One of the worst things that can happen to a business owner is to break the law.
As the internet continues growing at an extraordinary rate and the rules constantly change, it’s important to stay on top of what’s going on and ensure that your site remains legal, especially if having a digital presence plays a significant role in your overall business strategy.
Recent laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their sites state that if you promote anything on your website for profit, you will need to follow certain disclosure guidelines to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory agencies, such as the US-based BBB, or Better Business Bureau. Search online for information about “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.
(Better Business Bureau Website)
The new laws affect several business activities, including:
- Any kind of advertising, like Google AdWords or AdSense
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketers
- Product Creation
- Bloggers
- etc.
If you do not display certain legal pages on your website (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, financial disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank will not allow you to sell digital products, PayPal could close down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook will suspend your web applications, and you won’t be allowed to enroll in a number of advertising or affiliate marketing networks.
If your digital presence is not in compliance, you could also end up facing a multitude of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
This guide explains why it’s important to have a legally compliant website and how to quickly add legal pages to your WordPress website using simple legal resources and solutions.
Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice. As previously stated, the aim of this article is to help make you aware that your website may be subject to a number of legal policies in accordance with the laws governing business practices online and that you may be required to comply with the terms of service of providers whose products or services you use
Why Having A Compliant Website Is Important
Are you at risk? Consider for one moment what could happen to your business if any of the scenarios below were to occur:
- A user suffers a cardiac arrest after using your online fitness workout.
- The skin care products you promote as an affiliate gives someone who purchases from your link allergic reactions.
- You’ve told subscribers that you won’t sell their information, but you haven’t clearly spelled out what you will do with their details.
- Someone steals your content and puts it up on their site.
- There is no statement on your website letting your site visitors know that you are recommending a product as an affiliate and could receive financial benefits if they purchase the product via your affiliate link.
- You haven’t spelled out the conditions of your refund policies.
- A visitor claims your testimonials are false and decides to sue you.
- You have not disclosed in a product review that you received a free copy of the product.
- Your site publishes adult information and you didn’t take appropriate measures to restrict access by underage persons.
Consider now these documented case studies of costly compliance breaches:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would be required to give up personal information (including credit card details to complete his offer. Cost = $390,000.
- 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 private information about children.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape Users IDs. Many internet marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, resulting thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
- An independently-conducted study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites picked at random, more than 90% were in breach of at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had infringed at least two of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were breaking 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 with the violation, 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 through non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPA, CPC or PPA Marketer
- Multilevel Marketer
- Affiliate Product Marketer
- AdSense Publisher
- Info Product Marketer
- Amazon Affiliate
- EBay Seller
- Adult Content Publisher
- Provider Of Freelance, Coaching Or Consulting Services
- Seller Of Any Service Or Product Online
It’s vitally important to ensure that your website has the right legal pages and clearly displayed to all you site users.
Compliance With Third-Party Services
Complying with 3rd-party services terms and policies is important.
You are expected to let your site visitors know that your website complies will all laws and recommended guidelines. This not only increases trust and buyer confidence in your site, it’s also required by most companies you interact with.
For example:
Google requires your site to display legal information if using their products and service. This includes using services like Google Analytics …
(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)
Earning revenue online with your websites using Google AdSense ads …
(Google AdSense online advertising policy requirements)
And even promoting your services or products using Google AdWords …
(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)
If you sell information-based products using 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 sale in their marketplace …
(ClickBank – policy requirements for vendors)
The Federal Trade Commission also requires that you include clear disclaimers and policy statements on your website, especially if you plan to use product testimonials or endorsements …
(FTC – consumer policies and regulations)
New FTC Regulations Require Your Website To Be Compliant
New FTC regulations governing the conduct of businesses online were introduced in March 2012. Search online and you will see that many business are still unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As has happened in the past, this will most likely prompt the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute site owners for breaches of regulation 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 chances. Even if your business does not operate in the U.S. you should protect your business by making sure that your website complies with FTC guidelines.
Many business resources provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help you comply with FTC requirements. We provide links to useful resources to some of these at the end of this article …
(Structure your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of the law)
Don’t Forget Social Media Applications
If you plan to create apps for your site, social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others require you to provide access to your legal pages …
(Apps for social networking sites also require compliance)
- If you are not sure whether or not you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of organizations like Google, Facebook, etc., then it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
- If you are considering promoting services or products on your site as an affiliate marketer, or generate revenue online with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon advertising, or driving visitors to your website with Google AdWords, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you are required to provide on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements - don’t risk having your accounts terminated.
- If you’ve been wondering whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to protect yourself and your website.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party websites require you to comply with their policies and guidelines)
Basic Legal Pages You Should Include In Your Site
If you suspect that your web site lacks in areas of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.
At its most basic, adding the following legal pages to your website should help your business stay out of trouble with most regulatory agencies and 3rd-party providers, and help to avoid possible legal issues):
- About Us Page
- Contact Page
- Privacy Statement
- Terms & Conditions
- Website Disclaimer
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
As well as the above pages, you may want to consider including any of these pages:
- Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you provide information about affiliate products or services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Linking Policy
- Health Disclaimers (e.g. if your website provides health or medical information)
- Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
- Media Terms Of Use (if you allow media downloads on your site)
Disclosure Pages – Types
Adding the correct type of disclosure to your website is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – Disclosure that informs your visitors that you are not receiving any kind of compensation for writing the post.
- Affiliate Links – Discloses to site users that you will receive compensation if they act on your recommendation and buy through affiliate links on your site.
- Sample Or review Copy – Informs users that you have been given a sample or review copy of the product or service you’re reviewing or writing about by the author or developer.
- Sponsored Post – Lets users know that you have been compensated in some form to write the article.
- Third Party Advertising – Lets visitors 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 Compliance Pages To Your WordPress Website
Ideally, you will consult your lawyer 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 Web Pages Manually
If someone prepares the legal content for you in typical web page formatting (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your web server, or have someone upload these pages for you.
We recommend creating a legal folder on your web 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 a link to these pages from your WordPress site using a custom WordPress menu …
(Custom WordPress Menu Feature)
Make sure that your legal pages are up-to-date and clearly accessible to all site visitors. You can insert these into your WordPress sidebar (or place them in the footer of your site) to ensure that users have access to legal information from every web page …
(Display links to legal pages on all of your site’s pages)
We have created a detailed tutorial about displaying links to pages on your sidebar menu or footer in WordPress using widgets here:
Templates
You can easily find attorney-drafted downloadable forms and agreements by searching online, or going to sites like the ones listed below:
Find Legal Forms
(FindLegalForms.com – Legal forms)
For more information, go here:
Another option is to purchase a package of cut & paste legal templates drafted by attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages
(Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages – Website Legal Pages)
Cut & Paste website legal templates feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with a simple quick search and replace to add your own business name and URL, then pasted into your legal web pages.
The legal templates included in Scott Talbert’s Legal Forms include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer
- DMCA Compliance
- FTC Compliance
- Privacy Policy
- Terms of Service (ToS) & Conditions of Use.
You can either create a new WordPress page for each legal form you want added to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your web pages and publish or upload your legal pages to your server as previously described.
For more details, visit this site:
Legal Page Plugins
As well as using copy & paste templates, another option for adding legal pages to your website is to use WordPress plugins.
Here are some legal plugins for WordPress-driven websites worth looking into:
WP Legal Pages
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin)
If the idea of setting up legal pages manually seems too time-consuming for you, then consider using a plugin like WordPress Legal Pages instead …
WP Legal Pages is not a free plugin, but it’s a reasonably affordable and well-supported plugin that will help simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website and save you time.
Here are just some of the benefits of using WordPress Legal Pages:
- Built-in Legal Templates – Includes over 20 built-in legal page templates created by professional lawyers.
- Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of the legal pages you need in around 3 minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
- Fully Customizable Pages – The plugin includes customizable and easily editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
- Easy To Edit Pages – WordPress content editor lets you edit legal pages just like every other WordPress page.
- Custom Shortcodes Integration – You can add shortcodes to your website or blog pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your content when published.
- Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like every other WP page.
- Forced Options – Force page or post lockdown. Page unlocks and can be accessed only when users agree to your terms.
- Additional Features – More features get added to this plugin with each new version.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu item is added to your dashboard menu …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Menu)
This lets you create, edit and view legal pages from your admin area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Settings)
You can easily create legal pages for different types of websites, such as business websites with products, affiliate sites, AdSense sites, etc …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Create different legal pages)
You can also choose from various built-in legal templates …
(WP Legal Pages – 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
To learn more about the benefits of using this plugin, visit the plugin website:
Compliance Bar – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
complete website compliance and disclaimer solution …
Go here to learn more:
Legal Suite Pro
(Legal Suite Pro Plugin)
Legal Suite Pro Plugin For WordPress 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 – 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. 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.
For more information, go here:
If using the services of legal experts to create your online legal documentation is out of your budget, then consider implementing some basic form of legal protection on your website until you can afford to hire the services of a lawyer.
We want your website to be legally protected!
Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator tool below, or consider choosing one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using ready-made legal content, or plugins as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator Software)
Legal Pages Generator Software quickly generates necessary 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 engage in any form of commercial activity online (or are planning to), you need to ensure that your site stays compliant with regulatory agencies and the guidelines and terms of service (TOS) required by third-party products and services that you may be promoting or recommending online. Your internet presence must comply with a whole range of regulations, many of which you may not be aware of.
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?
Legal 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 legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with all legal requirements pertaining to your specific business.
Legal Resources And References
Below is a useful list of websites we recommend you visit to help you better understand what your site may require to comply and meet its 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
- 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
- US Patent and Trademark Office
- US Copyright Office
Additionally …
- Google 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 why it’s important to have a compliant website. Use the information above to quickly add legal pages to your 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)