Category: Management Plugins

As a business owner, the last thing you want to do is to learn the hard way that you have broken the law.

Internet laws, regulations, and guidelines are designed to protect the rights of consumers and apply to anyone who sells, markets or promotes products or services online. Anyone who owns a website risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about the law won’t prevent you from being slapped with a legal notice.

Recent laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly 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 consumer protection departments, such as the BBB, or Better Business Bureau. Look up “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 kind of advertising, e.g. Google AdWords or AdSense
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketers
• Product Creation
• Bloggers
• etc.

If your site does not display certain pages to visitors (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank won’t allow you to list digital products, PayPal could close down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook could disapprove your web applications, and you won’t be accepted into a number of advertising or online merchant networks.

Additionally, you could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to legal action.

This article explains the importance of having a compliant website and how to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your website or blog using simple and inexpensive methods and solutions.

Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?

Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we do not offer legal advice in this article. You must do your own due diligence and we recommend consulting legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with the law in your country or region.

Why Ensuring That Your Website Is Compliant Is Important

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

• A person has a cardiac arrest after purchasing your online fitness workout.
• The skin care products you sell as an affiliate gives a number of users an adverse reaction.
• You’ve told your subscribers that you won’t sell their information, but you have not spelled out exactly what you’ll do with the information you have collected.
• Someone steals content from your website and puts it up on their website.
• There is no statement on your site letting your site users know that you are an affiliate for the product you’re marketing and could earn a sales commission if they buy via your link.
• You did not spell out the terms and conditions of your refund/return policies.
• A visitor claims that the testimonials on your site are fake and decides to sue you.
• You did not disclose that you have received a free copy of the product you are reviewing.
• Your site publishes adult-related content and you did not take sufficient measures to keep underaged children from accessing it.

Consider now these actual case studies of costly compliance breaches:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would be required to give up their personal information (including credit card details to complete his offer. Cost = $390,000.
• A social networking app developer was slapped with a massive $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 prohibits users from scraping Users IDs. Many internet marketers gambled that they could get away with it and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them 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% were breaking at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had broken at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were in breach of 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 notices or lose access entirely to the Google program they had infringed, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).

Can you see how you could become exposed to the risk of non-compliance?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• CPC (Cost Per Conversion) Marketer
• Multilevel Marketer
• Affiliate Marketer
• AdWords Advertiser
• Product Publisher
• Amazon Associate
• e-Commerce Store Owner
• Adult Content Publisher
• Provider Of Freelance, Coaching Or Consulting Services
• Online Seller Of Any Product Or Service

It’s imperative to ensure that your digital presence has the right legal pages and information accessible to all site visitors.

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

Compliance with 3rd-party companies terms and policies is important.

You must let your visitors know that your website complies with all necessary laws and professional guidelines. This not only increases consumer trust and confidence in your business, it’s also a requirement of most companies you do business with online.

For example:

Google requires your site to display legal information if using their services and product features. This includes using Google Analytics …

(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)

Monetizing your sites using Google AdSense display advertising …

(Google AdSense ads policy requirements)

And even promoting your services or products via Google AdWords …

(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)

If you sell products online via places like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant networks, you will be required to add a number of legal pages to your website before they will approve your products for sale …

(Policy requirements for ClickBank product vendors)

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

(Federal Trade Commission – consumer guidelines and regulations)

New FTC Regulations Require Your Site 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 typically prompts the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute companies in an effort to get other businesses to comply.

If you 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. it’s best to protect your business by making sure that your website complies with all FTC regulations and guidelines.

A number of business resources provide guidelines and examples for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help your site meet FTC requirements. See the 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)

Social Media Apps - Don’t Forget These

If you are planning to develop social networking applications that will integrate with your website, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others will require you to provide access to various legal pages …

(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)

• If you are unsure as to whether you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of organizations like Google, Facebook, etc., it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
• If you plan to promote anything online as an affiliate marketer, or generating revenue online with Google AdSense, Amazon, or eBay advertising, 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 terminated.
• If you’ve been wondering whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to avoid becoming a magnet for litigation.

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

Essential Legal Pages You Should Add To Your Website To Ensure Compliance

If you suspect that your web site is lacking in aspects of compliance, then this section will help you.

At its most basic, adding the following legal pages to your website should keep your business out of trouble with many consumer protection agencies and third-party providers, and help to avoid potential legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “cease and desist” notices):

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

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

• Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you provide information about affiliate products or services)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Earnings Disclaimer
• External Links Policy
• Health Disclaimers (if your website provides health or medical advice)
• 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 correct disclosures to your site. For example:

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

Adding Compliance Pages To Your Website

Ideally, you should consult a 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 include them in your website.

Upload Legal Web Pages To Your Site

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

We recommend creating a legal directory on your server and uploading your legal pages to this directory using FTP …

(Upload legal pages to your web server via FTP)

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

(Custom WordPress Menu Feature)

Where To Display Legal Web Pages On Your Site

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

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

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

• How To Use WordPress Widgets

Legal Templates

You can find attorney-drafted disclosures and downloadable website forms and agreements by searching online, or visiting websites like the ones listed below:

Find Legal Forms

(Find Legal Forms)

More info:

• FindLegalForms.com

Alternatively, you can download a set of website legal templates designed by attorney Scott Talbert …

Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages

(Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages – Website Legal Pages)

These legal pages were written by an attorney and feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with search and replace to add your own business details, then pasted into your web pages.

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

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance
• Privacy Policy: Google, etc.
• Terms of Service (ToS) & Conditions of Use: includes inter- & intra-page redundancy, Contra Proferentem provision, reservation of rights, and exclusive social media admonition.

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

Visit this website to learn more:

• Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages – Legal Templates

WordPress Legal Page Plugins

In addition to using legal templates, another option is to use a plugin.

Here are some great legal WordPress plugins worth looking into:

WordPress Legal Pages Plugin

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin)

If setting up legal pages manually seems too time-consuming for you, then consider choosing a plugin like WordPress Legal Pages instead …

WP Legal Pages is not a free plugin, but it’s a reasonably affordable and well-supported premium plugin that will help make the task of creating and implementing legal pages on your WordPress site a lot easier and save you a great deal of time and effort.

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

• Pre-written Legal Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal page 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 customizable and easily editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms Of Service, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
• Easy To Edit Pages – WYSIWYG editor lets you edit legal pages just like every other WordPress page.
• Shortcodes – You can add shortcodes to your pages and the information will be automatically inserted into your pages when you publish.
• Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like any WP page.
• Forced Options – Force page lock down. When users agree to your legal terms, the page unlocks, giving them access.
• Additional Features – More features are being added to this plugin with every new version.

After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a menu feature will appear in your main WordPress dashboard menu section …

(WP Legal Pages – Menu)

This lets you view, create and edit legal pages from the admin area …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

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

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

Select from several built-in legal templates …

(WP 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

Go here to learn more this useful plugin:

• WP Legal Pages Plugin

Compliance Bar – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress

Compliance Bar is a simple plugin for WordPress users containing over twenty customizable compliance page templates for your digital presence …

Learn more about this plugin here:

• Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

Legal Suite Pro

(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 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. You can have legal pages installed and set up on your site in less than one minute and the plugin licensing is flexible, allowing you to install and use this plugin on all of your websites.

Visit this website to learn more:

• Legal Suite Pro Plugin

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

We want your website to be 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 legal documents, or a legal pages plugin as described in the section below.

(Legal Pages Generator Software)

Legal Pages Generator Software lets you easily generate necessary 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 make money online (or are planning to), it’s important that your site remains compliant with regulatory agencies and the terms of service and guidelines of third-party sites that you may be promoting or advertising online. Your internet presence must comply with various regulations, 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?

Disclaimer: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot provide legal advice on this website. You are strongly advised to do your own due diligence and consult legal experts to ensure that your website fully complies with the law wherever your business is based.

Additional Legal Information

Below is a useful list of sites we recommend you visit to better understand what may be required of your website to stay compliant and meet its legal requirements and guidelines:

• Federal Trade Commission 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

Plus …

• 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 you have found this article useful and that it has helped you understand the importance of having a compliant website. Use the information presented above to quickly and easily add essential legal pages to your WordPress website.

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