In episode 244 of the Late Night Internet Marketing podcast, host Mark Mason delves into the often-overlooked topic of legal pages on websites. Despite the fact that most website visitors never actually read these pages, they serve an important purpose in establishing the legal framework of the relationship between the website and its visitors. Mark discusses the reasons why these pages are necessary, including regulations that require certain disclosures and the potential protection they can offer in the event of a lawsuit. He also touches on the potential value of legal pages in legitimizing a website in the eyes of potential customers. Tune in for a comprehensive look at the often-overlooked topic of legal pages on websites.
In episode 244 of the Late Night Internet Marketing podcast, host Mark Mason delves into the often-overlooked topic of legal pages on websites. Despite the fact that most website visitors never actually read these pages, they serve an important purpose in establishing the legal framework of the relationship between the website and its visitors. Mark discusses the reasons why these pages are necessary, including regulations that require certain disclosures and the potential protection they can offer in the event of a lawsuit. He also touches on the potential value of legal pages in legitimizing a website in the eyes of potential customers. Tune in for a comprehensive look at the often-overlooked topic of legal pages on websites.
This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we're going to tackle the issue of those pesky legal policy pages. I mean, Why do you even need those things? Nobody ever reads them, but it turns out that there are critical. There's great reasons to have them beyond the legal requirements. And I'm going to tell you exactly how to get them. All this and more on the Late NIght Internet Marketing Podcast. Hey, hi. I hope you're doing well. I am your host, Mark Mason, and this is the Late NIght Internet Marketing podcast. It's episode 200. 44. And today on the podcast, we're going to be talking about those pesky legal pages, those pages that you're always know that you're supposed to have. And you never really want to pay attention to, and you don't know why you need them in the first place. We're going to talk about those and we're going to talk about why you need them and what I think you should do about them. Now, of course, first the standard disclaimer. I'm not an attorney. In fact, I'm quite proud of that. My brother's an attorney and I don't want to be an attorney. There's enough attorneys in my family. So if you feel like you need legal advice, professional, legal advice. You should run, don't walk, run to your nearest attorney and give them all your money. I think that's what you should do. I'm not an attorney and this is not legal advice, but I can tell you about my experience and my experience with legal pages is that there are really important reasons that you need to have legal policy pages on your website. Now, first of all, what am I even talking about? What are these legal policy pages Well, if you go to any established professional website, usually. If you go down to the footer of the website, you will see pages linked to there that point to the websites, terms of service. In other words, what are you agreeing to by using the website? You will oftentimes find a disclaimer. This is especially important. If there are commercial relationships that the website has with other parties that they need to disclose, you'll find a privacy policy, which is important and talks about things like what they do with your data. And you may find other legal pages like a refund policy and other things that are important to establish the underlying kind of legal framework for the relationship that a visit. Visitor has with a website. So there's several reasons that you want to have these things. Even though when you click on them, they're just usually pages and pages of legal gobbledygook that no normal person ever reads let's face it. The only people that ever really read these pages are regulators and attorneys and people that are looking for some form of legal redress or looking to defend against some form of legal redress. Very few normal users ever actually read these pages. So, so what are the reasons to have them? Well, one. You need to have them because there are often times regulations. That govern the legal space that you're operating in the state or the country in which you operate that require you to make certain statements or disclosures or give other information to people that are visiting your website. It's kind of like the sign on the side of a pack of cigarettes here in the United States that say things like cigarettes. Let's may cause cancer. You shouldn't smoke cigarettes. If you're pregnant, et cetera, you've got a requirement to disclose certain information. Uh, about your website to website visitors. And that requirement is generally put on to you by legislators in your area. Now, the second reason is kind of obvious too. It's sort of the flip side of the coin. Properly constructed legal pages. Might in some cases offer you some protection from people who might want to Sue you for one reason or another. If you're in America and you can fog a mirror. If you can breathe and fog a mirror and you have 20 bucks in your pocket, you can Sue someone. That's how easy it is to Sue people in America. And in fact, You don't even really need 20 bucks because there are many cases where attorneys. We'll take your case and they'll only charge you if they win and you will pay them out of your proceeds. And it's one of the things that. Really bugs me about some of these very large lawsuits that you see. Attorneys will Sue and they'll get$50 million. 10 million will go to legal fees. 15 million will go to attorneys and 15 million will go to the 15 million people in the class. Everybody gets a dollar except the attorneys who get$15 million. I don't know. That just feels wrong to me, but that's an aside from this. Properly constructed legal pages may help you. In a legal battle, they generally will not prevent you from being sued unless a reputable attorney reads those pages and sees that they're so well constructed. They advise their client that there's no point in suing you. If what they're suing you for is properly disclaimed in the pages. But even in those cases, there are issues of jury trials so just know that just because you have these legal pages does not mean you won't get sued. And in America, sometimes it won't even slow people down, but it can. Offer you some protection in some cases. You know, I think sometimes the real value in legal pages is the fact that they seem to legitimize your website. If you've got a landing page or some other sort of page, that cold traffic is coming to people that don't know you. And they're trying to assess whether or not your page is one of the billions of scams on the internet, or it's a legitimate page that they can know. Like, and trust and maybe opt in and get the free thing or whatever's going on. They're having legal pages. Can legitimize your website in the eyes of the visitor. And I think that's probably the most practical and realistic reason to have legal and privacy pages. These, these policy pages on your website is because it makes you look like a serious business owner that takes whatever you're doing seriously. And I think it's pretty important actually, in that regard, yes. It may help you legally. Yes, it may be. He required, and those are all good reasons to do it. But from a conversion standpoint, these legal policy pages can help you make more money because people see you as a solid citizen in the online space, or at least this helps them see that. The other thing that legal policy pages do for you is in terms of SEO and in terms of ad networks, this is often a requirement for good results in SEO. SEO and for running paid traffic, if you start running paid traffic to a page, say from Google search that doesn't have policy pages, Google will detect that. And they will either DeRay the quality of your page, which means your traffic is going to cost more. Or in some cases we've heard stories of people outright getting their accounts banned their ad accounts banned because they didn't have. Have the proper policy pages and privacy disclosures and things that are really required by Google and Microsoft and Facebook and other paid traffic sources. For a proper landing page. So for reasons there for really good reasons that you should have these policy pages. And I'll tell you one more way that a policy page can really help you. That's a legit. Good citizens sort of reason to have policy pages. And that is occasionally a real user might contact you and want to know what your policy is on something that's actually important. For example, they might want to understand, are you going to sell my email address? That's actually pretty important idea, or they might want to know what is your actual refund policy? Those sort of policy pages can actually be helpful to real users. So we'll call that a fifth legitimate business to consumer reason to have good policy pages on your website is that occasionally there's information in there. That can actually help real people in certain situations. Okay. So you've gotten reasons now, hopefully I've convinced you that you should have legal policy pages on your website. So now the question is, well, how do I do that? Right. I mean, I can't even understand these pages. I don't know what goes in them. And, uh, you know, I don't know what to do. So the temptation is, and I see people do this all the time. And it drives me absolutely crazy. The temptation has to go to someone else's website and steal their policy page. Okay, don't do that. So, first of all, that is theft of intellectual property. It is not an ethical way for you to create content for your website. So please don't do that. I'm more serious reason not to do that is you don't really know what's in those compared to what you need. Those may be written for another state or God help you another country. And you may be getting exactly the wrong. Legal policies in place for your website based on where you're operating. Additionally, that person that you're taking those pages from may also be a knucklehead who either did them incorrectly or stole them from somebody else thereby propagating the same mistakes to you. You just don't want to do that. Okay. That is not a valid way to go get policy pages for your website. So, if you can't steal the stuff, you need to be legal. That's kind of a, I don't know what it is when a phrase is an oxymoron, but I guess it's an irony. That's an irony. You would steal the things you need to be legal. Since I've told you, you shouldn't do that. What can you do? Well, one reasonable thing that you can go do is go to a website that provides these privacy policies for free. And I can tell you that the one that I really like is free privacy policy.com and they offer free privacy policies. It's kind of like legal zoom in the sense that you go there, you pick the thing that you want to generate. You give them information about your particular situation. Including your state, the name of your website and your company and so forth. And it generates a policy specifically for you now, they state right in their disclaimer, their purpose is to help you. They're not your attorney. They do the best they can to give you a useful privacy policy, but there is no substitute for actual professional legal advice. Of course, the thing that they don't talk about is the fact that in general, If you're starting a business online. The last thing you can possibly imagine is going and spending several thousand dollars to sit down with an attorney to build legal pages for a business. That's not yet generating any revenue. And while that's exactly what you would do, if you were building a brick and mortar business, and it would be way more than a few thousand dollars. I do. Understand the resistance that people feel in spinning a bunch of money with attorneys on something that they feel like they're probably not going to need anyway. In any case, free privacy, policy.com provides no warranties or guarantees. And that's basically you get what you paid for. You get these templates, but they're not guaranteeing them. In any way. And it's interesting, this disclaimer, that's on free privacy policy.com is an example of the kind of disclaimers that you need when your operating website. And I'm sure they paid their attorneys to write that language. Now. Another option. If you are a person who does not like to take risk. And you're doing something where, you know, It makes sense to go ahead and have some policies in place for your website, because you've got prior experience knowing how painful it is. If someone sues you and you understand the intrinsic value of these policies and you're willing to pay for them. The guy I recommend that you check out is Bobby Klink. Now Bobby clinks, kind of a cool guy. Okay. He's an attorney and we excuse that. He's even worse. Uh, Harvard attorney, he's a Harvard educated attorney. which reminds me of the old joke. How many Harvard attorneys does it take to paint a brick wall red? And the answer is of course. It depends on how hard you throw them. Oh, God, that is such a gruesome joke. I'm sorry if you have kids in the car, but, Bobby's a good guy. He's really funny and he's fun to follow online and I encourage you to go over to his website and check him out. But he also, as an attorney, in addition to running an online business and teaching online business as an attorney, he has some fantastic legal templates available on his site. And if you'd like to get ahold of those, I recommend that you go over to. Too late night. I am. Dot com forward slash Bobby. And take a look at what Bobby has to offer. Now, this is a space where you get what you pay for. So you went from free. Which is, you know, one kind of thing to paying for templates from a Harvard educated attorney. Those are not free. Okay. He does have a free privacy policy over there that I recommend you check out over at Late NIght. I am.com. Forward slash Bobby. But the rest of his stuff is not free. And so take a look at it and see if that makes sense for you either now, as you're starting up or in the future, when you start to generate some revenue, Bobby's one of those guys that understands what it takes to do things correctly, because he's not just a hair club president. He's like also a customer, right. He eats his own dog food. Bobby runs online business websites and knows what he's doing. But just to understand that. even though Bobby's a Harvard attorney and he's worked for the department of justice, he's not your attorney. So you're buying templates from Bobby. So the best thing you can do, which is also the most expensive. Is to find an attorney in your area that specializes in online business, sit down with them and describe to them what you're going to do. And have them architect, policy templates that are specific to your business. That's the most expensive option. Under that would be Bobby under, that would be free. And I don't recommend, especially with the availability of free privacy policy.com. I don't recommend that you ever steal someone else's privacy policy pages. And put them on your own website. So what we learned today, what is we learned that you always, absolutely need to have policy pages on every page of your website, LinkedIn, your footer, and you need to do that not just for legal reasons. But you need to do it for revenue reasons because having these pages will help you grow revenue. And in some cases they may even offer you some legitimate legal protection. We learned that you can get these for free off of free privacy policy.com, but it's probably better if you involve a real attorney like Late NIght, I am.com forward slash Bobbie or better yet find someone local that you can go sit down. With the talk to about your business. I hope that's helpful to you. And as an aside to this episode, I often get the question, Hey mark, should I form an LLC? And while that is a episode on itself. It is also an extension of this episode because while an LLC can offer you some sorts of protection, At least on paper after all the name is limited. Liability corporation. The truth of the matter is, especially in America, if you're the one person in your business that did the thing that someone wants to Sue you for, when they go to Sue your company, they're going to Sue you personally, because you're the one who perpetrated it. And the chances are they're going to bust your LLC and they're going to come after you and your house and your car. Maybe you'll win. Maybe you won't. But if you're sitting there thinking that an LLC is this magical thing, like the shields on the star ship enterprise. And they're going to protect you from some litigators, photon, torpedoes. Uh, it's not really how it works again. I encourage you to seek professional legal advice, but I just want to bust that myth for you a little bit right here. That's all I got for you today. I'm Mark Mason. This is the Late NIght Internet Marketing Podcast. If you like this show, find a way to smash a like button or do me a solid and share it with some of your friends or better yet go find how to subscribe. Subscribing doesn't cost you any money. It's a weird word that we use in podcasting, but it's a free way to raise your hand and say, Hey. I like this content. And I would like it very much if you'd let me know when the next episode comes out and that's exactly what I'll do. If you hit that subscribe button, you'll be notified automatically and magically. The next episode, episode 2 45 will land in your pod. Catcher of choice, wherever you listen to find podcasts. Oh, if you have an amazing day and until next time I'm Mark Mason. Ciao. Hey, if you're not familiar, this is the after show part of the show where we just talk about whatever I want to talk about, which is cool. Um, today I've been checking math homework. I do that every day. My 13 year old is taking math. She doesn't think she's great at math. Like a lot of female math students in this country. I've been tutoring, math for a long time on and off. I don't understand that, but there seems to be an epidemic with female confidence in math. I'm desperately trying to fix. And teach girls that they know how to do math. And particularly right now, my 13 year old girl, she's good at math. And I'm trying to convince her to that. And I'm checking her math homework right now. Uh, and I, you know, it's exciting. So she's doing today. She is doing areas of composite figures where she needs to know all of these. Goofy formulas for the area of geometric shapes and they're composite shapes. So she has to break them down and compute the area. Pretty straightforward stuff. Super great. Exercise. Why? Kids always ask mom, why do I need to know this? You know, I don't understand why I need to do this math. If you're a parent and you're listening to this and you really don't know the answer and you felt the same way when you're a kid, I totally get that. It can be frustrating. Let me tell you why. Kids are learning math. It's not about the math. Sure. 10% of these kids will go on to be an engineer like me and they'll use math every day and another 10% will be accountants. And those accountants will also use some math every day, although probably not too much geometry, but. The reason we teach kids math is to teach them how to think. Logically, this is very important. Math exercises, a part of the brain and builds neural pathways required to think logically, this is super critical. So the next time some kid asks you why they need to learn math, tell them it's so they can learn to think. Ciao.