Category: Management Plugins

As a business owner, you do not want to find yourself breaking any laws, rules or regulations.

Online laws, regulations, and guidelines were designed to protect consumers and apply to anyone 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 won’t protect you from being slapped with a legal notice.

Recent laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their sites clearly state that if you plan to promote anything on your site for profit, then you must follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection agencies, such as the Better Business Bureau, also referred to as the BBB. Search online for information about “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.

(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program – BBB)

The introduction of these new laws has implications for several online business categories, including:

• Any kind of advertising, like Google AdWords or AdSense
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Product Creators
• Bloggers
• etc.

If there are no legal pages on your site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank won’t approve digital products for sale, PayPal could suspend your account, Facebook will suspend your web applications, and you won’t be allowed to promote a number of advertising and affiliate merchant networks.

If your digital presence is not compliant, you could also end up facing a number of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!

The purpose of this article is to make you aware that your website may be required to comply with legal requirements in accordance with the laws that govern business practices online, the importance of being compliant with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you may be offering on your website, and that there are solutions that can help your websites become fully compliant, such as the plugins listed further below.

Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?

Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice on this website. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with all laws pertaining to your specific business.

Why Making Your Website Compliant Is Important

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

• Someone has a heart attack after they use your online fitness workout.
• The skin care creams you promote as an affiliate gives someone skin rashes.
• Your opt-in list displays a statement that lets subscribers know that you will not sell their information, but you haven’t described exactly what you will do with their details.
• Someone steals your content and publishes it on their own website.
• You have not divulged to your site visitors that you’re an affiliate for the product you are marketing that you could earn financial benefits if they purchase it.
• You have not spelled out the conditions of your return policies.
• Online visitors claim your testimonials are misleading and try to sue you as a result.
• You did not disclose in a product review that you were given a free copy of the product.
• Your website contains adult content and you have not taken sufficient measures to restrict access by underaged persons.

Consider now these documented examples of costly compliance breaches:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would have to give up personal information (including credit card information to complete a debt reduction offer. In addition to a hefty $390,000 fine, he was also ordered to give a copy of the judgement to everyone they do business with for the next 20 years — including employees.
• A social networking app developer copped 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 marketers took a risk 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% were in violation of at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were in breach of at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% had broken 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 notices or lose access to the Google program with the infringement, 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 or PPA Marketer
• Multilevel Marketer
• Affiliate Promoter
• AdWords Advertiser
• Product Publisher
• Amazon Affiliate
• e-Commerce Store Owner
• Adult Content Publisher
• Freelancer, Coach or Consultant
• Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online

It’s imperative to ensure that your website or blog is fully compliant with the law.

Compliance With 3rd-Party Companies - ToS, Policies, etc.

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

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

For example:

Google requires you to display legal information when using their products. This includes using services like Google Analytics …

(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)

Earning revenue with your blog using Google AdSense …

(Google AdSense ads policy requirements)

Or promoting your products via Google AdWords …

(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)

If you sell information-based products through companies like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant sites, you will be required to add legal pages before your products are approved for sale in their networks …

(ClickBank – policy requirements)

The Federal Trade Commission also requires that you include clear disclaimers and disclosures to visitors, especially if you plan to use product testimonials or endorsements …

(FTC – consumer guidelines and regulations)

FTC Regulations – Ensuring That Your Site Is Compliant

FTC regulations governing the conduct of doing business online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online reveals that many sites are unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As is already the case, this typically ends up with 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 plan to do any type of business online, therefore, it’s best not to take any chances. Even if your business is not physically located in the U.S. it’s best to protect your business by ensuring that your website is compliant with all FTC guidelines.

Many sites provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your business comply with FTC requirements. See the resources section at the end of this article for more information …

(It’s important to structure your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of the law)

Don’t Forget Social Media Applications

If you are planning to create apps for your site, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others will require you to provide information about your legal pages …

(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)

• If you are unsure whether or not you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of organizations like Google, Facebook, etc., then you most probably are.
• If you plan to promote anything online as an affiliate marketer, or generate revenue with Google AdSense, ads for Amazon or eBay products, or driving visitors to your site using Google AdWords, 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’ve been wondering if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to avoid becoming a magnet for litigation.

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

Common Legal Pages You Should Add To Your Site To Ensure Compliance

If you suspect that your web site falls short in aspects of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.

At its most basic, adding the following compliance pages to your website will help your site keep out of trouble with most consumer protection agencies and 3rd-party providers, and help to avoid possible legal issues):

• About Us
• Contact Us
• Privacy Policy
• Terms And 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:

• Affiliate Agreement (e.g. if you sell products or services through an affiliate program)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Earnings Disclaimer
• External Linking Policy
• Financial Disclaimers (e.g. if your website provides financial content)
• Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
• Audio/Video Terms Of Use (e.g. if you allow users to download videos or audio files on your site)

Types Of Disclosure Pages

Adding correct web content disclosure information is important. For example:

• No Material Connection – Informs readers that you are not being paid for writing the content.
• Affiliate Links – Lets visitors know that you will derive some form of financial or similar form of benefit if they act on your recommendation and purchase through your affiliate links.
• Review/Sample Copy – Lets site users be aware that you have been given a review or sample copy of the product or service you’re reviewing.
• Sponsored Post – Lets visitors be aware that you have been compensated in some way to write the article.
• Third Party Advertising – Informs users 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.

How To Add Legal Pages To Your Website

Ideally, you should consult lawyers and ask them to prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once you have this prepared, there are several ways to include them in your website.

Upload Legal Web Pages Manually To Your Website

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

We recommend adding a legal directory to your server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this directory using FTP …

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

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

(Custom WordPress Menu)

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

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

To learn more about displaying links to pages on your sidebar menu using widgets, refer to this step-by-step tutorial:

• How To Use Widgets In WordPress

Use Store-Bought Templates

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

Find Legal Forms

(FindLegalForms.com)

More info:

• Find Legal Forms

Another option is to download a set of cut & paste legal templates designed by legal attorney Scott Talbert to protect businesses online …

Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages

(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 details, then pasted into your pages.

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

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer: multi-discipline professional disclaimers
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance (This proprietary FTC page accommodates Federal Trade Commission regulations and guidelines that came into effect in 2012)
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Service (ToS) & 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 WordPress page for every legal form you want to add 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 described previously.

To learn more, go here:

• Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages

Legal Page Plugins

In addition to using cut & paste templates, another option is to use a plugin.

Here are some great legal WordPress plugins worth looking into:

WordPress Legal Pages

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress)

If manually creating legal pages for your website seems too time-consuming for you, then consider installing a plugin like WP Legal Pages …

This is not a free plugin, but it’s a reasonably low-priced and well-supported plugin that will 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 WP Legal Pages plugin:

• Pre-written Legal Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal page templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
• Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of your basic legal pages in around 3 minutes with a few clicks of the mouse.
• Fully Customizable Pages – Includes customizable and editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
• Easy To Edit Pages – Content editor lets you edit all legal pages like every other WP page.
• Custom Shortcodes – You can add shortcodes to any of your website or blog pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your content when you publish.
• Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like any other page on your site.
• Forced Options – Force page lockdown. When users agree to your terms, the page unlocks.
• Additional Features – More features are being added to this plugin with each new version.

After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a menu feature will be added to your WP dashboard section …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Legal Pages Menu)

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

(WP Legal Pages – Settings)

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

(WordPress Legal Pages – Page Type)

Choose from a number of pre-written legal templates …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – 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 this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website:

• WP Legal Pages

Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

total website compliance and disclaimer solution …

More info:

• Compliance Bar – WordPress Website Compliance Plugin

Legal Suite Pro Plugin

(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 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 have packaged high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers into a plugin that can be installed quickly on any WordPress powered 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.

Go here for more information:

• Legal Suite Pro Plugin

If using the services of lawyers to create your online legal documentation is out of your budget, then consider implementing at least some basic form of legal protection on your site until you can afford a solicitor.

We want your website to be legally protected!

Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator software below, or consider using one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using legal forms, or a WordPress plugin as described in the section below.

(Legal Pages Generator)

Legal Pages Generator lets you quickly generate necessary legal documents for your website including ToS, Privacy Statement, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and optional Earnings Disclaimer.

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As stated earlier, if you are making money online, you need to ensure that your site stays compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business online and the terms of service and guidelines for third-party products and services that you may be promoting or using online. If your website doesn’t comply with laws intended to protect consumer rights, you’re breaking the law.

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 are not providing legal advice. You are strongly advised to do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with the law wherever your business is based.

Legal Resources & References

Below is a time-saving list of sites we recommend you visit to help you better understand what may be required of your site to remain compliant and meet legal requirements and guidelines:

• Federal Trade Commission 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
• US 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
• Google 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 why it’s important to have a legally compliant website. Use the information provided above to quickly and easily add essential legal pages to your site.

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