Must-Have legal pages for your blog

Your blog is business and like every business, there are few rules that you need to follow, or else you might end up in big trouble.

Most blogger gets excited when starting a new blog and doesn’t pay attention or usually forgets to create legal pages on their blog.

Why Do You Need Legal Pages?

The number one reason is to avoid expensive lawsuits.

Numerous problems can occur to you or your blog.

Let’s take a small example, it's common that most of the bloggers have their content stolen every day.

Yeah! It's true

More popular your blog is, higher the chance of getting your content stolen.

What measures do you have to prevent this happening to you?

Let’s take a more deeper look.

Did you know that if you don’t follow the Federal Trade Commission (a government body) you can be fined for thousands of dollars?

Having the right legal pages on your blog is of utmost necessary and also mandatory.

Complying with the law

Federal Trade Commission is responsible for protecting the rights of the consumers.

So, if you are the United States-based blogger or even from other countries, then also you need to make your blog FTC compliant.

Some bloggers think that having this is not mandatory, well my friends it is totally incorrect.

There have been many cases which happened in the past and FTC regularly investigates and sues such companies for violating the privacy rights of consumers and failing to comply with them.

Complying with Affiliate networks

Most of the affiliate networks mention in their terms and conditions that if you are using their affiliate network then you need to have an affiliate disclosure.

They also say that you need to put this disclosure in such a way that your blog readers can read and view easily and make sure it's not hidden away on your blog.

If you don’t comply with them then they can suspend or even terminate your account and you might lose all the earning you might have with them.

Complying with other third parties

If you are using Google Analytics or Google AdSense or any other third-party services, then their terms of service page say the same thing.

According to Google’s Terms of service, they want you to have the Privacy Policy page on your blog to notify the user that you are using their services which make use of cookies and collect and process other user data.

If you don’t follow this and if any visitor wants to sue you for this, they totally can since you don’t have any legal pages to defend yourself.

So, make sure whenever you are using any services, go through their terms and condition, and strictly follow them.

Protect your intellectual property rights

All the content that you have on your blog needs to be protected.

As I mentioned earlier, every day there are bloggers whose content is copied and used by someone else, content that they have worked on for days and nights.

Here you can make use of Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA), which allows you to send notice to these wrongdoers or their hosting company to take down such wrongly copied contents.

However, if you did not have any legal page stating that the content on your blog is your sole property, you can’t do anything about this.

Only with proper legal pages on your blog you can use your DCMA right and protect your content.

Disclaimers

The content on your blog has only one purpose, to help your readers.

You make every effort to keep your content 100% accurate, but even then, some mistakes are bound to happen.

And for such mistakes people can sue you, and if you google this up, you will find that this has happened to a lot of blog owners in the past.

To understand this better, let’s take an example:

Suppose you provide health and fitness tips on your blog, say you give your readers some workout plan or food recipes.

You don’t know what type of individual is going to use that info and say they broke a leg, or they have a negative side effect from your recipe.

These kind of things happen and since you were creating your content you were thinking about the common people only and that’s why you need disclaimers to disclaim all these liabilities.

How many legal pages you should have and what it should contain

There are a few important legal pages that you definitely need to have on your blog.

Because your blog serves international visitors you need to adhere to the laws of each state and country.

But more or less you only need to have a few legal pages to cover them all.

Privacy Policy

A privacy policy contains what type of data you collect and how you use it.

Just like the above-mentioned example, if you are using Google Analytics then you are collecting different kinds of data to get a better picture of who is visiting your blog and when and how they interact with your blog.

Not only Google Analytics, but names, email addresses, comments, or cookies etc, you are gathering all these data from your visitors.

The main reason you need to have Privacy Policy is that it is required by law.

FTC is known to have taken strict legal action against those who have violated the privacy rights of visitors.

Your ideal Privacy policy should cover the following topics:

• What type of personal data you collect, why do you collect and how you will use it.
• What type of visitors are restricted from using your site for example age restriction
• Cookies and comment policies
• Third-party services that your blog uses and how you share data with them
• How the user will be notified for any updates to your policy

Terms And conditions

As the name suggests, this page will contain all the “Terms” that visitors need to follow while on your blog.

This document, later on, can be used by you in court in case of any legal dispute.

To enforce it, you can notify the user when they first land on your blog that, by using your website they agree to your terms and conditions.

In this way, suppose your content is stolen, and later on when you send out a notice to the offender and get no reply from them, on basis of this document you can file a lawsuit against them.

This legal page should cover the following areas:

• Intellectual property rights, what they can and cannot use from your blog, and if they can use then under what conditions, like a link to your website wherever they use your content.
• Which state law will be applied in case of any legal dispute
• How they can use your website, list of do’s and don’ts
• What will happen when the user violates your terms and conditions
• How the user will be notified for any updates to your policy

Copyright notice

Since as a blogger you will be creating new content on your blog which can be in the form of blogposts or images or pdf/excel or any other filetypes.

Copyright notice notifies the user that content on your blog is yours only and they cannot be used without your permission.

If there are multiple contributors for your content then you might need a whole page for that otherwise a single line is sufficient.

The single one-liner, found at the bottom of many websites, typically contains

• A copyright symbol ©.
• Year
• Name of the copyright holder, in most cases name of your blog.

Disclaimers

This is the most important legal page that you should without a doubt need to have, irrespective of any niche you are in.

This legal document is used to limit your liability by informing visitors that content on your blog is purely informational and users are solely responsible for how they use it and any related consequences.

As I explained above that in case you are providing a weight loss recipe and by using that recipe if any of your readers face a negative side effect then they can file a lawsuit against your blog.

Having a disclaimer stating that visitors are solely responsible for any outcome can surely help you in avoiding an expensive lawsuit.

Disclaimer needs to be customized according to risks that your niche carries.

For example, if you are in flight booking business then you definitely need to state that prices of the ticket are for informational purposes only and to get the correct price they need to check on the respective airline’s websites.

You can use a general template for this but do check what extra clause you need to add according to your niche.

These are a few legal pages that are in my view mandatory to have to avoid any lawsuit and continue your blogging journey stress-free.

My recommendation is to use online templates for all these pages and when you start making some money from your blog, you can invest in paid templates or consult a lawyer.

But when you start your blog do make sure you have all these pages on your blog, later on, you can always update these as you move forward.