Top 25 Success Secrets – Legal Protection

Posted by Steven Wagenheim on October 10, 2010 in General

In the last installment of Top 25 Success Secrets, I went over dedication, which is something that I think 90% of the people failing in this business are lacking in one form or another, either to their customers, themselves, or both. If you didn’t read the article, I suggest you go and do it after reading this one. In this installment, I’m going to talk about legal protection…another area where many Internet marketers are dropping the ball.

Okay, so what type of legal protection am I talking about and why is it important to success? Am I talking about getting yourself a lawyer? Well, hopefully, it won’t come to that because quite honestly, if you’ve reached the point where you need a lawyer, you’ve already dropped the ball on this issue.

The kind of legal protection I’m talking about specifically in this article is the use of disclaimers. So many people seem to think that these little things are just that…little things. They are not. They can mean the difference between you having and NOT having your business the next day. All it takes is one person to file a complaint and claim that you had no disclaimers on your site in regard to the products that you’re selling.

For example, let’s say you have a health site and you’re selling natural treatments for a variety of diseases such as cancer, acne, warts or whatever. Imagine that there are no disclaimers on the site and somebody actually BELIEVES that these are FDA approved “cures.” What do you think will happen when they try whatever it is you’re peddling and it doesn’t work, or worse, makes them deathly ill?

Can you say lawsuit?

For a product like this, and please consult with a lawyer who is an expert on disclaimers, you will probably need something that reads something like this.

“This product is sold as a natural alternative for treating (disease). The product creator makes no guarantees in regard to any results and this treatment is not FDA approved. You use this product entirely at your own risk”

And so on. Naturally, you will have to work on the wording but you get the point. You have to make it crystal clear in the disclaimer that you make no guarantees and accept no liability for its use in case of any harmful side effects.

What if you’re selling a make money online product? Same thing. You will have to have a disclaimer that goes something like this.

“The product creator makes no claims or guarantees in regard to income you may earn. The results posted on this page are atypical and your results will depend on your own effort and understanding of the principles taught in the product itself.”

By using disclaimer similar to these (and some of them are pages long) you remove any legal chance that you could end up on the short end of a lawsuit because of false or misleading claims.

I can’t stress this enough. You absolutely MUST protect yourself if you’re going to sell products to the general public, the variety of which imply that by using those products the customer will get certain results.

Failure to do this can be disastrous.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to know what the 7 Deadly Sins of Internet Marketing are? Get my free report at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/7deadlysins/7deadlysins.html and save your business from going down the tubes before it even has a chance.