In the following article I am going to take you through the correct structure in the form of an FTC disclaimer example.

An FTC disclaimer has a number of absolutely essential elements that must be included to ensure your website content does not fall foul of the FTC guidelines that all businesses are expected to abide my if selling products and services online.

By the end of this article, you will know the main elements you need to include before being able to safely sell your own and affiliate products and services to the general buying public.

So let’s now take a look at the following FTC disclaimer example so you know what you need to do.

Opening Statement:

The opening statement of your FTC disclaimer should essentially be a “catch all”. In other words it should be the summary of what your FTC disclaimer page is all about. Your main aim is to give your site visitor a brief yet solid grounding on what your role as the site administrator plays in conveying the information to the visitor.

If you use WordPress on your website, we at ThemeintheBox have developed a free plugin to allow you to show your disclaimer to your users when they log into your website. Try it out and let us know what you think.

Full Commercial Disclosure:

Let’s not make any mistake here. If you are going to obtain a commission or payment of any kind through a purchase that your site visitors make then you absolutely must tell them this on the FTC disclaimer page. Failing to disclose information like this is a guaranteed way of bringing your site under the FTC’s microscope which could lead to action being taken against you. This could be in the form of a request from the FTC (or other legal body) requesting a removal or change to the content of your site. At the other end of the scale you could be on the receiving end of a court summons and a rather large legal bill running into five figures.

Scary stuff, so it’s absolutely crucial that you don’t miss this part out of your disclaimer page.

Some examples of commission-paying companies are Amazon, ClickBank, Commission Junction, and PayDotCom.

Testimonials:

As I write this article, it is very easy to go to shall we say “sources” on the internet to purchase a review, testimonial or even video review for your product or service – without them actually having seen the product or service in the first place.

I don’t know about you but that genuinely scares me. That anyone selling any particular product or service can go out there and obtain fake testimonials.

It’s a sure fire way for the marketplace to be flooded with poor quality products, loss of trust from your customer base and overall increasing bad feeling towards online marketers – and we certainly don’t need that in our industry.

Use of Products to Make Money:

State that in no uncertain terms that the money made by the customer should do their own due diligence with products and services that say they will help make them money online.

If you have yourself made money successfully with this product and can prove it then by all means state this. But do not whatever you do state that you made money from a product that you’ve never even looked at before never mind made money from.

Common sense is a massive factor here, don’t forget that if you are in the make money online arena then a lot of your site visitors will be looking for quality information to help them achieve that goal, so don’t send them down the river with some nonsensical statement.

The online buying public put a lot of trust in us to provide them with quality products and services, and it is our duty to uphold this. Not only to keep the FTC happy but also to ensure that we help build up the reputation of the Internet Marketing / online business arena.

Thankfully there are experts out there that are more than willing to lend their expertise to us, and by all means if you can take advantage of that then grab it with both hands. At the end of the day it’s your business and livelihood at stake.