Tag: Legal Pages

One of the worst predicaments a business owner can find themselves in is to be on the wrong side of the law.

As the digital era continues to grow at an extraordinary rate and the rules constantly change, it’s vitally important to stay informed about what’s going on and make sure that your website or blog remains compliant, especially if having an online presence is important in the success of your overall business strategy.

New laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you promote anything on your website for commercial gain, then you will need to follow certain disclosure guidelines to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection departments, such as the US-based Better Business Bureau (BBB). Do a search online for “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.

(Better Business Bureau Website)

These laws affect several online business categories, including:

• Any form of advertising, e.g. contextual ads
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketers
• Product Creation
• Bloggers
• etc.

Without legal pages on your website (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, financial disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank will not let you list your digital products on their network, PayPal could shut down your account, Facebook could suspend your applications, and you won’t be allowed to promote a range of advertising or online merchant networks.

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

This article explains why it’s important to have a legally compliant website and how to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress site.

Is Your Site Breaking The Law?

Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we do not offer legal advice in this article. Do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with all laws wherever you do business.

Why It’s Important To Make Your Website Compliant

Consider for a moment what would happen to your business if the situations below were to take place:

• A customer has a cardiac arrest after purchasing your online fitness program.
• The skin care lotion you sell as an affiliate gives someone skin rashes.
• You’ve informed subscribers that you will not sell their information, but you have not informed them exactly what you will do with their details.
• Someone steals your content and publishes it on their site.
• There is no statement on your website or blog making visitors aware that you’re an affiliate for the product you’re selling that you could earn a sales commission if visitors decide to buy through your link.
• You don’t spell out the terms and conditions of your refund/return policies.
• A visitor claims the testimonials on your site are fake and decides to sue you because of it.
• You did not disclose in a product review that you received a free copy of the product.
• Your site publishes adult content and you did not take sufficient measures to restrict access by underage persons.

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 personal information (including credit card info to complete a debt reduction offer. Cost = $390,000.
• A social networking app developer copped a whopping $800,000 fine for collecting personal information without users’ knowledge and consent – including storing private information about children.
• Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape UIDs. Many internet 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 websites chosen at random, more than 90% were in violation of at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had infringed 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 with warnings 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 be exposed to the risks of non-compliance?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• PPA (Pay Per Action) Marketer
• MLM Networker
• Affiliate Product Marketer
• AdWords User
• Niche Marketer
• Amazon Associate
• EBay Seller
• Publisher Of Adult Content
• Freelancer, Consultant Or Coach
• Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online

It’s vitally important to ensure that your website or blog complies with all laws and regulations governing the use of your site, wherever you are located.

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

Big companies and government agencies that regulate trade in many countries emphasize the need and importance of complying with the terms and policies of service providers.

You must let your site users know that your website complies will all legal requirements and professional guidelines. This not only increases trust and buyer confidence in your website, it’s also a requirement of most companies you engage with.

Here are just some examples:

Google requires websites to display certain information if using many of their services or product features. This includes Google Analytics …

(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)

Monetizing your sites using Google AdSense advertising …

(Google AdSense ads policy requirements)

And even promoting your products or services via Google AdWords …

(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)

If you sell information-based products through merchants such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant sites, you will need to add legal pages before they will approve your products for sale in their network …

(Policy requirements for vendors using ClickBank)

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

(Federal Trade Commission – consumer policies and regulations)

New FTC Regulations Require Your Website To Comply

New FTC regulations governing the conduct of doing business online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online will easily reveal that many sites are unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As has happened in the past, this often prompts the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute website owners 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. we strongly recommend protecting your business interests by making sure that your site is compliant with all FTC regulations.

You can find many resources sites for businesses that can provide guidelines and examples for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help your business meet FTC requirements. We provide a number of references at the end of this article …

(Structuring your disclaimers and disclosures correctly is important to avoid running foul of the law)

Don’t Forget Social Media Applications

If you plan to develop applications that will integrate with your website, you will also be required to provide social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and many others with information about your legal pages …

(Facebook apps also require compliance)

• If you are unsure as to whether you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of service providers like Google, Facebook, etc., then it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
• If you are considering promoting services or products online via affiliate marketing, or generating revenue 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 are required to display on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements - don’t risk having your accounts terminated.
• If you’ve ever wondered whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to take proper precautions to protect yourself and your business interests.

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

Essential Legal Pages You Should Include In Your Website

If your website or blog is falling short in aspects of compliance, then this section will help you.

Adding the following compliance pages to your website should keep you out of trouble with most regulatory authorities and 3rd-party service providers, and avoid potential legal issues):

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

In addition to the pages above, you may want to look into including any of the following pages if applicable:

• Affiliate Agreement (e.g. if you provide an affiliate program)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Earnings Disclaimer
• External Linking Policy
• Health Disclaimers (e.g. if your website provides general information about health or medical areas)
• Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
• Media Terms Of Use (e.g. if you allow users to download videos or audio files on your site)

Types Of Disclosure Pages

Adding correct disclosure information to your site is important. For example:

• No Material Connection – This lets site users be aware that you will not receive any kind of compensation for writing the post.
• Affiliate Links – Lets users be aware that you will be compensated if they purchase through your affiliate links.
• Review/Sample Copy – Lets readers know that you have received a sample or review copy of the product or service by the author or product developer.
• Sponsored Post – Lets users know that you were 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 Compliance Pages To Your Website

Ideally, you will have your lawyer prepare the content of your legal documents. Once you have this prepared, there are several ways to include them in your website.

Uploading Legal Pages Manually To Your Website

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

We recommend adding a legals folder to your web server and uploading your legal pages to this folder (e.g. via FTP) …

(Upload legal pages to your web server via FTP)

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

(WordPress Menu)

Make sure that your legal pages are kept up-to-date and clearly accessible to all site visitors. You can add links to your legal pages to your WordPress sidebar (or place them in the footer of your website or blog) to ensure that users have access to legal information from every web page …

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

To learn more about adding links to pages on your WP sidebar, see this step-by-step tutorial:

• How To Add Widgets To Your WordPress Blog Sidebar

Templates

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

Find Legal Forms

(Find Legal Forms)

More info:

• Find Legal Forms

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

Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages

(Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages)

These templates feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with search and replace to insert your own business name and URL, 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
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Service & Conditions of Use.

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 these to your web server as described previously.

For more information, go here:

• Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages – Legal Templates

Plugins – Legal Pages

In addition to using copy & paste templates, another option for adding legal pages to your website is to use WordPress plugins.

Here are some great plugins for WordPress sites worth looking into:

WordPress Legal Pages

(WordPress Plugin – WP Legal Pages)

If you don’t want to spend time creating legal web pages manually, then consider choosing WP Legal Pages instead …

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

Some of the benefits of using the WordPress Legal Pages plugin are:

• Pre-written Legal Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal templates created by a team of 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 mouse clicks.
• Fully Customizable Pages – Includes customizable and easy to edit legal form templates (e.g. Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
• Easy To Edit Pages – Full WYSIWYG editor lets you edit legal pages like any other page on your site.
• Custom Shortcodes – You can add shortcodes to any of your WordPress pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your content when published.
• 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 lock down. Page unlocks and can be accessed only when users agree to your legal terms.
• New Features – More features are being added to this plugin with each new version.

After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a menu item will display inside your main dashboard area …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Legal Pages Menu)

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

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

The plugin gives you the option of creating legal pages for different types of sites, such as business websites, niche websites, e-commerce sites, etc …

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

You can also choose from several pre-written legal templates …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Pre-configured 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, go here:

• WP Legal Pages

Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Plugin For WordPress

total website compliance & disclaimer solution …

For more details go here:

• Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

Legal Suite Pro Plugin

(Legal Suite Pro)

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

For more details, go here:

• Legal Suite Pro Plugin

If using the services of legal experts to create your legal pages is currently out of your budget, then consider at least implementing some basic kind of legal protection on your site until you can afford legal services.

We want your business to be protected!

Download the Legal Pages Generator tool below (for FREE!), or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using ready-made legal templates, or plugins as described in the section below.

(Legal Pages Generator Software)

Legal Pages Generator Software allows you to quickly generate basic legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.

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As stated earlier, if you engage in any form of business online, it’s important that your site remains compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business practices online and the guidelines and terms of service for third-party sites that you may be promoting or selling online. If your website isn’t compliant with laws intended to protect consumers, 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 in this article. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert to ensure that your website is compliant with all legal requirements in your country or region.

Resources

Here is a time-saving list of additional sites we recommend you visit to better understand what may be required of your site to stay compliant 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
• 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

Plus …

• Analytics Help – Policy requirements for Google Analytics Advertising Features
• Google AdSense Program Policies Explained
• 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 the importance of having a compliant website. Use the information above to quickly add legal pages to your WordPress website.

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