Category: WordPress Configuration

One of the worst things that can happen to a website owner is to break the law.

As the cybersphere continues to grow at an extraordinary rate and the rules keep changing, it’s absolutely vital to try and stay on top of what’s happening and ensure that your website remains legal, especially if having a digital presence is important in the success of your overall business strategy.

New laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their sites clearly state that if you promote anything on your site for commercial gain, you must follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory departments, 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)

The new laws affect several online business activities, including:

• Any form of advertising, including text link ads, Google Adsense, etc.
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketers
• Product Creators
• Blogging
• etc.

If your site does not display certain pages to visitors (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, financial disclaimers, etc.), many sites like Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank will not let you list digital products for sale, PayPal may suspend your account, Facebook could disapprove your applications, and you won’t be allowed into a range of advertising or affiliate merchant networks.

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

The purpose of this guide is to help make you aware that your website may be subject to legal requirements according to laws that govern business practices online, the importance of remaining compliant with the terms of service of external providers whose services or products you may be using online, and that there are solutions that can help your websites become more compliant, such as the plugins that we discuss further below.

Is Your Website Or Blog Compliant?

Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we do not offer legal advice on this website. You must do your own due diligence and we recommend consulting a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website fully complies with the law wherever you do business.

Why Making Your Website Compliant Is Important

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

• A customer suffers a heart attack after using your online fitness workout.
• The skin care creams you promote as an affiliate gives someone skin rashes.
• You’ve let your subscribers know that you won’t sell their information, but you have not informed them exactly what you’ll do with it.
• Someone steals content from your site and publishes it on their website.
• There is no statement on your site making your site visitors aware that you are recommending a product as an affiliate and could receive a commission if they decide to purchase through your affiliate link.
• You have not spelled out the conditions of your return policies.
• Your visitors claim your testimonials are all fake and decide to sue you as a result.
• You have not disclosed that you received a free copy in your product review.
• Your site publishes adult content and you didn’t take appropriate measures to keep underaged persons from accessing it.

Consider too these real case studies of costly compliance breaches:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would have to give up their personal information to complete his offer. Cost = $390,000.
• A social networking app developer was slapped with 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 Users IDs. Many marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
• An independent 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites chosen at random, more than 90% had infringed at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were breaking at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were in breach of 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 cautions or lose access 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 a website owner can easily become exposed to the risk of non-compliance?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• CPA (Cost Per Action) Marketer
• MLM Networker
• Affiliate Marketer
• AdSense Publisher
• Product Publisher
• Amazon Affiliate
• EBay Seller
• 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 online business stays legally compliant.

Complying With Third-Party Services - ToS, Policies, etc.

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

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

Let’s take a look at some examples:

Google requires you to display legal information if using many of their services. This includes Google Analytics …

(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)

Earning revenue online with your website using Google AdSense online advertising …

(Google AdSense advertising policy requirements)

Or promoting your services or products using Google AdWords …

(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)

If you sell information-based products via merchants such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant networks, you will need to add a number of legal pages before they will approve your products for selling via their marketplace …

(Policy requirements for selling products via ClickBank)

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

(FTC – consumer policies and regulations)

FTC Regulations – Ensuring That Your Site Is Compliant

FTC regulations governing how business is conducted online were introduced in March 2012. Search online and you will see that many websites are unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As is already the case, this often results in 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 type 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 by making sure that your website complies with FTC regulations and guidelines.

A number of business resource sites provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your site comply with FTC requirements. See the resources section at the end of this article for more information …

(Word your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of the law)

Don’t Forget Social Media Applications

If you plan to create applications for your website, social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and many others will require you to provide information about your legal pages …

(Social networking apps also require compliance)

• If you are unsure whether you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of websites like Google, Facebook, etc., then it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
• If you plan to promote services or products online as an affiliate marketer, or generate revenue with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon ads, 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 display on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts suspended.
• If you’ve been wondering if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to avoid becoming a litigation magnet.

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

What Compliance Information Pages Should I Add To My Site To Be Legally Compliant?

If you suspect that your website or blog falls short in areas of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.

Adding the following compliance pages to your website will help your business stay out of trouble with most regulatory authorities and external service providers, and even help you avoid possible legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “cease and desist” notices):

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

Additionally, you may want to consider including any of these compliance pages:

• Affiliate Disclosure (if you promote or sell affiliate products and services)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Earnings Disclaimer
• External Linking Policy
• Financial Disclaimers (if your website or blog provides general advice about financial areas or income opportunities)
• Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
• Use Of Media (if you provide users with access to downloadable videos or audio files on your site)

Disclosure Pages – Types

Adding the right type of disclosure is important. For example:

• No Material Connection – Informs site users that you are not receiving compensation for writing the article.
• Affiliate Links – Informs site users that you may receive compensation if they buy through your affiliate links.
• Sample/Review Copy – Lets your visitors be aware that you have received a sample or review copy of the product or service by the author or developer.
• Sponsored Post – Informs your readers 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 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 WordPress Website

Ideally, you should consult your lawyer and ask them to prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once you have this, there are several ways to include them in your website.

Uploading Legal Pages Manually

If someone prepares and delivers the legal verbiage for you in standard web page format (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your server, or have someone upload them for you.

We recommend adding a legals directory to your web server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this directory using FTP …

(Upload legal pages to your web server via FTP)

You can then easily add a link to these legal pages from your WordPress site using custom links in your menu administration …

(WordPress Menu)

Where To Display Legal Pages On Your Site

After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are kept up-to-date and clearly accessible to all site visitors. You can insert these into the WordPress sidebar (or the footer section of your website or blog) so that users have access to legal information from all of your pages …

(It’s important to display legal pages to users on all of your website’s pages)

If you need help displaying links to pages on your sidebar or footer menu using widgets, refer to this step-by-step tutorial:

• How To Add And Configure WordPress Widgets On The Blog Sidebar Section

Use Ready-Made Templates

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

Find Legal Forms

(Find Legal Forms – Attorney-drafted legal forms)

Visit this website to learn more:

• Find Legal Forms

Alternatively, you can download a package of cut & paste website legal templates designed by legal attorney Scott Talbert …

Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages

(Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages – Legal Templates)

Cut & Paste website legal templates feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with simple search and replace to insert your own business details, then pasted into your legal pages.

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

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance (This proprietary FTC page reflects new Federal Trade Commission guidelines that came into effect in 2012)
• Privacy Policy: Google, DART, etc.
• Terms of Service & Conditions of Use: with inter- & intra-page redundancy, Contra Proferentem provision, reservation of rights, and exclusive social media admonition.

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

Visit this site to learn more:

• Website Legal Pages

Legal Page Plugins

As well as using copy & paste legal templates, you can keep things very simple using plugins.

Here are some plugins for WordPress users you should check out:

WordPress Legal Pages Plugin

(WordPress Plugin – WordPress Legal Pages)

If the idea of manually creating legal pages for your website seems too time-consuming for you, then consider using WP Legal Pages instead …

WordPress Legal Pages is not a free plugin, but it’s a very affordable and well-supported premium plugin that will help simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website and save you time.

Some of the benefits of using WP Legal Pages are:

• Built-in Legal Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal templates created by professional lawyers.
• Very Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of the legal pages you will need in a few minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
• Customizable Pages – 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 legal pages like every other page on your website.
• Shortcodes – Add shortcodes to your website or blog pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your pages when published.
• Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like any WordPress page.
• Forced Options – Force page or post lock down. When the user agrees to your legal terms, the page unlocks.
• New Features – More features get added to this plugin with each new version.

When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu feature will appear inside your main navigation menu …

(WordPress Legal Pages – Menu)

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

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

You have the option of creating legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites with products, niche sites, medical sites, etc …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Page type menu)

Choose from various built-in legal templates …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Built-In 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 information about the benefits of using this handy plugin, visit this site:

• WordPress Legal Pages Plugin

Compliance Bar – Compliance Plugin For WordPress

Compliance Bar is a simple WordPress plugin containing over twenty customizable compliance templates for your online business …

Learn more here:

• Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

Legal Suite Pro

(Legal Suite Pro)

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 & 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 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. You can have legal pages installed and set up on your site in one minute or less and the plugin licensing is very flexible, allowing you to install and use this plugin on all of your websites (even sites that you decide to sell or flip).

More info:

• Legal Suite Pro

If using the services of a lawyer to create your legal pages is out of your budget, then consider implementing at least some form of basic legal protection on your website until you can afford professional legal services.

We want your business to be protected!

Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator software below, or consider choosing one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-prepared legal documentation, or a legal pages plugin as described in the section below.

(Legal Pages Generator Software)

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

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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you do any kind of business online (or plan to), it’s important that your site remains compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate online business practices and any guidelines and terms of service required by 3rd-party sites that you may be promoting or endorsing online. Your internet presence must comply with a wide range of regulations, some of which you may not even 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?

Legal Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice. We strongly advise you to do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with the law pertaining to your business.

Legal Resources

Here is a useful list of websites we suggest you visit to help you better understand what your business requires to comply and meet legal requirements and guidelines:

• FTC Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
• FTC 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 …

• Google 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

We hope this article has helped you understand why it’s important to have a legally compliant website. Use the information above to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your site.

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