Welcome to Day 5 of the Internet Marketing Makeover (#31DIMM for short)!
Today we tie up another set of loose ends that we sometimes overlook – isn’t building sites and generating traffic way more exciting than dealing with legal mumbo-jumbo?
But, being in compliance with the law and any advertising programs we’re using is a must to protect our sites, our businesses and ourselves.
Today we’ll cover the legal inclusions, disclosures and updates your sites and your business require.
DAY 05 OBJECTIVE
Ensure your sites are in compliance with the rules and regulations of the advertising programs you’re using and the law.
DAY 05 ASSIGNMENT
Firstly, I will preface this by saying that I am not and will never be a lawyer. I don’t play one on TV and I’m not playing one on the internet. Always check with a lawyer to ensure you’re in compliance with your local and federal regulations for your unique situation, business entity and marketplace.
PRIVACY POLICY
Updated in 2008 (although many folks still aren’t compliant even today), Google’s Asdense Program Policies requires:
AdSense publishers must have and abide by a privacy policy that discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browsers, or using web beacons to collect information as a result of ad serving on your website.
What it means is that you need a privacy policy on any of your sites that display Adsese, and that privacy policy must let visitors know that data about their visits may be collected via cookies.
A Privacy Policy is not a bad idea even if you’re not running Adsense. It’ll sometimes make visitors feel more comfortable navigating and buying from your site – I’m continually surprised at how many hits my Privacy Policy pages get.
For a Wordpress blog, getting up a privacy policy that’s Adsense compliant is easy, there’s even a plugin to help.
Download, install and set up the Easy Privacy Policy for your Wordpress sites, particularly your Adsense sites.
You wouldn’t want to lose your Adsense account for overlooking this little detail!
If you’re not using Wordpress or you would like more flexibility and customization of your privacy policy, FreePrivacyPolicy.com has a fantastic template and generator service.
It not only allows you to customize the verbiage of your privacy policy, it also explains to you what each section means, in what locations certain disclosures are required, etc.
COPYRIGHT
It’s nearing the end of 2009 – time to change your copyright notice for the New Year!
A site with an outdated copyright notice is a surefire red flag to visitors and it makes your whole site look outdated and uncared for.
Update your copyright notice to reflect the coming change in year!
(Webmasters usually have a copyright notice in the footer of their site to protect their property, if you don’t currently have one, now’s a good time to add it!)
LOCAL LEGALESE
Are you licensed to do business in your county? Does your county even require a business license for folks working at home with no foot traffic?
US residents can get all the information on local, state and federal licenses and permits you may be required to have to legally operate your business from Business.gov’s Licenses and Permits page.
As an internet marketer, this is one of those “I’ll get to it later” kind of tasks that never get done – it’s not like you have a storefront!
But many counties do require you be licensed even if you’re not seeing customers or occupying a commercial office. Check your local regulations at the link above to find out.
Today is the day to get legal – even locally!
FTC REGULATIONS
I’m sure you’ve heard the buzz about the new interpretations of the FTC regulations going into effect December 1.
There are two areas we need to be concerned about: testimonials and product endorsements.
TESTIMONIALS
If you have a salepage using testimonials OR you are an affiliate of a product and you are using testimonials for that product in your marketing, you must ensure that if those testimonials depict exceptional results, you also include a conspicious statement of typical results. Simply showing the best of the best testimonials and than a “Results not typical” disclaimer is no longer enough.
The problem here is that we generally don’t know what the typical result is! In fact, many people buy a product and don’t even use it!
As such, many marketers are simply removing and performance based testimonials altogether.
Check your marketing materials, website, autoresponder, graphics, etc. to ensure you’re not using performance based testimonials.
PRODUCT ENDORSEMENTS
As marketers, we recommend products and services to people all the time – it’s part of the business!
Sometimes, we’ve purchased the product, think it’s great and refer our visitors to it though an affiliate link.
Now, we must disclose that we are using an affiliate link and may make money if the visitor clicks through from our link and buys the product.
The FTC’s thought here is that site visitors may not know your recommendation was an affiliate link. If they did know that, perhaps they would not trust that recommendation as much – or maybe they would continue to trust you if you’ve built a relationship with you. Either way, the FTC believes the consumer has a right to know if you’re earning via your referral.
You also must disclose to your site visitors if you received a product you’re referring for free, or got other perks from the company, such as a free trip to their corporate offices or a lap dance last Thursday night at Centerfolds (just seeing if you’re paying attention!).
Check your sites and ensure your in compliance with the FTC regulations.
You may even wish to add a statement to your site as a whole (perhaps in the sidebar) indicating your use of affiliate links throughout the site, as opposed to with each individual link separately.
ABOUT THE 31 DAY INTERNET MARKETING MAKEOVER
You will also want to keep up-to-date with 31 Day IM Makeover happenings through the following channels:
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The official Twitter hashtag for the 31 Day Internet Marketing Makeover is #31DIMM (yes, I know it reads “31 Dim” but that’s kinda funny, right?). You can find other participants by searching Twitter for the hashtag.
Join using the form above and look in your inbox tomorrow for the next step in your Internet Marketing Makeover!
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{ 8 comments }
I’d love to win a Crowd Mountain membership, but no, I certainly wouldn’t have guessed this was going to be next. It’s a good one though. Hope my folks are following this.
Thanks
Susan
I did not think about the copyright notice – very good call. I just saw a site yesterday with a 2006 copyright notice. Suppose some people don’t find that copyright matters.
I am glad to see the change in Google’s Asdense Program Policies. I am tired of the useless sites that people make just to run adverts. I’m like that, but people should give something back instead of just finding a way to trick the system. /rant
Why would an older copyright date be a problem. I think it would indicate to people that you have been around awhile and not just a newcomer (As most of us are.). In terms of domains, age is a great SEO boost. As old as I am, I think age is great. If it weren’t I wouldn’t still be here.
Rick,
An older copyright makes visitors think you haven’t updated your site since then. A current copyright year shows you update your site regularly.
If you want to show you’ve been around awhile, you can put a copyright that’s a range, like 2001-2010, with the latter date being automatically updated via the Javascript I mentioned in my other comment here.
Thanks Michelle for the copyright notice heads up. I noticed that on one of my sites the copyright notice hadn’t been changed since 2008.
There’s also a good chance that I’ll have lost sales from that site purely because of having an out of date copyright notice.
It doesn’t exactly instill confidence in the site for prospective customers.
Gary
p.s. when are you ding the next Internet Marketing This Week ?
@Gary – We recorded a new IMTW on Thursday, it should be out any moment!
I’m a web designer and I use a simple little Javascript on all my clients’ sites that automatically uses the current year for the copyright notice. I’m not going to try to paste it here since inserting code usually doesn’t work, but you can click on my name and view source on my site to see it at the bottom of any page.
Workz.com also has a very good privacy policy template that incorporates many of the same areas as the Free Privacy Policy template. They also have other forms for various other things related to business as well.
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