How to Legally Protect Your Blog
Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links which means if you decide to make a purchase through these links, I will receive a commission at no extra cost to you. For more information, please read the disclaimer in full here.
I know, I know, you’re probably thinking you clicked into another blog post about how to blog legally that probably won’t tell you anything that resonates with you. Trust me, I've been there. But I hope you find yourself delightfully surprised by the end of it.
I’ve been on the other side of this article, I know how hard it is to feel comfortable with the information you have or don’t have in front of you when it comes to the law.
In fact, before I launched, I read blog post after blog post about how to blog legally because it was what made me most nervous. After a while, it seemed like every post I read said in order to blog legally I needed to buy templates and I just kept thinking, “Well, yeah, obviously you’re going to tell me to use what you did, you’re probably making money if I click on your link to buy it”.
This did not jive well with me in the beginning. I wanted an honest and upfront answer about what I needed to blog legally; and I did not want anyone to be influenced about what they were telling me.
So I started searching even further and I found data that said all I legally needed to have on my site was a privacy policy... Initially, this made me very frustrated with all my favorite bloggers who were saying differently, but not telling me why. But I got over it, and got to work. I started reading privacy policy after privacy policy to find out what I needed to include because by golly, I was going to write it all on my own. I didn’t need to pay someone else to do it for me. Well, that lasted all of a few minutes. I think I got to around the fourth sentence of the introductory paragraph explaining who is referred to as what before I decided the headache and the time it was going to take just wasn’t worth it. I mean really, you can’t copy anyone else’s policy word for word (unless you pay for it or are given express permission), and there are what seem like a million different policies out there, so how can you be both original and legal without pulling your hair out?
I couldn't, so I had to move on and in doing so I discovered the free template generators. I found two, and after emailing another blogger I admired, she sent me to another one. Boy was I excited. No headache and the legal template I needed? Sign me up! I went to the first site and it seemed pretty legit, but it was a lot shorter than all the policies I’d seen previously, so I knew it had to be missing some stuff. I skipped it. The next site I went to looked pretty good and matched the quality and tone of most of the other policies I’d seen, all except for the fact that in order to get the GDPR section that’s required and a few other extras, I would have to pay meaning it was no longer free. I moved on. The last one I went to was the one the other blogger recommended. It was free, and it looked well drafted from what I could tell… up until the point where it didn’t include the GDPR compliance that is now necessary for this policy. After realizing this, I decided to see if the blogger used the policy herself and was a little shocked to see that she did. Especially since she’s not a small blogger, she makes a pretty decent living blogging, and she just copied and pasted the template word for word as her own policy without even changing site names within the text. So I started wondering, if I, someone with no legal background whatsoever noticed this and realized it was wrong, imagine how easy it would be for a lawyer to slap a lawsuit her way. The idea of this scared me pretty bad. How could one of my favorite bloggers be comfortable being negligent? I couldn’t let my blog be the same way. So what was I left with?
I decided it was time to reach out to lawyers in my area to see what they had to say. I wasn’t going to use the only person all the other bloggers had recommended. I was going to be different. After some (more) research, I found the names of two attorneys I could reach out to and inquire about price. Only one answered and they came back with a price over $3,000…. Did you catch that? Over $3,000 for a single policy on a website! Nope. Nuh-uh. Nothing doing. I was left with looking into the blogger and lawyer that almost everyone else had recommended. And boy do I wish I would have just broken down and looked at her website sooner. Amira is both a lawyer AND a blogger, so she knows exactly what is needed to make a blog legal. And because she has experience in both fields, she has been able to focus on creating quite a few comprehensive, easy to use, and the biggest shock of all, AFFORDABLE, legal templates that you can use to make your blog legal too.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, and before you move on thinking you don’t need to buy any of her templates because you can do it yourself or get them for free, let’s have a very real chat for a moment about why that's wrong. If you are not a lawyer or another legal professional, how are you ever to know whether your policy is truly legal if you write it yourself or get it for free? You won’t...unless of course down the road you get sued. And do you really want to question whether it’s legal then? Absolutely not. You want to be prepared, and the best way to do that is with Amira’s privacy policy, available here.
Or protect yourself even further with the Legal Starter Bundle available here.
I opted for the bundle for two reasons:
1) Do you remember when I said a Privacy Policy is the only thing you need to legally have on your website? Well, I want to clarify something for you. Just because this is the only legal requirement for a basic website does not mean it is the only thing you should have for a blog.
If you use affiliate links, offer sponsorships, or have ads on your site, you also need to legally have a disclaimer which tells people you are earning money from those links.
The bundle includes the disclaimer.
Or you can get just the disclaimer template here.
2) While you are not legally required by law to have Terms and Conditions on your website, it is best that you do because this lets you set in stone for the users of your website