Tag: Legal Pages

One of the worst situations you can find yourself in as a website owner is to break the law.

As digital business continues to grow at an extraordinary rate and the rules of the game constantly change, it’s vitally important to stay informed about what’s happening and make sure that your site remains legal, especially if your online presence is an integral aspect of your business strategy.

New laws introduced in 2014 to regulate how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you plan to promote anything on your site for profit, then you need to follow certain disclosure guidelines to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection agencies, such as the (US based) BBB, or Better Business Bureau. Look up “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.

(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program – BBB)

These laws has legal implications for various business categories, including:

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

If your site does not display certain legal pages (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, financial disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank or JVZoo won’t allow you to list digital products, PayPal could suspend your account, Facebook could suspend your applications, and you won’t be allowed to promote most advertising and online marketing networks.

If your web presence is not in compliance, 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 help make you aware that your website(s) may be required to comply with certain legalities in accordance with the laws that govern business practices online, the importance of remaining compliant with the terms of service of external providers whose services or products you may be endorsing online, and that there are solutions that can help your online properties become more compliant, such as the plugins discussed further below.

Does Your Site Comply With All Legal Requirements?

Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we do not provide legal advice on this website. You must carry out your own due diligence and we recommend consulting legal experts about the best way of ensuring that your website fully complies with all laws wherever your business is located.

Why Making Your Website Compliant Is Important

Are you at risk? Consider for a moment what could happen to your business in the following scenarios:

• A customer suffers a cardiac arrest after purchasing your online workout program.
• The skin care creams you promote as an affiliate gives a number of users an allergic reaction.
• Your opt-in list provides a statement informing prospective subscribers that you will not sell their information, but you haven’t clearly informed them what you’ll do with it.
• Someone steals content from your site and puts it up on their own website.
• There is no statement on your website letting your site visitors know that you are an affiliate for the product you’re promoting that you could derive a commission if visitors purchase it.
• You didn’t spell out the terms of your refund policies.
• Your visitors claim the testimonials on your site are fake and decide to sue you because of it.
• You did not disclose that you have received a free copy in your product review.
• Your website contains adult-related information and you haven’t taken appropriate measures to keep underaged children from accessing it.

Consider also the following 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 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 prohibits using software that scrapes Users IDs. Many marketers gambled that they could get away with it and lost. Their accounts were shut down, resulting 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 broken at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were in violation of at least two of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were breaking 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 cautions 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 you could easily become exposed to the risks of litigation?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• CPA (Cost Per Action) or CPC (Cost Per Conversion) Marketer
• Network Marketer
• Affiliate Product Promoter
• AdWords Advertiser
• Niche Publisher
• Amazon Affiliate
• EBay Seller
• Publisher Of Adult Content
• Provider Of Freelance, Coaching Or Consulting Services
• Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online

It’s imperative to make sure that your website has the right legal pages and information accessible to your site users.

Complying With Third-Party Services

Leading online companies and government agencies that regulate trade in various countries emphasize the need of observing the terms and policies of 3rd-party service providers.

You must let your site users know that your website complies with all necessary legal requirements and professional guidelines. This not only increases consumer trust and confidence in your business, it’s also a requirement of many companies you interact with.

For example:

Google requires your site to display legal information if using many of their services or features. This includes Google Analytics …

(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)

Monetizing your websites using Google AdSense …

(Google AdSense ads - policy requirements)

Or promoting your services via Google AdWords …

(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)

If you plan to sell products online using merchants such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant networks, you will be required to add a number of legal pages before your products are approved for sale in their network …

(Policy requirements for using ClickBank)

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

(Federal Trade Commission – consumer policies and regulations)

New 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 business are unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As documented on their website, this often ends up with the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting site owners 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 is not located in the U.S. you should protect your business interests by ensuring that your site complies with all FTC regulations.

Various online resources provide guidelines and examples for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help your business meet FTC requirements. See the resources section at the end of this article for more information …

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

Social Media Applications Also Require Compliance

If you plan to create apps for your site, you will also be required to provide social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many 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 organizations like Google, Facebook, etc., then assume that you most probably are.
• If you are considering promoting products or services online using affiliate marketing, or make money online with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon advertising, or using Google AdWords 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 all Terms Of Service and policy requirements - don’t risk having your accounts shut down.
• If you’ve been wondering if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to take proper precautions to avoid becoming a litigation magnet.

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

What Legal Pages Do You Need To Add To Your Website To Be Insured Against Legal Compliance Issues?

If your website falls short in aspects of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.

At its most basic, adding the following legal pages to your site will keep your business out of trouble with most regulatory agencies and external service providers, and even help to avoid potential legal issues):

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

Additionally, you may want to look into including one or more of the following pages:

• Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you promote or sell affiliate products or services)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Compensation Disclosure
• External Linking Policy
• Health Disclaimers (e.g. if your website or blog provides general health or medical content)
• Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
• Use Of Media (if you allow users to download videos or audio files on your site)

Types Of Disclosure Pages

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

• No Material Connection – This lets your visitors know that you will not receive for writing the content.
• Affiliate Links – Discloses to your readers that you will be compensated if they purchase through your affiliate link.
• Review/Sample Copy – Informs readers that you have received a review or sample copy of the product by the author or product developer.
• Sponsored Post – Discloses to users that you were compensated in some form to write the article.
• Third Party Advertising – Lets your visitors know 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 display prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.

How To Add Legal Pages To Your WordPress Site

Ideally, you will consult a lawyer 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.

Uploading Legal Web Pages To Your Site

If someone prepares 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 in your web server and uploading your legal pages to this directory via FTP …

(Upload legal pages to your web server using FTP)

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

(WordPress Menu)

Displaying Legal Web Pages On Your Site

After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are kept up-to-date and clearly accessible to all site visitors. You can insert links to your legal pages into your sidebar menu (or the footer section of your website) so that visitors have access to the information from all your site’s pages …

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

To learn more about displaying links to pages on your sidebar and footer using widgets, see this tutorial:

• Adding And Configuring WordPress Widgets In Your Blog

Templates

You can find attorney-prepared downloadable forms and agreements just by searching online, or by going to sites like the ones shown below:

Find Legal Forms

(FindLegalForms.com)

Visit this site for more information:

• FindLegalForms.com

Alternatively, you can purchase a package of cut & paste legal templates created by legal attorney Scott Talbert …

Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages

(Website Legal Pages)

These legal pages feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with a quick search and replace to add your own details, then pasted into your pages.

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

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer: multi-discipline professional disclaimers
• DMCA Compliance
• Federal Trade Commission Compliance (This proprietary FTC page accommodates new FTC guidelines that came into effect on March 2012)
• Privacy Policy
• 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 WordPress page for every 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 web server as described previously.

Go here for more information:

• Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages – Legal Templates

WordPress Plugins – Legal Pages

As well as using templates, another option is to use plugins.

Here are some legal plugins for WordPress-powered sites you should check out:

WP Legal Pages Plugin

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress)

If manually setting up legal pages for your website feels too time-consuming for you, then consider installing a plugin like WP Legal Pages instead …

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

Some of the benefits of using WP Legal Pages are:

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

When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu feature will be added to your main dashboard area …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Menu)

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

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

You have the option of easily creating legal pages for different types of websites, such as business websites with products, affiliate websites, AdSense sites, etc …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Type of Site dropdown menu)

You can also choose from several built-in legal templates …

(WP 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 plugin, go here:

• WP Legal Pages Plugin

Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

Compliance Bar is a simple plugin for WordPress-powered websites and blogs that contains over 20 customizable compliance pages for your digital business …

More info:

• Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

Legal Suite Pro Plugin

(Legal Suite Pro)

Legal Suite Pro 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 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 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 less than one minute and the plugin licensing is very flexible, allowing you to install and use the plugin on all of your websites (even sites that you decide to sell or flip).

Go here for more info:

• Legal Suite Pro

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

We want your site to be legally safe!

Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator software below, or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-written legal forms, or a plugin - see section below.

(Legal Pages Generator Software)

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

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As stated earlier, if you do business online (or are planning to), you need to make sure that your site stays compliant with regulatory agencies and the guidelines and terms of service (TOS) of 3rd-party services and products that you may be promoting or endorsing online. If your website doesn’t comply with laws designed 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?

Legal Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice in this article. We strongly advise you 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.

Additional Information

Below is a useful 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:

• FTC 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
• United States Copyright Office

Also …

• 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
• 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 presented above to quickly add essential legal pages to your website using simple and inexpensive legal resources and solutions.

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