Category: Engagement Plugins

Is your website legal? Do you know if you are breaking the law, or breaching the Terms of Service (TOS) of any companies whose services or products you do business with?

As the digital realm continues growing at an extraordinary rate and the rules constantly change, it’s important that you try to stay on top of what’s going on and ensure that your website remains legal, especially if having an online presence is an integral aspect of your business strategy.

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

(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)

These laws affect various online business categories, including:

• Any form of advertising, e.g. pay-per-click advertising
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Product Creators
• Bloggers
• etc.

Without certain legal pages on your site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, financial disclaimers, etc.), many sites like Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank will not let you list your digital products on their network, PayPal may suspend your account and freeze your funds, Facebook will suspend web applications, and you will not be allowed to promote a number of advertising and online merchant networks.

If your online business is not in compliance, you could also end up facing a whole range of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!

The purpose of this post is to help make you aware that your website or blog(s) may be required to comply with certain legalities according to laws that govern business practices online, the importance of maintaining compliance with the terms of service of 3rd-party providers whose products or services you may be advertising on your website, and that there are plugins for WordPress website owners that can help your website become fully compliant, such as the tools listed further below.

Is Your Website Or Blog Breaking The Law?

Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we do not provide legal advice on this website. You must do your own due diligence and we recommend consulting a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with all legal requirements in your country or region.

Why It’s Important To Make Your Website Compliant

Are you at risk? Consider for a moment what the implications to your business would be in the following scenarios:

• A customer has a heart attack after using your online workout program.
• The skin care lotion you sell as an affiliate marketer gives someone who purchases from your link allergic reactions.
• You’ve let your subscribers know that you won’t sell their information, but you have not defined what you will do with the information you have collected.
• Someone copies content from your website and publishes it on their own website.
• You did not tell your site users that you’re an affiliate for the product you’re endorsing and may earn financial benefits if visitors purchase via your affiliate link.
• You don’t spell out the terms of your refund policies.
• A visitor claims your testimonials are misleading and tries to sue you because of it.
• You didn’t disclose that you have received a free copy in a product review.
• Your site contains adult information and you have not taken appropriate measures to keep underage children from accessing it.

Consider now the following real case studies of costly compliance breaches:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would have to give up their personal information (including credit card info to complete an offer they were promoting. In addition to a substantial $390,000 fine, he is now required to issue 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 does not allow users to scrape Users IDs. Many marketers gambled that they could get away with it and lost. Their accounts were shut down, resulting thousands of dollars 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 in breach of at least two 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 whose policies they had violated, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).

Can you see how a website owner can easily be exposed to the risks of litigation?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• CPA or PPA Marketer
• Multilevel Marketer
• Affiliate Promoter
• AdWords User
• Niche Publisher
• Amazon Affiliate
• EBay Seller
• Adult Content Publisher
• Freelancer, Consultant Or Coach
• Seller Of Any Service Or Product Online

You need to make sure that your website or blog stays fully compliant with the law.

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

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

You are expected to let your site users know that your business complies with all necessary laws and recommended guidelines. This not only improves consumer trust and buyer confidence in your website, it’s also required in many cases by most companies you interact with.

Here are just some examples:

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

(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)

Earning revenue with your blog using Google AdSense advertising …

(Google AdSense advertising - policy requirements)

And even promoting your services or products via Google AdWords …

(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)

If you sell information products with merchants such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant networks, you will need to add a number of legal pages to your website before your products can be approved for sale …

(Policy requirements for vendors using ClickBank)

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires you to include clear disclaimers and disclosures on your website, especially if you plan to sell or promote products and services online with the aid of testimonials or product endorsements …

(FTC – consumer policies and regulations)

New FTC Regulations Require Your Website To Be Compliant

FTC regulations governing the conduct of businesses online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online will easily reveal that many sites are unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As documented on their website, this typically results in the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting site owners for breaches of regulation in an effort to get other businesses to comply.

If you do any kind of selling online, therefore, it’s best not to take any chances. Even if your business does not operate in the U.S. you should protect your business interests by making sure that your website is compliant with FTC guidelines.

A number of online business resources provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help you comply with FTC requirements. We provide additional references at the end of this article …

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

Don’t Forget Social Media Apps

If you plan to develop applications for your website users, you will also be required to provide social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others with access to various legal pages …

(Social networking apps also require compliance)

• If you are unsure whether or not 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 plan to promote services or products online as an affiliate marketer, or monetize your pages with Google AdSense, Amazon, or eBay advertising, or using Google AdWords to drive visitors to your pages, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you are required to include on your site to comply with all Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts suspended.
• If you have been wondering if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to act now and take proper precautions to avoid becoming a magnet for litigation.

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

Common Legal Pages To Add To Your Website To Ensure Compliance

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

At its most basic, adding the following legal pages to your site will help your website stay out of trouble with many regulatory agencies and third-party providers, and even help you avoid potential legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “takedown” notices):

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

In addition to the above, you may want to look into implementing one or more of the following pages if applicable:

• Affiliate Agreement (e.g. if you provide 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 sell products or services online)
• Video/Audio Terms Of Use (if you allow media downloads on your site)

Types Of Disclosure Pages

It’s important to add the right disclosures to your website. For example:

• No Material Connection – This lets your readers know that you will not receive any form of compensation for writing the post.
• Affiliate Links – Disclosure that informs your readers that you will receive compensation if they buy through an affiliate link.
• Review Or Sample Copy – Lets readers know that you have been given a review or sample copy of the product or service.
• Sponsored Post – Informs readers that you were compensated in some form to write the post.
• Third Party Advertising – Lets visitors know 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.

Adding Legal Content To Your WordPress Site

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

Uploading Legal Web Pages Manually To Your Website

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

We recommend adding a legals directory to your server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this directory (e.g. using FTP) …

(Upload legal pages to your web server via FTP)

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

(Custom WordPress Menu Feature)

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

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

We have created a detailed tutorial on displaying links to pages on your sidebar and footer using widgets here:

• How To Use Widgets

Use Ready-Made Templates

You can easily find downloadable attorney-drafted internet forms and agreements by searching online, or visiting websites like this one:

Find Legal Forms

(Find Legal Forms – Attorney-drafted legal forms)

For more details, go here:

• Find Legal Forms

Another option is to purchase a set of cut and paste legal templates written by attorney Scott Talbert …

Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages

(Website Legal Pages)

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

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

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance (This proprietary FTC page reflects Federal Trade Commission regulations and guidelines brought into effect in 2012)
• Privacy Policy
• 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 each legal form you want added to your site, then paste the content from the templates into your web pages and publish or upload the pages to your web server as previously described.

To learn more, go here:

• Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages – Website Legal Pages

Plugins – Legal Pages

In addition to using cut & paste legal templates, you can keep things really simple using WordPress plugins.

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

WP Legal Pages Plugin

(WordPress Plugin – WP Legal Pages)

If the idea of setting up legal pages manually feels too time-consuming for you, then consider installing WP Legal Pages instead …

The WP Legal Pages plugin is not free, but it’s a very low-priced and well-supported plugin that will help simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your site and save you a great deal of time.

Here are just some of the reasons to consider using WP Legal Pages:

• Pre-written Templates – Over 20 built-in legal templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
• Very Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of the basic legal pages you will need in around 3 minutes with a few mouse clicks.
• Fully Customizable Pages – Includes customizable and easily editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms Of Service, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
• Editable Pages – Content editor lets you edit all legal pages like every other WP page.
• Shortcodes – Add shortcodes to your WordPress pages and the information will then be 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 page on your website.
• Forced Options – Force page lock down. When users agree to the legal terms, the page unlocks, giving them access.
• New Features – New plugin features get added when new versions are released.

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

(WP Legal Pages – Menu)

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

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Settings Screen)

With WPLegal Pages, you can create legal pages for different types of websites, such as business websites, affiliate/review sites, e-commerce sites, etc …

(WordPress Legal Pages – Create different legal pages)

You can also select from a number of pre-configured 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

Go here to learn more this handy plugin:

• WP Legal Pages

Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

total website compliance and disclaimer solution …

More info:

• Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

Legal Suite Pro

(Legal Suite Pro 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 Service
• 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 less than one minute and the license allows you to install and use the plugin on all of your websites (even sites that you decide to sell or flip).

More information:

• Legal Suite Pro Plugin

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

We want your site to be protected!

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

(Legal Pages Generator)

Legal Pages Generator Software allows you to quickly generate basic legal documents for your website including ToS, Privacy Statement, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.

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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you engage in any form of commercial activity online (or are planning to), it’s important that your site complies with government legal requirements and the guidelines and terms of service provided by 3rd-party products and services that you may be promoting or advertising online. If your website doesn’t comply with laws intended to protect consumer rights, you’re breaking the law.

Non-compliance 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 cannot provide legal advice. We strongly advise you to do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert to ensure that your website is compliant with all legal requirements concerning your specific business.

References And Resources

Below is a time-saving list of websites we suggest you visit to better understand what your business requires to stay compliant 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 – 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
• US Copyright Office

Plus …

• 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
• 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 compliant website. Use the information presented above to quickly add legal pages to your website.

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