Adding Privacy And Disclosure Policy Pages To Your New Blog

We’ve covered quite a bit so far and by now your cruising right along in the new blog thing:

• decided to start a blog
• found our niche
• bought a domain
• chose the blogging platform
• set up your blog and made it all pretty 🙂
• signed up for and installed Google Analytics
• added copyright to the website footer

Adding Privacy And Disclosure Policy Pages To Your New Blog

Today we’re going to talk about some crucial pages that some people overlook, but, they are necessary:

Privacy Policy

Disclosure

The difference in Posts and Pages:

You’ll notice in the dashboard sidebar of your blog that you have Posts and you have Pages.  Pages don’t show up on the homepage of your blog or in the blog section.  Pages are only visible with web address they are given.

Posts show up on your homepage (unless you have chosen to have a static homepage that stays the same all the time), and they are in the blog section on your blog.

What Are They?

A Disclosure policy lets readers know if a blogger has been paid to write certain posts or if they were given other forms of compensation in exchange for their opinion about a product(s).  It lets them know if the blogger writes unbiased opinions, or if their opinion will be influenced by the compensation.

A Privacy policy lets readers know how any information they provide on your site will be used.  It also lets them know how you’ll gather that information, how that information is stored, managed, and protected.  This is a legal requirement in many places.

When Do I Need To Add Them?

Disclosure and Privacy policies are usually added very early on as they are important to companies and PR reps that will be searching your site, as well as Google and other search engines that will be checking out your blog.

Why Disclosure and Privacy?

Many companies we work with for ads and more require that we have both a standard Privacy Policy and a Disclosure page that is easily accessible.  If you look at the menu bar on this page you’ll see the Privacy Policy and Disclosure are both in it.

How To Produce Them

They are simple to write, but, very important.  There are places you can copy and paste and just add in your own info and that works fine for a website privacy policy and disclosure policy.  Sometimes you may want to add to it, or you may want to write your own, as long as you cover everything needed, there is no reason you can’t personalize it and write your own.

Here is a free, simple multiple choice Disclosure Policy generator that you can use.  Once you choose each of your answers by clicking the button next to the one that describes what you’ll be doing, it automatically generates a Disclosure Policy you can copy and paste on to your page.

Here is a free Privacy Policy generator you can use.

How To Implement

Once you have copied the info you’ll need for your page, come back to your dashboard and choose Pages in the sidebar, and choose Add New.

It will open a new blank page for you to paste in your new policy.

Then at the top of the page add your title – Privacy Policy or Disclosure Policy

Hit Publish and you’re done!

Do the same for the next one and you are done with your Privacy and Disclosure Policy pages!  Good work!

Be sure to read all of the posts in this How To Start Your Own Blog series.  Don’t miss any of them or you could be setting yourself up for failure.  Each one is as important as the next.  Remember, you’re skipping all of the mistakes I have made over the years.