Tag: WordPress Legal Pages

If you plan to grow a successful business online, the last thing you want to do is to learn the hard way that you have done something illegal.

Internet laws and regulations were designed to protect consumers and apply to anyone who sells, markets or promotes products or services online. Every website owner risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about legal requirements will not prevent someone from taking legal action against you.

Recent laws introduced in 2014 to regulate how businesses promote advertising on their websites state that if you promote anything on your website for profit, you will need to follow certain disclosure guidelines to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory agencies, such as the US-based Better Business Bureau, also known as 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)

These laws has ramifications for various online business activities, including:

• Any form of advertising, including PPC advertising
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Product Creators
• Bloggers
• etc.

Without legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank will not approve your digital products on their network, PayPal may suspend your account, Facebook will disapprove your web applications, and you will not be allowed into various advertising or online merchant networks.

If your website is not in compliance, 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 are subject to legal requirements according to laws that govern businesses online, the importance of maintaining compliance with the terms of service of external providers whose products or services you may be selling online, and that there are plugin-based solutions for WordPress site owners that can help your websites become fully compliant, such as the plugins that we list further below.

Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?

Legal Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot provide legal advice. You must carry out your own due diligence and we recommend consulting legal experts about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with the law wherever your business operates in.

Why Having A Compliant Website Is Important

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

• A person has a cardiac arrest after using your online fitness workout.
• The skin cream you promote as an affiliate marketer gives people an allergic reaction.
• You’ve informed subscribers that you won’t sell their information, but you haven’t informed them exactly what you plan to do with their personal details.
• Someone copies your content and publishes it on their own site.
• There is no statement on your website or blog making visitors aware that you are an affiliate for the product you are endorsing that you could earn a financial benefit if they buy it.
• You didn’t spell out the terms and conditions of your refund/return policies.
• Someone claims your testimonials are false and decides to sue you as a result.
• You have not disclosed that you have received a free copy of a product you reviewed.
• Your site includes adult content and you haven’t taken sufficient measures to keep underaged persons from accessing it.

Consider now these actual case studies 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 his offer. In addition to a significant $390,000 fine, they’ve also been ordered to give everyone they do business with for the next 20 years, a copy of the judgement — including employees.
• A social networking app developer was slapped with a massive $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 users from scraping UIDs. Many internet 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 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% had breached at least two 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 easy it is to risk being a target of litigation?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• PPA (Pay Per Action) Marketer
• MLM Networker
• Affiliate Marketer
• AdWords Advertiser
• Info Product Marketer
• Amazon Associate
• e-Commerce Store Owner
• Publisher Of Adult Content
• Freelancer, Coach or Consultant
• Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online

it’s important to make sure that your website or blog has the right legal pages and information displayed to your site users.

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

Complying with 3rd-party companies 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 increases trust and confidence in your site, it’s also a requirement of most companies you will do business with online.

Here are just some examples:

Google requires you to display certain information if using their services. This includes Google Analytics …

(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)

Monetizing your WordPress sites using Google AdSense advertising …

(Google AdSense - policy requirements)

And even promoting your business through Google AdWords …

(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)

If you plan to sell information-based products with companies like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant networks, you will be required to add a number of legal pages to your site before they will approve your products for sale in their networks …

(Policy requirements for using ClickBank)

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires you to add clear disclaimers and disclosures to visitors, especially if you plan to use product testimonials or endorsements …

(Federal Trade Commission – consumer guidelines and regulations)

New FTC Regulations Require Your Site To Be Compliant

New FTC regulations governing the conduct of businesses online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online reveals that many sites are unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As has already been the case, this often ends up with the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting website owners in an effort to get other businesses to comply.

If you plan to do any type of money-making activity 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 ensuring that your site complies with all 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 resources at the end of this article …

(Word your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)

Social Media Apps Also Have Compliance Requirements

If you plan to create apps for your website, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others require you to provide information about your 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 sites like Google, Facebook, etc., then you most probably are.
• If you plan to promote products or services online as an affiliate marketer, or making money online with Google AdSense, ads for Amazon or eBay products, 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 all Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts suspended.
• If you have ever wondered if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to act now and take proper precautions to protect yourself and your business interests.

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

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

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

At its most basic, adding the following compliance pages to your site should help your business keep out of trouble with many regulatory agencies and third-party providers, and help to avoid possible legal issues):

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

As well as the above pages, you may want to consider adding any of these legal pages if applicable:

• Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you provide information about affiliate products or services)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Earnings Disclaimer
• External Links Policy
• Health Disclaimers (e.g. if your website or blog provides general information about health or medical areas)
• Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
• Media Terms Of Use (if you allow media downloads on your site)

Disclosure Pages – Types

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

• No Material Connection – This lets site users be aware that you will not receive compensation for writing the article.
• Affiliate Links – Informs visitors that you may be compensated if they act on your recommendation and purchase through your affiliate links.
• Sample Or review Copy – Disclosure that informs site users that you have received a sample or review copy of the product or service.
• Sponsored Post – Lets site users know that you have been compensated in some way to write the content.
• 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.

Adding Legal Content To Your Website

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

Uploading Legal Web Pages Manually To Your Site

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

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

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

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

(WordPress Menu)

Where To Display Legal Web Pages On Your Site

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

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

If you need help displaying links to pages on your WP sidebar using widgets, see this step-by-step tutorial:

• Configuring Widgets On Your WordPress Sidebar

Legal Templates

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

Find Legal Forms

(Find Legal Forms – Legal forms)

For more details, go here:

• Find Legal Forms

Another option is to purchase a package of legal templates designed by legal attorney Scott Talbert to help businesses protect themselves online …

Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages

(Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages)

Cut & Paste website legal templates were written by an attorney and feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with simple search and replace to insert your own business details, then pasted into your web pages.

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

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer: multi-discipline professional disclaimers
• DMCA Compliance
• Federal Trade Commission Compliance (This proprietary FTC page reflects FTC guidelines brought into effect in 2012)
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Service (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 every legal form you want added 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.

Go here for more information:

• Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Page Templates

Plugins – Legal Pages

In addition to using legal templates, you can keep things really simple using plugins.

Here are some legal WordPress plugins that you may be interested in checking out:

WP Legal Pages Plugin

(WordPress Plugin – WP Legal Pages)

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

WP Legal Pages is not a free plugin, but it’s an affordable and well-supported plugin that will make the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website a lot easier and save you a great deal of time and effort.

Here are just some of the benefits of using the WP Legal Pages:

• 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 – Set up most of the basic legal pages you will need in around 3 minutes with just a few mouse clicks.
• Customizable Pages – Includes customizable and easy to edit legal form templates (e.g. Terms Of Service, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
• Easy To Edit Pages – Content editor lets you edit legal pages like any other WP page.
• Shortcodes – Add shortcodes to any of your pages and the information will then be automatically inserted into your content when you publish.
• Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like any other WP page.
• Forced Options – Force page or post lock down. Page unlocks only when user agrees to your terms.
• Additional Features – New plugin features get added when new versions are released.

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

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Menu)

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

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings Area)

With WPLegal Pages, you have the option of creating legal pages for different types of sites, such as business websites, review sites, AdSense sites, etc …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Page Type)

Select from several built-in legal templates …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Pre-configured 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

Go here to learn more this plugin:

• WordPress Legal Pages

Compliance Bar Plugin – WP Website Compliance Plugin

Compliance Bar is a total compliance and disclaimer solution for your site …

Learn more about this plugin here:

• Compliance Bar – WP Website 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 And Conditions
• 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. Your legal pages can be 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.

For more information, go here:

• Legal Suite Pro

If hiring lawyers to create your legal documentation is currently out of your budget, then consider implementing at least some kind of legal protection on your website until you can afford to hire a solicitor.

We want your business to be legally safe!

Download the Legal Pages Generator tool below (it’s FREE!), or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-drafted legal forms, or plugins - see section below.

(Legal Pages Generator)

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

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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you engage in any form of business online, it’s important that your website is found to comply with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done and any terms of service (TOS) and guidelines for third-party sites that you may decide to promote or endorse online. If your website isn’t compliant 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, please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot provide legal advice. We strongly advise you to do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert to ensure that your website is compliant with all legal requirements concerning your specific business.

Resources

Below is a useful list of additional sites we suggest you visit to better understand what your business requires to comply and meet legal requirements and guidelines:

• Federal Trade Commission Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
• FTC 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
• 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 provided above to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website or blog.

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