Tag: Website Legal Compliance

If you plan to grow a successful business online, the last thing you want is to find out the hard way that you have been operating on the wrong side of the law.

Internet laws are designed to protect consumers and apply to anyone who markets, sells or promotes goods or services online. Every website owner risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about legal requirements won’t protect someone from taking legal action against you.

Recent laws introduced in 2014 that regulate how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you promote anything on your website for commercial gain, you need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection agencies, such as the (US based) BBB, or Better Business Bureau. Search online “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 new laws has legal ramifications for various business categories, including:

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

If your website does not display certain pages (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, earning disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank won’t let you list digital products on their network, PayPal could shut down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook will disapprove web applications, and you won’t be allowed into a range of advertising and affiliate merchant networks.

If your online business is not compliant, you could also face a number of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!

The purpose of this post is to help make you aware that your website may be required to comply with various legalities according to laws that govern your business, the importance of maintaining compliance with the terms of service of other providers whose products or services you may be recommending on your website, and that there are easy solutions that can help your websites become compliant, such as the plugins discussed further below.

Is Your Website Or Blog Breaking Rules Or Regulations?

Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we are not providing legal advice in this article. As stated above, this article is designed only to make you aware that your website may be subject to a number of legal policies in accordance with federal, regional or local laws and regulations governing business practices online and that you may be required to comply with the terms of service of providers whose services or products you endorse

Understanding The Importance Of Making Your Website Compliant

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

• A person has a heart attack after purchasing your online fitness workout.
• The skin care products you sell as an affiliate marketer gives someone who purchases from your link allergic reactions.
• Your opt-in list displays a statement that lets subscribers know that you will not sell their information, but you haven’t clearly spelled out what you will do with it.
• Someone copies your content and publishes it on their website.
• There is no statement on your site letting visitors know that you are an affiliate for the product you’re promoting and will receive a sales commission if visitors buy via your affiliate link.
• You didn’t spell out the terms of your return policies.
• Visitors claim that your testimonials are all fake 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 site contains adult-related content and you did not take sufficient measures to keep underage persons from accessing it.

Consider too 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 information to complete a debt reduction 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 does not allow users to scrape Users IDs. Many marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
• An independently-conducted 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred randomly-chosen websites, more than 90% had breached 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 whose policies they had violated, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).

Can you see how a website owner can easily be exposed to the risk of non-compliance?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• PPA (Pay Per Action) Marketer
• MLM Networker
• Affiliate Promoter
• AdWords Advertiser
• Niche Marketer
• Amazon Affiliate
• e-Commerce Store Owner
• Adult Content Publisher
• Provider Of Freelance, Coaching Or Consulting Services
• Seller Of Any Service Or Product Online

It’s imperative to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your website is fully compliant with the law.

Complying With 3rd-Party Companies

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

You must let your visitors know that your business complies with all necessary legal requirements and recommended guidelines. This not only improves consumer trust and buyer confidence in your website, it’s also required by most companies you will do business with online.

Let’s take a look at some examples:

Google requires websites to display legal information if using many of their products and service. This includes Google Analytics …

(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)

Making money online with your WordPress blog using Google AdSense …

(Google AdSense - policy requirements)

Or promoting your services or products through Google AdWords …

(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)

If you sell information-based products via merchants such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant sites, you will be required to add various legal pages to your website before your products are approved for sale …

(Policy requirements for ClickBank digital product vendors)

The Federal Trade Commission also requires that you display clear disclaimers and policy statements on your website, especially concerning the use of product testimonials or endorsements …

(Federal Trade Commission – consumer guidelines and regulations)

New FTC Regulations Require Your Site To Comply

FTC regulations governing the conduct of doing business online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online will reveal that many sites are unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As has happened in the past, this often prompts the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute site owners in an effort to get other businesses to comply.

If you do any type of money-making activity online, therefore, it’s best not to take any chances. Even if your business does not operate in the U.S. it’s best to protect your business by ensuring that your website is compliant with FTC guidelines.

Various online business resources provide guidelines and examples for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help your business meet FTC requirements. We provide a number of references and links to useful resources at the end of this article …

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

Don’t Forget Social Media Apps

If you plan to develop apps that will integrate with your website, you will also be required to provide 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 service providers 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 generate revenue with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon ads, or use 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 provide on your site to comply with all Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts shut down.
• If you’ve been wondering whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to protect yourself and your website.

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

What Compliance Pages Do You Need To Add To Your Site To Be Compliant?

If your website or blog is lacking in areas of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.

Adding the following compliance pages to your website will help keep your business out of trouble with many regulatory agencies and third-party providers, and help to avoid potential legal issues):

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

As well as the pages above, you may want to look into implementing one or more of the pages listed below if applicable:

• Affiliate Agreement (if you provide an affiliate program)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Earnings Disclaimer
• External Linking Policy
• Financial Disclaimers (e.g. if your website or blog provides money-making advice)
• Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
• Media Terms (e.g. if you allow media downloads on your site)

Types Of Disclosure Pages

Adding the correct type of disclosure to your site is important. For example:

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

Adding Compliance Pages To Your Website

Ideally, you should have a lawyer prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once you have this, there are several ways to include them in your website.

Uploading Legal Pages To Your Site

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

We recommend adding a legals folder to your server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this directory (e.g. using FTP) …

(Upload legal pages to your web server using FTP)

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

(Custom WordPress Menu)

After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are up-to-date and display clearly to all site visitors. You can add these to your sidebar (or place them in the footer section of your site) to ensure that visitors can access legal information from all pages …

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

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

• Adding Widgets To The Sidebar

Legal Templates

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

Find Legal Forms

(Find Legal Forms – Attorney-drafted legal forms)

To learn more, go here:

• FindLegalForms.com

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

Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages

(Website Legal Pages)

Cut & Paste website legal pages 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 business details, then pasted into your pages.

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

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
• DMCA Compliance
• Federal Trade Commission Compliance
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Service & Conditions of Use.

You can either create a new page on your website 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 previously described.

More info:

• Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages

WordPress Legal Page Plugins

In addition to using legal templates, another option for adding legal pages to your site is to use a plugin.

Here are some legal plugins for WordPress-driven websites you may be interested in using:

WordPress Legal Pages

(WP Legal Pages Plugin)

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

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

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

• Built-in 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 around 3 minutes with just a few mouse clicks.
• Customizable Pages – The plugin includes customizable and easy to edit legal form templates (e.g. Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
• Editable Pages – Full WYSIWYG editor lets you edit legal pages just like any other WordPress page.
• Shortcodes – You can add shortcodes to your website or blog pages and the information will then be 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 WP page.
• Forced Options – Force page lockdown. When a user agrees to your terms, the page unlocks.
• New Features – More features get added to this plugin with each new version.

After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu item will be added to your navigation area …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Menu)

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

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Settings Area)

The plugin gives you the option of creating legal pages for different types of sites, such as business websites with products, review websites, AdSense sites, etc …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Create different legal pages)

Select from various pre-configured legal templates …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – 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

Visit this website to learn more this plugin:

• WordPress Legal Pages Plugin

Compliance Bar – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress

Compliance Bar is a simple plugin for WordPress users with over twenty customizable compliance page templates for your online business …

More info:

• Compliance Bar – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress

Legal Suite Pro

(Legal Suite Pro Plugin For WordPress)

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 powered 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 sites (even sites that you decide to sell or flip).

For more details, go here:

• Legal Suite Pro Plugin

If using the services of a lawyer to create your legal documentation is currently out of your budget, consider implementing at least some basic form of legal protection on your website until you can afford professional assistance from a lawyer.

We want your site to be legally protected!

Download the Legal Pages Generator tool below (it’s FREE!), or use one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using legal templates, or a WordPress plugin as described in the section below.

(Legal Pages Generator)

Legal Pages Generator Software quickly generates basic legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Statement, 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 website complies with government legal requirements and any terms of service (TOS) and guidelines provided by third-party sites that you may decide to promote or sell online. If your website isn’t compliant with laws designed to protect 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?

Legal Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts to ensure that your website is compliant with all legal requirements in your country or region.

Resources

Below is a time-saving list of websites we suggest you visit to better understand what your business requires to comply and meet 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
• Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program – 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
• US Copyright Office

Plus …

• 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
• 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 and easily add legal pages to your WordPress site.

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