Transcript
Welcome to the bloggy friend show.
What's up, bloggy friends?
I'm Sasha Gratton here.
I'm so excited today to bring you Amira Erfon.
We are going to be jamming all about legal stuff.
So if you've been wondering how to get your blog legal,
this is the episode for you.
So Amira, could you do us a favor and introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Absolutely. Well, thank you for having me, Ashley.
Hi, guys. My name is Amira.
I am the business lawyer, blogger and coach behind aselfbrew.com,
where I help bloggers and entrepreneurs with the legal side of their business.
I have affordable legal templates and coaching services.
And then I also help you make money online.
That definitely sounds like exactly what I'm looking for.
So so you have all these templates.
What kind of templates do you have and what kind of legal pages do bloggers need?
Absolutely. So there are different legal templates that I have in my legal store page.
So if you visit my site, aselfbrew.com, you will see the legal store page
and you will see tons and tons of legal templates.
Don't get overwhelmed.
When you're starting your blog, to answer your question, Ashley,
you're going to need at least three legal pages.
Number one is a privacy policy page.
Number two, a disclaimer page.
And then number three, a terms and conditions page.
And you should have all three of them on your blog before you launch.
OK, but what's the privacy policy and why do we need it?
So great question.
So privacy policy is basically a legal document that is on your site
that informs the people who visit your blog,
what information you're collecting from them and how you're going to use it.
So think of a privacy policy as a way for your readers to know exactly
what information you're collecting from them, such as their name,
their email address, their credit card information.
And it is one of those legal pages that is actually required by law.
So it's not an optional legal document.
Every blogger, every entrepreneur, if you have a website,
you should have a privacy policy and it should also ensure compliance
with different privacy laws out there.
Like you may have heard about GDPR, California privacy law
and other children's privacy laws.
So there are different laws out there and you need to make sure
that your privacy policy is in compliance with those as well.
So now the legal template that you have on your website,
does that handle the GDPR and CCPA or no?
Absolutely. Yeah, because I am a business lawyer,
but I'm also a blogger myself, right?
So I have an online business.
I also need to ensure compliance myself.
So when I created these templates, I made sure that I included
extra additional bonuses and provisions to help bloggers
and entrepreneurs get compliant in as little as like 15 minutes.
So yes, to answer your question, all the templates that I have,
they're basically compliant.
Privacy policy is GDPR and CCPA compliant.
And it doesn't take more than 15 minutes for you to download.
You can download the template instantly,
but it doesn't take more than 15 minutes for you to plug in
your business information and begin using the template on your site.
Okay, so that's pretty cool.
So basically you can just download the template,
add your own stuff and plug and play.
Correct.
That's kind of awesome.
Now, why is it though that people should go to a paid template
like the one that you've created versus all the free ones that we've seen online?
So yeah, that's another great question.
So this is a question I get a lot of times.
And the best way I answer this is through a blog post that I have on my website,
where 50 of my customers have actually showed me
that why they ditch their free legal template and purchase one of my templates.
And the number one reason for that is the free legal templates have loopholes
and they don't have all the legal provisions in them to protect your business.
That's why they're free.
So I have been auditing free legal templates for more than 10 years,
and I have found a lot of deficiencies.
For example, they are not GDPR compliant.
They don't have a cookie policy.
They don't have the California law compliance.
They don't have the children's privacy law compliance.
And then when you start adding all of those provisions to your template,
then it's no longer free.
So that's the bigger big risk with free templates
that you don't know what you're getting
and they're always missing legal provisions.
And then that defeats the purpose of getting a free template to begin with, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
So I'm curious though, what would happen to a blogger
that doesn't have these kinds of things on their website?
Like what is the risk?
Why is it so important that we have this?
Great question.
So let's talk about the privacy policy, right?
So privacy policy is a legal document that is required by law.
It's federal laws, right?
So if you don't have one, you will obviously get sued, fined or audited.
And we have the agency that you may have heard about, Federal Trade Commission,
that actually regulates consumer privacy.
So if you visit their website, you will see thousands and hundreds of cases
where companies have gotten in trouble for not maintaining data
and privacy of readers or customers.
And we're talking small companies to big companies like Zoom,
like Facebook, like Google, and many others.
So that's the big issue with whenever you don't comply with the law,
you obviously get risk, you have the risk of getting sued, fined and audited, right?
The second issue is if you're publishing content as a blogger, which we are,
we're sharing so much information with the world,
you want to always limit your legal liability
because you don't know how that information will be received
and you don't know what kind of impact it's going to make on someone.
So you want to protect that information with proper disclaimers on your site
to limit your legal liability, right?
Because, for example, let's say you're in the medical niche,
you're publishing all these lovely articles on how to protect yourself medically
or what to do or what not to do,
but then you have to keep in mind that that could all be interpreted as medical advice, right?
And somebody could take that information, suffer a negative consequence,
and then sue you for damages.
So that's why having medical disclaimers, just all of that,
just limits your legal liability.
And then you have terms and conditions.
If you don't have terms and conditions, you could be liable for refunds.
You could have customers' disputes because your customers don't know what your policy is.
So there's so many different things that have gone wrong with,
over the years that I've represented clients
and I've seen them pay for these big legal mistakes,
that all of that could be easily avoided with these proper policies on your site.
So you're saying that I can't get away with just saying
all of this content is just for entertainment purposes only?
That's not, see, that's a great start, but no, that's not enough, right?
Because legally, it's not enough.
It's like me saying that I'm a lawyer, but none of this is legal advice.
That's just very bare bones.
And it's not enough to legally protect me or what in your case, the example that you gave.
So you need to give a little bit more of the legal jargon.
What we call is limitation of legal liability provisions.
So you need to have more of that on your site.
So this way, if tomorrow you are taken to court,
that one line statement is not going to really help you, right?
But if you had the proper legal policy on your page, on your website,
then that will actually help you.
So that's the difference.
I'm curious.
So with all of these documents, once you get them onto your website,
do I need to reference it in every article I write
or is just the fact that it's on my website enough?
No, no, you don't.
So what you need to do is you need to create like three different pages
in the footer section of your site, like call the first one privacy policy
and put the privacy policy template over there.
And then the disclaimer will be the second page.
And then the third one will be terms and conditions.
But with the exception of one, which is a disclaimer page,
let's say that I'm sharing affiliate links in a blog post,
then you know that you need to give an affiliate disclosure
or something along the lines that you may have seen.
This post may contain affiliate links.
Please see full disclaimer here.
So that's where you're going to link to your actual disclaimer page
in the blog post, just in that little section.
So other than that, you don't need to have all three of them
in every single blog post or because just by having them
in the footer section, they are available for someone to look at
on all the pages of your site.
Okay.
You've been throwing around some legal jargon and dumb it down
for a person like me.
What's the difference between a blog disclaimer and a blog disclosure?
Great question.
So blog disclosure is when I talk about disclosures,
I talk about like affiliate disclosure.
So under the Federal Trade Commission,
remember the agency we talked about in a few minutes ago,
that's the one that regulates consumer privacy.
So under the Federal Trade Commission rules,
you have to give affiliate disclosures
anytime you're going to share affiliate links.
And the purpose of that is to be honest and transparent
with your readers because if I am sharing an affiliate link
to a product, then I have a financial incentive.
I've got something to gain from that.
So if someone purchases from my affiliate link,
I will earn a commission.
So I need to kind of disclose that this is required legally.
And that's why it's called disclosure.
And then disclaimers, blog disclaimers are a little bit different.
Blog disclaimers are just the way they sound, disclaimed.
They limit your legal liability.
So now I'm sharing affiliate links.
I am sharing all this content on my site,
but I don't want to be legally liable for what people do
with all that information I'm putting out there.
So that's where you need blog disclaimers
to reduce that liability and to protect yourself as a blogger.
Does that make sense?
Yes, it does.
Can you give me some different kinds of examples
of what disclaimers exist?
Absolutely.
So depending on your niche, like for example, I'm a lawyer, right?
So if I'm publishing something about legal stuff,
then I don't want that stuff to be construed as legal advice.
So my disclaimer would look a little different than yours.
So it'll be something like, hey, all the information I'm sharing
is for informational purposes only.
It's not legal advice.
You can't come after me for anything that you do with this information.
You could be in a personal finance niche.
Then you're going to say, obviously,
that none of this information is financial advice.
Always consult a financial expert for your particular circumstances.
And then another example could be a health niche, right?
Like medical health, which is really big.
So you could always say that this is not like,
I'm not your doctor here.
This is not medical advice.
Always consult a doctor professional for your medical conditions.
None of this is there to basically cure you or anything.
This is just information from my own personal experiences.
So you want to be a little bit more elaborate.
And then in addition, you need to give some legal jargon too,
that that's where my template comes in because it's all built in.
And then between that and between these disclaimers,
customizing them to your niche,
that's how you protect yourself.
This might sound like a dumb question, and if it does, I apologize.
But so what if you're like a lifestyle blogger
or a person who's working in multiple niches?
Do you need multiple disclaimers?
No.
So what I have in my template is what's called a general disclaimer.
So because if you don't have a particular niche,
then I have already drafted a general disclaimer, a paragraph for you.
So that kind of works for you for any niche, right?
Like someone like you who's in a broad scope, then that's what you would use.
So no, you don't need like all these different, different disclaimers.
Then that's the disclaimer that you would use.
Kind of cool.
So basically, instead of having to shell out $500 an hour for a lawyer,
we can get a template from someone who is a lawyer like you
and then just modify it for our own purposes, correct?
Yeah, because that was the whole intent behind it, right?
I know personally like how expensive legal help is, not just as a lawyer,
but unfortunately, before I became a lawyer, my dad's business got sued for $90,000.
And so my dad had to start all over again.
So I know exactly how it feels to get sued and we suffered a lot as a family.
And I know that legal help was very expensive.
And it's a nightmare when things go south.
So when I became a lawyer, my main goal was that I wanted to help other business owners
avoid making legal mistakes in their business.
But I also wanted to keep legal help affordable.
That's why if you visit the Work With Me page or my legal store page,
you'll be surprised by how affordable everything is
because I have purposely priced my templates or my coaching services
to be much more reasonably priced than what other lawyers charge.
Because I know other lawyers that are creating templates,
but they're like five times more expensive.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I know like how expensive legal help can be.
So that's why these templates are going to give you the same lawyer level protection
without the hefty costs.
Which is absolutely awesome.
I think it's just a brilliant idea and I'm a huge fan of templates.
So I have to ask you a question.
A lot of the people that are going to be listening to this show,
they're either not started their blog yet or they're very new to this.
So I'm curious, do you need these templates right away
or if I'm not making any money or I don't have anything for sale on my blog,
can I wait a while?
Yeah, so this is a question that I get a lot.
So a privacy policy is not optional.
That's something you cannot wait on because like I said, it's legally required,
especially if you're going to be collecting.
If you're going to have a lead magnet like a pre-b on your site
that you're offering to build your email list,
then it is something that is absolutely required.
So there's no shortcut there.
The disclaimer and the terms and conditions, you could wait,
but ideally it doesn't make sense to wait because by doing that,
once again, you're subjecting yourself to liability.
Because if you don't have a disclaimer,
then all this stuff that you're publishing on your site,
you're exposing yourself to risk.
And terms and conditions are like your website rules.
Like, you know, they protect the content that you publish.
They also let people who visit your site know that how and where legal disputes
will be resolved.
So without terms and conditions, once again,
you're opening yourself to liability.
So now I totally get the cost part,
but I'm just saying that the right thing to do would be to have all three.
If you're going to need a privacy policy anyway,
you might as well get all three done and it's a one-time deal, right?
So whether you get legal templates from me or some other lawyer is a one-time
cost.
It's not something that you're going to have to shell out like every few months
or every year.
And it's all tax deductible this year.
It's deductible business expense anyway.
So might as well have that peace of mind and do things,
you know, the right from the beginning.
Absolutely.
Because it's better to be safe than sorry.
Right. Exactly.
And I have a lot of new bloggers.
Actually, that's like a big part of my target audience is bloggers.
And they're brand new.
And I've had like customers send me love notes and testimonials saying that
your legal templates were the first things that I purchased before I even
wrote a word on my blog.
So that tells you like it's just it's something that is affordable,
but also like someone that is starting a business.
If you're starting a blog with the intention of turning it into a business,
then you might as well get the legal stuff out of the way so you can focus on
growing your business.
Well, speaking of legal stuff, I'm just kind of curious if we're already getting
all these legal pages and things like that, do we need to get incorporated or
something like that before we start blogging?
So incorporated is not a requirement, right?
You can operate your blog without registering, without doing anything,
and you would be considered a sole proprietor.
So meaning your blog and yourself are one.
Once you start making some money, then it is a wise idea to form an LLC
depending on your circumstances.
This is something that you would want to also discuss with your CPA to kind of
see what kind of financial impact that would have on your finances because
every financial situation is different.
But you do want to think about some sort of way of registering and
incorporating at that point once you have a consistent income coming in from
your blog because by forming an LLC, for example, you're going to separate your
business from yourself and then you're going to have a shield of protection.
So God forbid anything goes wrong legally in your business, your personal assets
like your house, your car, your bank accounts will be safe.
And that's something you definitely want to start thinking about.
I'll give you my example.
When I started my blogging business, I honestly didn't know what to expect
at the time and I was just a sole proprietor.
But then as soon as the business started generating revenue, it doesn't matter
the amount on a monthly basis.
And I knew I had a viable business.
Then right away I formed the LLC and then you want to keep your bank accounts
separate from your personal to your business and all of that good stuff.
That's a lot, a lot, a lot taken.
So what what what on your website would be the first thing you would direct a new
blogger to see?
The first thing would be the starter legal bundle.
That's what you would need.
The bare minimum, the three legal pages that we talked about, the privacy policy
disclaimer terms and conditions.
And then it also comes with nine bonuses.
Like I said before, I or I am a firm believer of over delivering, so I'll give
you extra stuff.
So this way you don't have to worry about the
So this way you don't have to worry about the
purchase again and again, new stuff, because there's some lawyers out there
will just charge you for upgrades.
They'll charge you additional legal templates for additional provisions.
And I'm just not one of them.
So that's what you should look at.
And also you should look into.
Unfortunately, we're seeing a high increase in ADA lawsuits, Americans
with Disability Act.
So you should also look into ADA compliance of your website.
From the beginning, it's a lot easier versus let's say you've been blogging
for a few years or a few months.
It's a lot harder to go back and ensure compliance.
You might as well work with your developer, like from the very beginning,
or even if you're doing it yourself, you should learn what is required under ADA.
And I have the legal bundle for that as well.
I can honestly tell you, I never would have thought of ADA
compliance as being a thing for bloggers.
So how do you make a website ADA compliant?
So there are so many different guidelines under ADA compliance that you have to follow.
Like, first of all, ADA stands for, for those of you who don't know,
Americans with Disabilities Act.
And the purpose is to prohibit discrimination against people with disabilities
who visit your website.
And when the ADA was enacted back in the 1990, the lawmakers didn't anticipate
that, you know, internet was going to be a big part of this.
So ADA itself doesn't talk about like website compliance, but lately we've been,
you know, in the last few years, we've had courts interpret that websites
now have to be accessible.
So they have to be, you know, there've been a lot of different
courts saying that websites are now under the purview of ADA.
But unfortunately ADA is not black and white.
So it doesn't really spell out for us like, Hey, these are the standards.
This is exactly what you should do to ensure compliance.
So for that, what we, what courts have been doing or what, you know, across the world,
people have been doing is they've been relying on what's called web content
accessibility guidelines, also known as WCAG.
And under those guidelines, they spell out like a checklist of things that you should do,
such as, you know, the common ones, people know that adding all text to your images,
right?
Adding captions or subtitles to your videos.
These are like some of the big ones, but that's just scratching the surface.
Then you also need to look at your logos, your sketches, your visuals.
So that whole, you know, checklist has a bunch of different things, like almost like six
different steps, 16 different steps that you need to take.
And I have, in my legal bundle, I give you all of that.
So I basically give you the checklist of that when you're designing your site on your own
or you're paying somebody, you can give them that checklist or yourself, and you can go
through it to make sure that your site is in conforming, you know, conforming to all
of that.
And, and I also give you a website accessibility statement that you would need.
So you also need to show compliance through like a statement that you publish on your
site.
And then you also need some plugins to help you out too.
So I kind of give you all of that in that bundle.
And this way, your video, audio content, your titles, your headlines, your alt tags, all
of that stuff is in compliance.
So there's a lot.
I don't want to overwhelm.
Yeah.
Well, one of the things that I saw recently, I can't remember where it was.
I'll have to look it up.
But one of the things I saw recently was that a lot of people, because of this whole ADA
compliance thing is they are starting to record their blog posts as audio files so people
can hear it rather than read it.
Do you have any background on that or do you know anything about that?
Yeah.
I mean, that is one of the things that it's not like required, but you can if you want
to, that's just basically helping people, you know, with disabilities get access to
your blog posts, the ones who can't read, they can at least listen.
Right.
So it's not required to do that, but it is, it helps.
I mean, if you have the means to do that, that yes, that's something definitely you
can include.
Awesome.
Cool.
Well, goodness, you have dropped like so many knowledge bonds in just the short amount of
time that we've been chatting with each other.
So we'll definitely be leaving a lot of links down in the show notes for this episode.
Is there anything I didn't ask you that you really want to share before we conclude?
No, I mean, I think we covered a lot.
So this was definite.
And thank you for asking a lot of great questions here.
But the only other thing I would say is that you've been, there's a lot of helpful
information under the legal tips page on my website where, you know, legal, when it
comes to your business, there's so many different aspects to worry about, whether it's
business contracts, legal pages, ADA compliance, you name it.
So I have a helpful blog post on different topics if you like to learn more.
And then I also have a free legal guide that nicely breaks down what you need for your
website compliance in a lot more detail.
So you can always download that free legal guide as well.
That's awesome.
So we'll definitely drop that in the show notes as well.
And where else can people find you online?
So you can follow me on basically any social media platform, you know, Instagram, Facebook,
even YouTube.
I'm focusing a lot on helpful videos that you will find on my YouTube channel.
And then my Facebook group.
So I have a Facebook group.
It's called a self group is blocked community.
You can join and have easy access to me there or anywhere on my website.
You can send us an email.
That's great stuff.
Well, thank you so much for your time.
I'm glad you could be here with us today.
And I look forward to sharing all this with everyone because there's a lot that you told
me that I didn't even know about.
Yeah.
Yeah, because, you know, when it comes to the legal stuff, it's not something that you
would think about a lot, right?
Like you always put it on the back burner.
So I'm happy to help.
Amazing stuff.
Well, well, my bloggy friends, I hope you guys got a lot from this.
And if you need to rewind and relisten, go for it and then check out the show notes for
all of the good stuff that we'll be dropping at bloggy friends.com.
And until next time, may your page views be high and your bounce rate below.