We Must Comply…….

….. or must we? And with what? Well as you may or may not know, there are various regulations that govern the use of Internet marketing and, more recently, websites in general. Precisely to what extent and if at all may depend on the country in which you live, but some Internet Marketers may not bother about compliance or even know that certain regulations even exist! So I’ve put together some information and resources here that hopefully you will find useful. *DISCLAIMER* This information is for reference use only. I am not an expert and neither advise or endorse that you follow any particular course of action laid out in the information below. The responsibility lies in you, the individual, to follow the guidelines of whatever information is relevant to your personal situation and to ensure compliance in the required areas and in the required way. All I am doing here is providing you with some information that may assist you in determining how you best need to ensure your own compliance in the correct, legal way. And please, if anyone can add any other relevant information or can advise in a professional capacity, please leave a comment below.

Privacy Policy, Disclosure Policy and Earnings Disclaimer

If you have a website for your Internet Marketing business then you may need to ensure that you include information regarding your privacy policy, a statement regarding any financial compensation you may receive through links adverts, etc and a disclaimer with regards to any claims of potential earnings.

Click here to download the FTC’s Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising

Click here for some information about the FTC’s Endorsement Guides

Click here to watch a webinar of a Q&A with Rich Cleland of the FTC about bloggers, affiliates, advertisers and more

Click here to go to an informative blog post by Geno Prussakov

I haven’t used it myself, but a lot of marketers use and recommend DisclosurePolicy.org to generate policies for you

One thing I do use myself is an absolutely amazing WordPress plugin called Paper Template.  This is an awesome piece of kit and although it’s not specifically designed for creating policies it does come with some editable ones built-in and the facility to create your own if you wish. The main purpose of this software is to create squeeze pages, sales pages in a practically push-button fashion right from within your WP dashboard. Even if you’re not bothered about nor need the policy page part of the plugin I would highly recommend that you get this!

Cookie Policy

Although, in my opinion and that of practically every person I have come across who has talked about it, this ruling is an absolute waste of time and does nothing other than potentially hurt online business, it is a legal requirement. Again, you will need to ascertain what specific level of responsibility you need to take in your country, but there are lots of WP plugins that will easily do the job. The one that I am currently using on this site (my being in the UK) is UK Cookie Consent. You can download the plugin from the WordPress Directory here. *Note: The plugin will automatically generate a cookie policy page for you. However some users report a problem with linking to the page and have reportedly not had any success in obtaining support from the maker of the plugin. I, too, had this problem but I worked out how to fix it. If you try this plugin and find that you run into this problem then just leave a comment below and I’ll try to help you get it working 🙂

Click here to get some useful information from the Information Commissioner’s Office about the UK requirements. Again, you should check regarding what the specific requirements are in your locality.

I hope all of that is useful to you. This information here is by no means exhaustive and, as I said, I am not an expert and I take no responsibility for any action you may or may not take as a result of the information and resources provided here or for any consequences that arise from such action or inaction. It is up to each individual/business to ensure their own lawful and legal compliance.

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