It's always important to cover yourself and your internet marketing business, and by including the following pages in your web site, you will go far in keeping the legal beagles at bay. Plus, having these pages on your site is good for your visitors.

 

About Page

 

Yes, you need an About page. This is the place where you can tell your visitors a lot more about yourself than they can glean from your blog posts. It's a great place to tell them more about you and it gives you a chance to be more personal with them. Plus, it gives you a chance to establish trust. It's an essential page.

 

Contact Page

 

Provide your visitors a way to contact you. Of course, you could just tell them your email address (you can set up a "catch all" email inbox), but this leaves you open to spammers and their spambots. What you really should do is use a good plugin like Custom Contact Form. This plugin is easy to use but it offers a lot more options than the contact form plugins you may read about.

 

When a visitor hits your contact page, they fill out some information and the plugin emails you. That way, you don't have to reveal your email address to anyone but you can get back to your visitor right away.

 

Terms of Use

 

If you use your web site for your business (and who doesn't, really?), then you need a Terms of Use ("TOS") page. On this page, you detail what rights your visitors have to your content: If or how they can share parts of it, what they can do with the material, and so on.

 

Privacy Policy

 

This page is of critical importance. It absolutely needs to be posted on your web site. This is the page where you tell visitors what you will do with their information. States, the Better Business Bureau, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are really clamping down on web sites and it seems that they are tackling the privacy issue first and foremost.

 

So please address this as soon as possible.

 

Earnings Disclaimer

 

While this is not a required page, I recommend that you include it, especially if you sell any products or services that your visitors may construe as  "how to make money".

 

Legal Pages Method

 

Create each of the 5 pages.

Make a menu that includes each of them.

Place that menu in the footer of your web site.

While you don't necessarily want to bury these pages, you don't want to highlight them either. You are not trying to hide anything, but the last three are legal in nature and the only requirement is that you have the pages posted and they are easily found. That is why you place them in a menu in your footer.

 

You can look at the pages I have posted as examples only to determine what they ought to include.

 

You should also place disclaimers on each of your product/service pages that tells your visitors exactly how you may benefit from them using, renting, or purchasing your products and services. It may seem silly to say that you will earn money if they buy from you (duh!), but it's becoming clearer that you may want to (over)cover yourself in those circumstances. There is a nifty plugin that helps you address these concerns.

 

It's called Privacy Simplified Plugin and it's an easy way to add disclaimers to any/all of your pages.