If you either blog or are creating niche sites, when you decide to monetize your site there are a few pages you need to have on your site to stay legal.
Privacy Policy
Most popular way to monetize is using Google’s Adsense. If you place any adsense blocks on your site you must have a privacy policy page within Google’s guidelines. Without it Google can and will cancel your account. Many people have complained that once they have started making money that their account gets canceled, while 9 out of 10 times its because they did not include this page. This page should contain information about google’s cookies and a way to opt out (you can see mine on the bottom)
Disclosure
If you have any type of affiliate adds on your site the FTC requires that you disclose that links and ads on the site will benefit you financially. The FTC does not come out and say how you have to disclose or what happens if you don’t but better safe to include something along the lines of:
This blog uses affiliate programs for monetization, which means when you click on links to various sites that I recommend in my posts and make a purchase, this can result in a commission that is credited to this site.
Disclaimer
Disclaimer is not really required but would be a good idea if your blog or niche gives out advice. If you have a niche site that is in the medical field you may wish to disclaim that you are not a doctor and any advice is based on opinion, that they really should seek a doctors opinion. Or if you are a personal finance you may want to disclaim that you are not a financial expert, etc… Such as mine here:
I am not a financial expert. All information on this site is documentation of my opinions, experiments and stupid mistakes and should not be taken as professional financial advice. Should you need that level of expertise, please contact a financial professional.
Contact
Your site needs to have a contact page or other means to easily contact you if your site visitors have a problem. This is also a good idea if you want to attract advertisers or even someone interested in buying your niche site. Why make them struggle to get a hold of you.
The Plugin
If your site is a wordpress site there is a plugin that will make some of this very easy for you, Easy Privacy Policy. Simple plugin to use, once installed you goto the settings and you will see 6 text sections already filled out for your privacy policy. You just check or un-check sections you wish to include (you can also edit these sections if you wish but they are good out of the box). At the top you’ll see the following for boxes where the plugin filled in based on your blogs info.
These are then populated through out the privacy policy where needed. You can of course edit these here and the changes will be made on the site. Next at the very bottom will be 2 more options, one to give the creator credit if you wish, the next to put a time stamp on the page that it was last edited. I typically do the last and uncheck the credit. Finally you click create or update page and the plug in automatically creates the page for you.
It does not put it into your menu though so you will have to add it to a menu somewhere. Google policy is that a link to it must appear on any page that has adsense on it. Another thing that is highly recommended (as I have not found a policy on it yet) is to not have any adsense on your privacy policy page or any any of the pages noted above. The idea is advertisers are paying for their ads to be displayed on your content pages not your policies.
Now the link to the creator of the plug in does not work any more and it is no longer in the wordpress plugins library so Im putting it up here for you to download if you wish as its a great and easy plugin for its purpose.
Found this informative? please share!
Wow, thanks so much for sharing this information. I had no idea that Google required this, even though I have my own privacy/disclaimer. I have downloaded the plug-in and updated my information. I will be sharing this helpful post for sure.
Carrie – Careful Cents recently posted..Meet the Royal Family of Payment Methods
thanks for reposting! most don’t realize until its to late. then try getting your account back from google!
Like Carrie, I had no idea that Google required some of the information that you listed. Thank you so much for sharing!
yep I often skim throughout the terms myself, waiting for that south park episode to happen to me 🙂
Thanks for the reminder Jeff. I have been meaning to do this since I updated my theme a few months ago…I had better get around to it.
Hunter @ Financially Consumed recently posted..All iTunes Sales Are Final, After This One
no problem. I hat that when you put up a new theme.
I didn’t know this. Thanks Jeff. 🙂
Jen @ Master the Art of Saving recently posted..Budget Maintenance- October 2011