashboard menu …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Legal Pages Menu)

This allows you to create, edit and view your legal pages from the admin area …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Settings Screen)

The plugin gives you the option to create legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites with products, review websites, Amazon sites, etc …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Create different legal page types)

You can also choose from several pre-written legal templates …

(WordPress Legal Pages – Legal Templates)

Legal page templates include:

• Terms of Use (Users are forced to agree to Terms and Conditions before using site)
• Linking Policy
• External Links Policy
• Terms and Conditions
• Refund Policy
• Affiliate Disclosure
• Privacy Policy
• Affiliate Agreement
• Facebook Privacy Policy
• Earnings Disclaimer
• Antispam Policy
• DoubleClick DART Cookies Policy
• Disclaimer Template
• FTC Disclosure Statement Template
• Medical Disclaimer Template
• Testimonials Disclosure – As per FTC guidelines
• Amazon Affiliate Disclosure Template
• DMCA Policy Template
• California Privacy Rights Policy Template
• Digital Goods Refund Policy Template
• COPPA – Children’s Online Privacy Policy Template
• Blog Comments Policy Template
• Newsletter Subscription Policy and Disclaimer Template
• FTC Disclaimer Widget

Go here to learn more about using this plugin:

• WP Legal Pages Plugin

Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

total website compliance & disclaimer solution …

Go here to learn more about the plugin:

• Compliance Bar – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress

Legal Suite Pro Plugin

(Legal Suite Pro Plugin For WordPress)

Legal Suite Pro Plugin lets you easily install professionally-written legal pages such as:

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance
• Privacy Policy
• Social Media Disclosure
• Medical Disclaimer
• Terms of Use
• Earnings Disclaimer

(Legal Suite Pro For WordPress – Professionally-written legal forms)

Additionally:

• Drag & Drop FTC Disclaimer Widget: Add an FTC Disclaimer to any WordPress sidebar or widget area.
• Customizable EU Cookie Compliance Bar: Display an EU cookie compliance bar if you are getting traffic from the EU and your sites use cookies.

With just one-click you can install almost all of the legal pages your site needs and these professionally written legal pages can be created in your theme and/or as a standalone page outside of your theme.

The plugin developers have packaged high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers into a plugin that can be installed quickly on any WordPress site. Your legal pages can be installed and set up on your site in less than one minute and the license allows you to install and use this plugin on all of your websites.

For more details, go here:

• Legal Suite Pro

If using the services of legal experts to create your legal pages is out of your budget, consider implementing some basic kind of legal protection on your site until you can afford professional assistance from a solicitor.

We want your website to be protected!

Download the Legal Pages Generator tool below (for FREE!), or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using ready-made legal documentation, or plugins - see section below.

(Legal Pages Generator Software)

Legal Pages Generator allows you to quickly generate basic legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.

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As stated earlier, if you are making money online, it’s important that your site complies with government laws and regulations and the terms of service and guidelines provided by third-party sites that you may decide to promote or advertise online. Your internet presence must comply with various laws and regulatory guidelines, many of which you may not be aware of.

Being non-compliant puts you at risk of suffering both financial losses and the loss of your reputation. Why risk your money and reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?

Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we do not offer legal advice here. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website fully complies with all legal requirements concerning your specific business.

Additional Legal Information

Here is a time-saving list of websites we recommend you visit to better understand what may be required of your site to remain compliant and meet its legal obligations:

• Federal Trade Commission Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
• Federal Trade Commission Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
• FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
• Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program
• Dot Com Disclosures: Information About Online Advertising
• Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act
• CAN-SPAM Act Guide
• Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule
• FTC Regulatory Review Web Page
• FTC Rules and Guides Currently Under Review
• The Department of Commerce Internet Policy Task Force – Commercial Data Privacy and Innovation in the Internet Economy: A Dynamic Policy Framework
• FTC Staff Report: Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising
• FTC Final Guides Governing Endorsements and Testimonials
• United States Patent and Trademark Office
• US Copyright Office

See Also …

• Analytics Help – Policy requirements for Google Analytics Advertising Features
• Google AdSense Program Policies Explained
• Google AdSense Help – Required Content
• Google AdWords – Information Collection And Use
• AdWords Help – What to include in your privacy policy for remarketing
• ClickBank – Creating Your First Product
• Facebook Platform Policies

Hopefully, this article has helped you understand the importance of having a compliant website. Use the information presented above to quickly add legal pages to your WordPress website or blog using simple and inexpensive solutions.

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