If you plan to grow a successful business online, you do not want to find yourself on the wrong side of the law.
Online laws, regulations, and guidelines were designed to protect consumers and apply to anyone who markets, sells or promotes products or services online. Anyone who owns a website risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about the law will not excuse you from being slapped with a legal notice.
New laws introduced in 2014 to regulate how businesses promote advertising on their sites clearly state that if you plan to promote anything on your website for commercial gain, then you must follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection agencies, such as the Better Business Bureau (BBB). Search online “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.
(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program – BBB)
The new laws affect various business activities, including:
- Any type of advertising, like Google AdWords
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketers
- Product Creators
- Blogging
- etc.
If your website does not display certain legal pages to visitors (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank won’t allow you to sell digital products, PayPal could shut down your account, Facebook could suspend your web applications, and you will not be allowed to enrol in a number of advertising and affiliate marketing networks.
If your online business is not compliant, you could face a whole range of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
The purpose of this article is to help make you aware that your website(s) are subject to certain legal requirements, the importance of complying with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you may be offering on your website, and that there are solutions that can help your site become compliant, such as the plugins listed further below.
Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?
Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we are not providing legal advice. As previously stated, the purpose of this article is only to make you aware that your website may be subject to a number of legal requirements in accordance with federal, regional or local laws and regulations governing online business practices and that you may be required to comply with the terms of service of providers whose products or services you use on your website
Why Making Your Website Compliant Is Important
Consider for a minute what the implications to your business would be in the following scenarios:
- A user suffers a heart attack after using your online workout program.
- The skin care creams you sell as an affiliate marketer gives people allergic reactions.
- Your opt-in list displays a statement that lets subscribers know that you will not sell their information, but you haven’t spelled out exactly what you plan to do with it.
- Someone steals your content and puts it up on their own site.
- There is no statement on your website letting visitors know that you are recommending a product as an affiliate and will earn a commission if they purchase it.
- You did not spell out the terms of your return policies.
- Someone claims that the testimonials on your site are misleading and decides to sue you.
- You haven’t disclosed that you were given a free copy in a product review.
- Your website includes adult information and you did not take sufficient measures to keep underaged persons from accessing it.
Consider now these actual examples of costly compliance breaches:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would have to give up their personal information to complete his offer. In addition to a significant $390,000 fine, they’ve also been ordered to give everyone he does business with for the next 20 years, a copy of the judgement — including employees.
- A social networking app developer received a whopping $800,000 fine for collecting personal information from mobile device address books without the owners’ knowledge and consent – including storing children’s private details.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape UIDs. Many marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, resulting thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
- An independently-conducted 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites chosen at random, more than 90% had broken at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had broken at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% had infringed at least three 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 to the Google program they had violated, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).
Can you see how easy it is to risk being exposed to litigation through non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- PPA (Pay Per Action) Marketer
- MLM Networker
- Affiliate Product Promoter
- AdWords User
- Product Marketer
- Amazon Associate
- EBay Seller
- Publisher Of Adult Content
- Freelancer, Consultant Or Coach
- Seller Of Any Service Or Product Online
it’s important to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your digital presence is fully compliant with the law.
Compliance With Third-Party Services
Big companies and government agencies that regulate trade in most countries emphasize the need of observing the terms and policies of service providers.
You must let your visitors know that your business complies with laws and recommended guidelines. This not only increases trust and buyer confidence in your business, it’s also required in many cases by most companies you will engage with.
For example:
Google requires your site to display legal information if using their services or product features. This includes using features such as Google Analytics …
(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)
Making money online with your WordPress blog with Google AdSense advertising …
(Google AdSense online advertising - policy requirements)
And even promoting your services or products through Google AdWords …
(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)
If you sell digital products with companies such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant networks, you will be required to add legal pages to your site before they will approve your products for sale …
(Policy requirements for ClickBank digital product vendors)
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also requires you to include clear disclaimers and statements on your site, especially concerning the use of product testimonials or endorsements …
(Federal Trade Commission – consumer guidelines and regulations)
New FTC Regulations Require Your Website To Comply
New FTC regulations governing how business is conducted online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online reveals that many websites are still unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As has already been the case, this will most likely prompt the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute companies in an effort to get other businesses to comply.
If you plan to do any type 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 by ensuring that your website is compliant with all FTC guidelines and regulations.
There are many business resources that can provide guidelines on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your site meet FTC requirements. We provide references to some of these at the end of this article …
(Word your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of the law)
Social Media Applications Also Require Compliance
If you are planning to create applications for your site, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many others require you to provide information about your legal pages …
(Facebook apps also require compliance)
- If you are unsure whether you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of organizations like Google, Facebook, etc., then assume that you most probably are.
- If you plan to promote anything on your site via affiliate marketing, or generating revenue with Google AdSense, Amazon, or eBay ads, or using Google AdWords to drive visitors to your pages, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you are required to display on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts suspended.
- If you’ve 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, almost all third-party websites require you to comply with their policies)
Essential Legal Pages To Include In Your Site To Ensure Compliance
If your website or blog is falling short in terms of compliance, then this section will help you.
At its most basic, adding the following compliance pages to your website will keep your business out of trouble with many consumer protection authorities and 3rd-party service providers, and avoid possible legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “cease and desist” notices):
- About Us Page
- Contact Page
- Privacy Policy
- Terms Of Use
- Disclaimers
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
In addition to the pages above, you may want to look into including any of the following pages where applicable:
- Affiliate Disclosure (if you provide information about affiliate products or services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Links Policy
- Health Disclaimers (e.g. if your website provides general information about health or medical areas)
- Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
- Use Of Media (if you allow users to download videos or audio files on your site)
Types Of Disclosure Pages
It’s important to add the right disclosures to your website. For example:
- No Material Connection – Lets users know that you’re not receiving any form of compensation for writing the post.
- Affiliate Links – Lets your visitors know that you will be compensated if they purchase through your affiliate links.
- Review Or Sample Copy – Discloses to site users that you have received a sample or review copy of the product or service you’re reviewing or writing about by the author or product developer.
- Sponsored Post – Lets readers know that you were compensated in some form to write the post.
- Third Party Advertising – Informs readers that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to satisfy 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 Legal Pages Content To Your Website
Ideally, you will consult lawyers or a legal firm and ask them to prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once you have this, there are several ways to add them to your website.
Uploading Legal Pages To Your Site
If someone prepares the legal verbiage for you in typical web page format (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your server, or have someone upload these pages for you.
We recommend creating a legal folder in your web server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this folder using FTP …
(Create a ‘legals’ folder in your web server and upload pages via FTP)
You can then add links to these pages from your WordPress site using a custom WordPress menu …
(WordPress Menu)
After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are up-to-date and clearly accessible to visitors. You can add links to your legal pages to your sidebar menu (or the footer section of your site) so that users can access legal information from every page …
(It’s important to display legal pages to visitors on all of your site’s pages)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial about adding links to pages on your sidebar menu, refer to this tutorial:
Templates
You can find downloadable attorney-drafted forms and agreements just by searching online, or visiting websites like the ones listed below:
Find Legal Forms
Go here for more information:
Another option is to download a package of cut and paste website legal templates written by attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages
(Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages)
Cut & Paste website templates feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with a quick search and replace to add your own details, then pasted into your legal web pages.
The legal templates included in Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Templates include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
- DMCA Compliance
- Federal Trade Commission Compliance (This proprietary FTC page reflects Federal Trade Commission guidelines that came into effect in 2012)
- Privacy Policy
- Terms of Service (ToS) & Conditions of Use.
You can either create a new page on your website for every legal form you want to add to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your web pages and publish or upload the pages to your server as previously described.
For more details, go here:
Legal Pages – WordPress Plugins
In addition to using templates, another option is to use a plugin.
Here are some WordPress plugins worth looking into:
WordPress Legal Pages Plugin
(WordPress Plugin – WP Legal Pages)
If setting up legal pages manually feels too time-consuming for you, then consider using WordPress Legal Pages instead …
The WP Legal Pages plugin is not free, but it’s a very affordable and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will help make the work of creating and implementing legal pages on your website much easier and save you a great deal of time and effort.
Some of the reasons to consider using WP Legal Pages are:
- Pre-written Legal Templates – Includes over 20 built-in legal page templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
- 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 editable legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
- Editable Pages – Content editor lets you edit all legal pages like every other WP page.
- Shortcodes – You can add shortcodes to any of your pages and the information will then be automatically inserted into your pages when published.
- Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like every other WordPress page.
- Forced Options – Force page lockdown. When users agree to your legal terms, the page unlocks.
- Additional Features – More features get added to this plugin with every new version.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a menu item is added to your main WordPress dashboard area …
(WordPress Legal Pages – Menu)
This allows you to view, create and edit legal pages from your admin area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Settings Area)
You have the option of easily creating legal pages for different types of sites, such as business websites, affiliate sites, AdSense sites, etc …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Page type drop down menu)
Select from various built-in legal templates …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – 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
For more details about this useful plugin, visit the plugin site:
Compliance Bar Plugin – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Compliance Bar is a simple WordPress plugin containing over 20 customizable legal templates for your digital presence …
More info:
Legal Suite Pro
(Legal Suite Pro Plugin For WordPress)
This 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 & Conditions
- 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 one minute or less and the plugin licensing is flexible, allowing you to install and use the plugin on all of your sites.
Go here for more information:
If using the services of legal experts to create your legal documentation is currently out of your budget, then consider implementing at least some basic kind of legal protection on your site until you can afford professional legal services.
We want your site to be legally safe!
Download the Legal Pages Generator software below (for FREE!), or use one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-written legal forms, or plugins as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator Software)
Legal Pages Generator lets you quickly generate essential legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Statement, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.
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As stated earlier, if you engage in any form of commercial activity online, you need to make sure that your site complies with regulatory agencies and the guidelines and terms of service for third-party products and services that you may decide to promote or advertise online. If your website doesn’t comply with laws intended to protect the rights of consumers, 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, we are not lawyers and we do not offer legal advice on our website. We strongly advise you to do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert to ensure that your website fully complies with all legal requirements wherever your business is based.
References And Resources
Below is a time-saving list of websites we recommend you visit to better understand what your website may require to remain compliant and meet legal requirements and guidelines:
- Federal Trade Commission Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
- Federal Trade Commission Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
- FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
- Better Business Bureau
- 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
- United States Copyright Office
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
We hope this article has helped you understand the importance of having a legally compliant website. Use the information provided above to quickly and easily add essential legal pages to your WordPress website.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)