Category: Website Planning

As a business owner, the last thing you want is to learn the hard way that you are doing something illegal.

As the cybersphere continues to grow at an extraordinary rate and the rules of the game keep changing, it’s vitally important that you stay on top of what’s happening and ensure that your website or blog remains compliant, especially if your digital presence plays a significant part in your overall business strategy.

New laws introduced in 2014 to regulate how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you promote anything on your site for profit, then you need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory departments, such as the Better Business Bureau, also known as BBB. Search online “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.

(Better Business Bureau – Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)

These laws affect various business categories, including:

• Any kind of advertising, including Google AdSense
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketers
• Product Creation
• Blogging
• etc.

If your site does not display certain legal pages (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, financial disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank or JVZoo won’t allow you to sell digital products, PayPal may close down your account, Facebook will disapprove web applications, and you will not be allowed to participate in most advertising and affiliate marketing networks.

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

In this guide, we discuss why it’s important to have a legally compliant website and how to quickly add legal pages to your WordPress website or blog using inexpensive solutions.

Does Your Site Comply With The Law?

Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice. As stated previously, the purpose of this article is only to help make you aware that your website may be subject to certain legal requirements in accordance with federal, regional or local laws and regulations that govern business online and that compliance may be required with the terms of service of providers whose services or products you use on your website

Why It’s Important To Make Your Website Compliant

Consider what could happen to your business if any of these scenarios were to occur:

• A customer has a heart attack after they use your online workout program.
• The skin care lotion you sell as an affiliate marketer gives a number of users skin rashes.
• You’ve let your subscribers know that you won’t sell their information, but you haven’t described exactly what you’ll do with the details you’ve collected.
• Someone copies content from your site and puts it up on their own site.
• You haven’t advised your site users that you are an affiliate for the product you’re endorsing and may derive a sales commission if they purchase it.
• You don’t spell out the conditions of your return policies.
• Visitors claim the testimonials on your site are all fake and try to sue you.
• You didn’t disclose that you have received a free copy of a product in your review.
• Your website publishes adult information and you have not taken appropriate measures to restrict access by underage children.

Consider too these actual examples of costly compliance breaches:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would have to give up personal information (including credit card information to complete his offer. In addition to a significant $390,000 fine, he was also ordered to provide a copy of the judgement to everyone they do business with for the next 20 years — including employees.
• A social networking app developer was slapped with a massive $800,000 fine for collecting personal information without users’ knowledge and consent – including storing private information about children.
• Facebook’s Terms Of Service prohibits using software that scrapes Users IDs. Many marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
• An independent study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred randomly-chosen websites, more than 90% were breaking at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were in violation of at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were in violation of 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 with warnings or lose access entirely to the Google program whose policies 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 non-compliance?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• CPA Marketer
• MLM Networker
• Affiliate Promoter
• AdWords Advertiser
• Niche Publisher
• Amazon Affiliate
• e-Commerce Store Owner
• Publisher Of Adult Content
• Provider Of Freelance, Consulting Or Coaching Services
• Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online

It’s imperative to make sure that your website complies with all laws and regulations governing the use of your site, wherever you are located.

Compliance With Third-Party Companies - ToS, Policies, etc.

Compliance with third-party companies terms and policies is important.

You must let your site users know that your business complies will all legal requirements and professional guidelines. This not only improves trust and confidence in your website, it’s also required by most companies you do business with online.

For example:

Google requires you to display certain information when using many of their services or product features. This includes using services such as Google Analytics …

(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)

Monetizing your blog with Google AdSense ads …

(Google AdSense advertising policy requirements)

And even promoting your business via Google AdWords …

(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)

If you sell information products via places like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant networks, you are required to add legal pages before they will approve your products for selling via their networks …

(Policy requirements digital product vendors using ClickBank)

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires you to include clear disclaimers and policy statements to visitors, especially regarding the use of product testimonials or endorsements …

(Federal Trade Commission – consumer guidelines and regulations)

New FTC Regulations Require Your Site To Be Compliant

New FTC regulations governing how business is conducted 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 is already the case, this often ends up with the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting site owners 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 chances. Even if your business does not operate in the U.S. we strongly recommend protecting your business interests by ensuring that your website complies with FTC guidelines.

Various business resources provide guidelines for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help your site meet FTC requirements. See the additional 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 Applications - Don’t Forget These

If you plan to develop apps that integrate with your website, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many others will require you to provide information about your legal pages …

(Apps for social networks also require compliance)

• If you are unsure whether you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of companies like Google, Facebook, etc., then it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
• If you are considering promoting anything on your site via affiliate marketing, or generating revenue with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon ads, or use Google AdWords to drive visitors to your pages, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you need to include on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts shut down.
• If you have ever wondered if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to protect yourself and your business interests.

(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all 3rd-party services require you to comply with their terms of use and policies)

What Legal Information Pages Should You Add To Your Site To Be Legally Compliant?

If your website is lacking in aspects of compliance, then this section will help you.

At its most basic, adding the following compliance pages to your site should help keep your business out of trouble with most regulatory authorities and external providers, and help to avoid possible legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “takedown” notices):

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

In addition to the above, you may want to consider including one or more of the following pages if applicable:

• Affiliate Agreement (if you sell products or services through an affiliate program)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Earnings Disclaimer
• External Linking Policy
• Health Disclaimers (e.g. if your website provides advice about health or medical areas)
• Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
• Media Terms Of Use (e.g. if you provide users with access to download videos or audio files on your site)

Types Of Disclosure Pages

It’s important to add the correct types of disclosure pages to your site. For example:

• No Material Connection – Disclosure that informs your readers that you will not receive any form of compensation for writing the article.
• Affiliate Links – Disclosure that informs your visitors that you may benefit financially if they act on your recommendation and purchase through affiliate links on your site.
• Review Or Sample Copy – Lets site users be aware that you have received a sample or review copy of the product or service you’re reviewing.
• Sponsored Post – Discloses to site users that you have been compensated in some way to write the content.
• Third Party Advertising – Lets users 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 website publishers to show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.

Adding Legal Content To Your Site

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

Uploading Legal Pages To Your Site

If someone prepares the legal verbiage for you in HTML format, you can simply upload these to your web server, or have someone upload them for you.

We recommend creating a legals directory on your server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this folder (e.g. via FTP) …

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

You can then add a link to your legal pages in WordPress using custom links in your menu admin area …

(Custom WordPress Menu Feature)

Make sure that your legal pages are fully up-to-date and clearly accessible to all site visitors. You can insert these into the sidebar (or place them in the footer of your site) so that users have access to the information from all your web pages …

(Display legal information to users on all of your site’s pages)

If you need help displaying links to pages on your sidebar and footer using widgets, refer to this tutorial:

• How To Add WordPress Widgets To Your Blog

Legal Templates

You can easily find attorney-drafted disclosures and downloadable forms and agreements by searching online, or going to sites like this one:

Find Legal Forms

(FindLegalForms.com – Attorney-prepared legal forms)

Go here to learn more:

• FindLegalForms.com

Alternatively, you can purchase a package of cut and paste website legal templates written by attorney Scott Talbert …

Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages

(Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages)

These templates feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with a simple quick search and replace to insert your own details, then pasted into your web pages.

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

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance
• Privacy Policy: Google, etc.
• Terms of Service (ToS) & Conditions of Use.

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

To learn more, visit this site:

• Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages – Legal Templates

Legal Pages – WordPress Plugins

As well as using copy & paste templates, another option is to use plugins.

Here are some great plugins for WordPress-driven sites worth looking into:

WP Legal Pages Plugin

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress)

If setting up legal pages manually seems too time-consuming for you, then consider choosing WP Legal Pages instead …

The WP Legal Pages plugin is not free, but it’s a reasonably low-priced and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website and save you loads of headaches.

Some of the benefits of using the WP Legal Pages plugin are:

• Pre-written Legal Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal page templates created by professional lawyers.
• Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of your basic legal pages in around 3 minutes with a few clicks of the mouse.
• Customizable Pages – The plugin includes customizable and completely editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
• Editable Pages – Content editor lets you edit legal pages just like any other page on your website.
• Custom Shortcodes Integration – Add shortcodes to any of your pages and the information will then be automatically inserted into your pages when you publish.
• Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like any other page on your website.
• Forced Options – Force page lock down. When the user agrees to your terms, the page unlocks.
• Additional Features – More features get added to this plugin with every new version.

When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu item will be added to your navigation menu section …

(WP Legal Pages – Menu)

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

(WP Legal Pages – Settings Area)

The plugin gives you the option to create legal pages for different types of sites, such as business websites with products, review websites, AdSense sites, etc …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Page type drop down menu)

Select from several pre-configured legal templates …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Pre-configured 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

To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website:

• WP Legal Pages Plugin

Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

Compliance Bar is a simple WordPress plugin containing over twenty customizable legal page templates for your online presence …

For more details, visit the plugin site here:

• Compliance Bar – WP Compliance Plugin

Legal Suite Pro Plugin

(Legal Suite Pro Plugin)

Legal Suite Pro 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 secured rights to high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers and packaged them into a plugin that can be installed quickly on any WordPress powered site. Your legal pages can be installed and set up on your site in one minute or less and the plugin licensing is flexible, allowing you to install and use this plugin on all of your sites.

Go here for more information:

• Legal Suite Pro

If using the services of lawyers to create your online legal documentation is out of your budget, then consider implementing at least some basic kind of legal protection on your site until you can afford a solicitor.

We want your website to be protected!

Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator software below, or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using legal content, or a plugin as described in the section below.

(Legal Pages Generator Software)

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

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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you are making money online (or are planning to), you need to make sure that your site remains compliant with regulatory agencies and the terms of service and guidelines provided by third-party services and products that you may be promoting or offering online. If your website isn’t compliant with laws designed to protect consumer rights, you’re breaking the law.

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, please note that we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice on our website. You must do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert to ensure that your website is compliant with the law in your country or region.

Legal Information

Below is a time-saving list of websites we recommend you visit to help you better understand what your site may require to stay compliant and meet 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
• US Patent and Trademark Office
• United States Copyright Office

And …

• Analytics Help – Policy requirements for Google Analytics Advertising Features
• Google AdSense Program Policies Explained
• AdSense Help – Required Content
• Google AdWords – Information Collection And Use
• Google 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 why it’s important to have a compliant website. Use the information provided above to quickly and easily add legal pages to your website or blog.

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