Category: Engagement Plugins

Is your website legally compliant? Do you know if your site is breaking any laws, or contravening the Terms of Service (TOS) of any third-party companies whose products or services you are doing business with?

Internet laws, regulations, and guidelines were designed to protect the rights of consumers and apply to any person who markets, sells or promotes products and services online. Anyone who owns a website risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about legal requirements will not protect you from being slapped with a legal notice.

New laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their websites state that if you promote anything on your site for commercial gain, then you must follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory departments, such as the (US based) 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 Website)

The new laws has implications for various business activities, including:

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

Without legal pages on your site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc.), many sites like Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank won’t allow you to sell digital products, PayPal may shut down your account, Facebook could disapprove web applications, and you won’t be allowed to participate in most advertising or online merchant networks.

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

The purpose of this post is to make you aware that your site are required to comply with various legalities, the importance of being compliant with the terms of service of other providers whose services or products you may be offering online, and that there are solutions that can help your sites become more compliant, such as the tools listed further below.

Is Your Website Or Blog Breaking Rules Or Regulations?

Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we do not provide legal advice on this website. As stated previously, the purpose of this article is only to help make you aware that your website may be subject to a number of legal requirements in accordance with the laws and regulations that govern your business and that you may be required to comply with the terms of service of 3rd-party companies whose services or products you use

Understanding The Importance Of Making Your Website Compliant

Consider what could happen to your business in the following scenarios:

• A person has a cardiac arrest after purchasing your online fitness workout.
• The skin care products you promote as an affiliate gives someone who purchases from your link an allergic reaction.
• You’ve told subscribers that you won’t sell their information, but you have not described exactly what you plan to do with it.
• Someone steals your content and puts it up on their website.
• There is no statement on your website or blog letting your site users know that you’re an affiliate for the product you are selling and will get paid an affiliate commission if they end up buying through your link.
• You didn’t spell out the terms of your refund policies.
• Someone claims that your testimonials are misleading and tries to sue you.
• You did not disclose in a product review that you were given a free copy of the product.
• Your website contains adult-related content and you did not take sufficient measures to keep underaged children from accessing it.

Consider too the following real examples of costly compliance breaches:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would be required to give up their personal information (including credit card information to complete an offer they were promoting. In addition to a significant $390,000 fine, they’re now required to give everyone they do business with for the next 20 years, a copy of the judgement — including employees.
• 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 private details about children.
• Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape UIDs. Many internet marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, resulting thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
• An independent 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred randomly-picked websites, more than 90% had infringed at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had broken at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% had breached 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 whose policies with the violation, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).

Can you see how easy it is to risk becoming a target of non-compliance?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• CPA (Cost Per Action) or CPC (Cost Per Conversion) Marketer
• MLM Networker
• Affiliate Marketer
• AdSense Publisher
• Info Product Marketer
• Amazon Associate
• EBay Seller
• Publisher Of Adult Content
• Freelancer, Consultant Or Coach
• Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online

it’s important to make sure that your website has the right legal pages and clearly accessible to your site users.

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

Big companies and government trade regulatory agencies emphasize the need and importance of observing the terms and policies of service providers.

You must let your site users know that your business complies with legal requirements and recommended guidelines. This not only improves trust and confidence in your website, it’s also a requirement of many companies you do business with.

Let’s take a look at some examples:

Google requires websites to display legal information when using many of their products and features. This includes Google Analytics …

(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)

Making money online with your website using Google AdSense …

(Google AdSense policy requirements)

Or promoting your services through Google AdWords …

(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)

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

(ClickBank – policy requirements)

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also requires you to add clear disclaimers and policies on your website, especially when concerning the use of testimonials or product endorsements …

(Federal Trade Commission – consumer policies and regulations)

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 websites are still unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As has happened in the past, this typically results in 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 selling online, therefore, it’s best not to take any chances. Even if your business does not operate in the U.S. it’s best to protect your business by ensuring that your website complies with FTC guidelines and regulations.

There are many resources online that can provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your business comply with FTC requirements. See the additional references and resources section at the end of this article for more information …

(Structure your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)

Don’t Forget Social Media Applications

If you are planning to create apps that will integrate with your site, you will also be required to provide social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others with access to various legal pages …

(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)

• If you are not sure whether or not you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of service providers like Google, Facebook, etc., then you most probably are.
• If you plan to promote services or products online via affiliate marketing, or generate revenue with Google AdSense, ads for eBay or Amazon products, or using Google AdWords 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 all Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts terminated.
• If you have been wondering 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 3rd-party websites require you to comply with their policies)

What Legal Information Pages Do I Need To Add To My Website To Be Compliant?

If your web site is falling short in terms of compliance, then this section will help you.

Adding the following compliance pages to your website will help you stay out of trouble with many consumer protection agencies and third-party service providers, and avoid possible legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “take down” notices):

• About Us Page
• Contact Us
• Privacy Policy
• Terms Of Use
• Website Disclaimer
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance

As well as the above, you may want to consider implementing any of these legal pages:

• Affiliate Disclosure (if you sell or promote affiliate products and services)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Earnings Disclaimer
• External Linking Policy
• Health Disclaimers (e.g. if your website provides general advice about health or medical areas)
• Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
• Audio/Video Terms (if you allow media downloads on your site)

Disclosure Pages – Types

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

• No Material Connection – Informs readers that you will not receive compensation for writing the article.
• Affiliate Links – Lets readers know that you will derive some form of financial benefit if they act on your recommendation and buy through your affiliate link.
• Sample Or review Copy – Lets visitors know that you have been given a review or sample copy of the product by the author or developer.
• Sponsored Post – Lets site users be aware that you have been compensated in some form 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 website publishers to show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.

Adding Legal Pages To Your WordPress Website

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

Upload Legal Pages To Your Website

If someone prepares and delivers the legal content for you in HTML format, you can simply upload these to your server, or have someone upload these pages for you.

We recommend creating a legals directory on your web server and uploading your legal pages to this folder via FTP …

(Upload legal pages to your server using FTP)

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

(WordPress Menu)

Displaying Legal Pages On Your Site

After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are fully up-to-date and display clearly to all site visitors. You can add these to the sidebar menu (or the footer section of your site) so that users have access to the information from all your pages …

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

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

• How To Configure Widgets On Your WordPress Blog Sidebar

Templates

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

Find Legal Forms

(Find Legal Forms – Attorney-drafted legal forms)

To learn more, visit this site:

• Find Legal Forms

Another option is to purchase a package of cut & paste legal templates created by legal attorney Scott Talbert …

Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages

(Website Legal Pages)

These 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 business details, then pasted into your legal web pages.

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

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance (This proprietary FTC page reflects new FTC guidelines that came into effect in March 2012)
• Privacy Policy: Google, DoubleClick DART, etc.
• Terms of Service (ToS) & Conditions of Use.

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 these to your web server as described earlier.

Go here to learn more:

• Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Form Templates

Legal Page Plugins

In addition to using legal templates, you can simplify things by using a plugin.

Here are some plugins for WordPress users that you may be interested in using:

WP Legal Pages Plugin

(WordPress Plugin – WordPress Legal Pages)

If you don’t want to bother with creating legal web pages manually, then consider installing a plugin like WordPress Legal Pages …

The WP Legal Pages plugin is not free, but it’s an affordable and well-supported premium plugin that will help simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your site and save you many headaches.

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

• Built-in Templates – Includes over 20 built-in legal page templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
• Very Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of the legal pages you will need in a few minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
• Fully Customizable Pages – The plugin includes fully customizable and editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
• Easy To Edit Pages – WordPress content editor lets you edit legal pages like any other WordPress page.
• Custom Shortcodes Integration – You can add shortcodes to your pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your pages when published.
• Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like any other page on your website.
• Forced Options – Force page or post lockdown. When a user agrees to your terms, the page unlocks.
• New Features – More features are being added to this plugin with each new version.

After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a menu feature will appear inside your main navigation section …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Menu)

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

(WordPress Legal Pages – Settings Screen)

With WPLegal Pages, you can easily create legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites, niche sites, Amazon sites, etc …

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

You can also choose from a number of pre-configured legal templates …

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

• WP Legal Pages

Compliance Bar – WP Compliance Plugin

Compliance Bar is a simple plugin for WordPress users containing over 20 customizable compliance templates for your online presence …

Learn We have written an in-depth article about this plugin here:

• Compliance Bar – Compliance Plugin For WordPress

Legal Suite Pro Plugin

(Legal Suite Pro Plugin)

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 And Conditions
• Earnings Disclaimer

(Legal Suite Pro Plugin – 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 site. You can have legal pages 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 sites.

For more details, go here:

• Legal Suite Pro

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

We want your site to be protected!

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

(Legal Pages Generator)

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

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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you do business online, you need to ensure that your website complies with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business online and the terms of service (TOS) and guidelines required by 3rd-party products and services that you may decide to promote or advertise online. Your website or blog must comply with a number of laws and regulatory guidelines, some 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?

Legal Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we provide no legal advice on our website. You are strongly advised to do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert to ensure that your website fully complies with the law concerning your specific business.

Resources

Below is a time-saving list of additional sites we recommend you visit to help you better understand what your website may require to comply and meet legal requirements and guidelines:

• FTC Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
• Federal Trade Commission Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
• FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
• BBB – 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

Also …

• 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

Hopefully, this article has helped you understand why it’s important to have a legally compliant website. Use the information above to quickly add legal pages to your WordPress website or blog.

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