Category: Management Plugins

If you do any kind of business online, the last thing you want is to find yourself on the wrong side of the law.

Online laws and regulations were designed to protect consumers and apply to any person who sells, markets or promotes goods and services online. Every website owner risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about legal requirements will not excuse you from being slapped with a legal notice.

New laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you plan to promote anything on your website for profit, you need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory departments, such as the Better Business Bureau, also referred to as the BBB. Do a search online for “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.

(BBB – Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)

The introduction of these new laws affect several business categories, including:

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

Without certain legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, financial disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank or JVZoo won’t let you list your digital products for sale, PayPal could suspend your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook will disapprove your applications, and you won’t be allowed to promote a range of advertising or online marketing networks.

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

The purpose of this guide is to help make you aware that your website(s) are required to comply with certain legalities, the importance of complying with the terms of service of external providers whose services or products you may be selling online, and that there are solutions for WordPress site owners that can help your site become fully compliant, such as the tools listed further below.

Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?

Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we do not offer legal advice. 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 laws pertaining to your business.

Why Having A Compliant Website Is Important

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

• Someone suffers a heart attack after purchasing your online fitness program.
• The skin care lotion you sell as an affiliate marketer gives someone an adverse reaction.
• Your opt-in list provides a statement that lets subscribers know that you won’t sell their information, but you haven’t clearly informed them what you plan to do with their personal details.
• Someone steals content from your site and publishes it on their own website.
• You haven’t advised visitors that you are an affiliate for the product you’re selling that you may receive a financial benefit if visitors buy it.
• You don’t spell out the terms and conditions of your refund or return policies.
• A visitor claims that your testimonials are fake and tries to sue you.
• You did not disclose that you were given a free copy in a product review.
• Your website publishes adult-related content and you didn’t take sufficient measures to keep underage children from accessing it.

Consider too these real examples of costly compliance breaches:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would be required to give up their personal information to complete his offer. Cost = $390,000.
• A social networking app developer copped a massive $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 prohibits using software that scrapes UIDs. Many marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
• An independently-conducted 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% were breaking at least two 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 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 easy it is to risk becoming exposed to non-compliance?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• CPA Marketer
• Multilevel Marketer
• Affiliate Promoter
• AdSense Publisher
• Product Publisher
• Amazon Associate
• EBay Seller
• Adult Content Publisher
• Freelancer, Coach or Consultant
• Online Seller Of Any Service Or Product

it’s important to make sure that your website remains fully compliant with the law.

Complying With 3rd-Party Services Terms And Policies

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

You are required to let your site visitors know that your business complies with legal requirements and recommended guidelines. This not only improves trust and confidence in your website, it’s also required by most companies you will interact with.

For example:

Google requires your site to display certain information if using their products. This includes using services such as Google Analytics …

(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)

Making money online with your site using Google AdSense online advertising …

(Google AdSense advertising policy requirements)

Or promoting your products using Google AdWords …

(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)

If you plan to sell information products with places like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant networks, you will need to add legal pages to your site before they will approve your products for sale in their networks …

(Policy requirements for vendors selling through ClickBank)

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires that you include clear disclaimers and policies to visitors, especially if you plan to sell products with the aid of testimonials or product endorsements …

(FTC – consumer guidelines and regulations)

FTC Regulations Require Your Website To Comply

FTC regulations governing how business is conducted online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online reveals that many websites are 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 plan to do any kind of money-making activity online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business is not located in the U.S. we strongly recommend protecting your business interests by ensuring that your site is compliant with all FTC regulations.

There are many business resource sites that can provide guidelines and examples for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help you comply with FTC requirements. We provide references to some of these at the end of this article …

(Structuring your disclaimers and disclosures correctly is important to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)

Social Media Applications - Don’t Forget These

If you plan to create apps for your site users, you will also be required to provide sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many others with access to your legal pages …

(Apps that integrate with social networking sites also require compliance)

• If you are unsure as to whether or not you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of sites like Google, Facebook, etc., then assume that you most probably are.
• If you plan to promote services or products on your site using affiliate marketing, or monetizing your pages with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon ads, 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 - don’t risk having your accounts shut down.
• If you have ever wondered if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to protect yourself and your business interests.

(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party services require you to comply with their policies and guidelines)

Essential Legal Pages To Include In Your Website To Ensure Compliance

If you suspect that your website or blog lacks in terms of compliance, then this section will help you.

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

• About Us Page
• Contact Us
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Disclaimer Pages
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance

In addition to the above pages, you may want to look into adding one or more of these pages where applicable:

• Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you sell or promote affiliate products and services)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Compensation Disclosure
• External Linking Policy
• Financial Disclaimers (e.g. if your website or blog provides general information about financial areas or money-making opportunities)
• Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
• Video/Audio Terms (e.g. if you allow users to download videos or audio files on your site)

Types Of Disclosure Pages

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

• No Material Connection – Informs your readers that you will not receive for writing the content.
• Affiliate Links – Lets visitors be aware that you will be compensated if they purchase through one of your affiliate links.
• Review Or Sample Copy – Informs users that you have received a review or sample copy of the product.
• Sponsored Post – Disclosure that lets users be aware that you were compensated in some way to write the content.
• 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 Content To Your Site

Ideally, you should consult your lawyer or a legal firm and ask them to prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once these have been done, there are several ways to add them to your website.

Uploading Legal Pages To Your Website

If someone prepares and delivers the legal content for you in typical web page formatting (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your site, or have someone upload these pages for you.

We recommend creating a legal directory in your server and uploading your legal pages to this folder (e.g. via FTP) …

(Create a ‘legals’ folder on your web server and upload pages using FTP)

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

(WordPress Menu)

Where To Display Legal Pages On Your Site

Make sure that your legal pages are fully up-to-date and clearly visible to all visitors. You can add these to your sidebar menu (or place them in the footer of your site) so that users can access legal information from all pages …

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

If you need help adding links to pages on your WordPress sidebar or footer, refer to this step-by-step tutorial:

• Using Widgets In WordPress

Templates

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

Find Legal Forms

(FindLegalForms.com)

For more information, go here:

• Find Legal Forms

Another option is to purchase a set of website legal templates drafted by legal attorney Scott Talbert …

Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages

(Scott Talbert’s Legal Pages)

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

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

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance (This proprietary FTC page reflects new FTC guidelines that came into effect in 2012)
• Privacy Policy: Google, etc.
• 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 for each legal form you want added 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 earlier.

More info:

• Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages – Legal Templates

Legal Page Plugins

As well as using copy & paste templates, another option is to use a plugin.

Here are some plugins for WordPress users worth looking into:

WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress

(WordPress Plugin – WP Legal Pages)

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

This plugin is not free, but it’s a reasonably affordable and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your site and save you many headaches.

Some of the reasons to consider using WordPress Legal Pages plugin are:

• Pre-written Templates – Includes 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 need in a few minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
• Fully Customizable Pages – The plugin includes 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 just like any WordPress page.
• Shortcodes – Add shortcodes to any of your WordPress pages and the information will then be automatically inserted into your content when published.
• Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like any other WordPress page.
• Forced Options – Force page lock down. Page unlocks and can be accessed only when users agree to your terms.
• New Features – New plugin features get added when new versions are released.

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

(WordPress Legal Pages – Menu)

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

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Settings Area)

With WPLegal Pages, you can create legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites with products, review websites, e-commerce sites, etc …

(WP Legal Pages – Type of Site drop down menu)

You can also choose from a number of built-in legal templates …

(WP Legal Pages – 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

To learn more about this plugin, go here:

• WordPress Legal Pages Plugin

Compliance Bar – WordPress Website Compliance Plugin

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

For a detailed review of this plugin go here:

• Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Compliance Plugin

Legal Suite Pro

(Legal Suite Pro)

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 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 powered site. Your legal pages can be installed and set up on your site in one minute or less and the license allows you to install and use the plugin on all of your sites (even sites that you decide to sell).

More information:

• Legal Suite Pro Plugin

If hiring lawyers to create your online legal documentation is out of your budget, consider implementing at least some basic form of legal protection on your website until you can afford to hire the services of a legal expert.

We want your website to be legally safe!

Download the Legal Pages Generator software below (for FREE!), or consider choosing one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using legal templates, or plugins as described in the section below.

(Legal Pages Generator Software)

Legal Pages Generator Software allows you to easily generate necessary legal documents for your website including ToS, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and optional Earnings Disclaimer.

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As stated earlier, if you do any type of business online (or plan to), you need to make sure that your site remains compliant with regulatory agencies and any guidelines and terms of service (TOS) required by third-party services and products that you may decide to promote or advertise online. If your website isn’t compliant with laws intended to protect the rights of consumers, 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, please note that we are not lawyers and we do not offer legal advice. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with all legal requirements concerning your specific business.

Legal Information

Here is a useful list of websites we suggest you visit to better understand what may be required of your site to stay compliant and meet its legal requirements and guidelines:

• FTC Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
• FTC 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
• United States Copyright Office

Plus …

• 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

Hopefully, this article has helped you understand the importance of having a legally compliant website. Use the information presented above to quickly and easily add legal pages to your WordPress website or blog using simple and inexpensive solutions.

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