Do You Need a Privacy Policy on Your Coaching Website?

I recently had a client ask me how to put together a privacy policy for her website, so I put my researching cap on and went to work.

I’m obviously not a lawyer, and this teeters dangerously close to that you-ought-to-get-a-lawyer line, so none of this should be construed as legal advice. (Please consult with an attorney to make sure your specific situation is covered.)

Do You Need a Privacy Policy on Your Coaching Website?

Long story short (before the story even gets started)…What exactly is a privacy policy?

A privacy policy is simply a written statement that tells people how you collect, store, use, or disclose any information they might share with you when they are interacting with your website. This might include things like making a purchase from you, filling out your email optin or contact form, or leaving a comment on a blog post.

It also covers information that flows the other way – how your website might be sharing information with them in the form of cookies.

Aren’t cookies delicious?

And so now you’re wondering what a cookie is, and does it involve chocolate chips (or at least that’s what I’m thinking about now).

Cookies are little bits of data that your website might store on a visitor’s computer that help remember any preferences they’ve chosen when visiting your website.

This could be something as significant as someone logging into your membership portal and a cookie remembering their login ID for next time or something as simple as them choosing to close down a popup box on your site and then that popup knowing it shouldn’t pop up for them again for at least another week so it isn’t too obnoxious.

WordPress, in and of itself, does not necessarily store cookies for the casual visitor, but there’s a really good chance that plugins you have installed on your WordPress website do.

For instance, you might use cookies if:

  • you’re running Google Analytics to track traffic
  • you have buttons that let visitors share your blog posts on social media
  • you embed a youtube video in one of your pages for their viewing pleasure
  • they can purchase something from you with a buy now button or your shopping cart.

There’s some great information about how to determine if your website uses cookies here: http://cookielawinfo.com/does-my-website-use-cookies/.

Anyhow, a privacy policy is a way of being up front and honest with your site visitors about this back and forth exchange of information via cookies, so it’s actually a really good thing in that it can help establish trust.

(And if you’re based in Europe, there are whole laws and directives about cookies and having to notify your site visitors of cookie usage. If you need any help with this, let me know.)

So back to privacy policies in general…

Why do you want / need a privacy policy?

Along with addressing how your website handles cookies, your privacy policy also ought to talk about data you collect from folks and reassure them that you’re not going to sell that data on the black market (because we all have secret underworld contacts on the dark web who pay big bucks for a few email addresses here and there).

In some cases, as for companies that are based in countries that are part of the European Union, Canada, or Australia (and lots of others), having a privacy policy is actually the law.

If you’re based in the United States, the law isn’t quite a clear cut. With the exception of the state of California, there isn’t necessarily an explicit law that says you absolutely must have a written privacy policy on your site, but there are a whole slew of federal laws that strongly suggest it’s a really good idea.

If you get into the online advertising game using the likes of Google AdWords or AdSense, Google is pretty insistent that you have a privacy policy and that people can easily find a link to it on your home page.

But here’s where I think a privacy policy is most important for folks in the coaching or a similar service industry…

One of the best tactics for online marketing and connecting with potential clients you may never meet in person has been, and likely will continue to be, building a strong email marketing list (and actually regularly sending useful communications to that email marketing list).

In order to do that, you gather names and email addresses using an email marketing service like Aweber or Mailchimp or Active Campaign.

And it’s important to be upfront about what you and your chosen email marketing service do with those email addresses and names that you collect.

In other words, a privacy policy states flat out and very clearly that you’re not going to be a jerk, you’re not going to sell their email address to the spam bots or use it for any purpose other than to send them the information they requested from you, and you’re taking reasonable precautions to protect their private information.

It says that you trust the company that is storing those email addresses for you, and you promise that you (and the email marketing service company you use) will use the information they shared with you for good and not evil.

Resources for creating your privacy policy

So aside from outright hiring a lawyer to draft your policy from scratch, there are several more economical ways to get up and running with one.

You can start by looking at the privacy policies of the external services you use like your email marketing service or if you use an ecommerce provider like Shopify or Ultracart or 1ShoppingCart. By virtue of you using these external services, your visitors are subjected to their privacy policies.

Here’s Aweber’s privacy policy: https://www.aweber.com/privacy.htm.  The “I Am A Subscriber To An Email List Managed Through AWeber” section is most relevant to what we’re talking about.  Similarly, here is Mailchimp’s privacy policy: https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/.  Section 12 – Your Distribution Lists is the section that pertains to your subscribers.

Beyond that, there are quite a few online privacy policy generators that might help you piece together what you need.  Here are a few that are decent options:

FreePrivacyPolicy.com

This is the service I used in creating my own privacy policy and it was relatively painless.

Iubenda

This service gives you a few more hoops to jump through to get going with it and I didn’t care for it as much, but it’s one of the more touted privacy policy generators out there, so it’s worth checking out. Plus they’ve posted a great article about privacy policies when you’re using an email marketing service like Mailchimp.

What to do with your privacy policy once you’ve got it put together

Once you’ve got your privacy policy generated (by lawyer or online policy generator), you need to actually post it on your website.

Start by creating a standalone page (not a blog post). Call it Privacy Policy (since that’s what everyone expects it to be called). It doesn’t need to be fancy and doesn’t need to include a lot of special formatting or pretty images. It’s not going to be a high-traffic page.

Then copy and paste the content of your policy right onto that new page.

Some of the privacy policy generators out there want to create your policy for you and then host it on their website (and then you’re supposed to link to it). I can’t see any advantage to doing this. Your content, your site, right?!  If you run into this, I highly recommend finding a way to copy the content from their page and port it over to your own.

Once your new privacy policy page is complete, you need to include a link to it somewhere that is easy to find and appears on most, if not all, of your web pages.

It does not need to take up precious real estate in the main menu bar at the top of your site. But it is fairly common practice to have the link in the footer somewhere – either down near your copyright information or listed with other similar pages in one of your footer widgets.

That’s it – you’re done!

(If you’d like any help getting up and running with your own privacy policy, don’t hesitate to reach out to me.) 🙂