It’s been almost 10 years since I owned a car.
Luckily, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Sometimes getting places on public transit isn’t the quickest or easiest. But most days it’s not a hassle to travel via foot, bike, or public transit.
But recently, I’ve been saving up to buy a car. To prepare for buying a car, I’ve started a car savings account.
And some of the funds in this account are set aside for usual car maintenance. Things like getting the oil changed, tires rotated, and belts replaced.
Running a regular legal check-up of your creative business sounds boring. But it is critical to building a foundation to support your big goals. And unless you turn it into a habit, then it’s hard to change your pattern of behavior. (Pssst…my favorite book about habit forming is The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg [affiliate link].)
And you probably don’t have strong habits around performing a regular legal check-up of your creative business.
To help you form a new habit, this post is the second of four I’ll be doing this year. Each one outlines a set of legal tasks you should complete in your creative business that quarter. (You can see the January tasks here, the July tasks here, and the October tasks here.)
So kick the second quarter of 2017 off, you are going to tackle between three and five legal tasks:
- evaluate (and update) your email marketing template
- update (or create) your website’s terms of service and privacy policy
- pay your taxes
- if you have sponsored or affiliate income, audit your website to assure that all your links and posts comply with the FTC rules
- if you are an LLC or corporation, document all major business decisions and hold any required meetings
Evaluate (and update) your email marketing template
By law, your marketing emails must:
- accurately identify your business by providing a valid name, from email address, and reply-to email address
- not use a deceptive subject line
- contain a valid postal mailing address (P.O. Boxes and Private Mail Boxes are acceptable)
- tell recipients how they can opt-out
- honor requests to opt-out promptly
- mailing address you provide them
- unsubscribe link
They also automatically remove anyone who opts out for you.
Your assignment: Double-check your email marketing template to assure all these items are present. And, check the address you provided to assure that you gave them a valid postal mailing address.
Update (or create) your website’s terms of service and privacy policy
Our websites are changing constantly. And when you make these changes or add new features, you need to update your terms of service and privacy policy.
Your assignment:
If you’ve got terms of service and a privacy policy: read over your them to make sure they are up to date. If you need to make changes, make sure you follow the rules in your current terms of service about what notice you’ll provide when you change them.
If you don’t have one (or both): then you should create them. If you want to quickly get them up, you can grab a Mad Libs template here. Or if you want to learn how to create a version that matches your branding and voice, click here to join the artist’s Courtyard. In the artist’s Courtyard, there’s a course with more than 30 resources to help you make sure your website is on the up and up.
Pay your taxes
- estimated self-employment taxes to the IRS
- collected sales tax to your state tax agency
- employer’s taxes to the IRS and your state tax agency
Your assignment: Send checks to the appropriate agency (And if you don’t have a system to set aside the government’s money, I highly recommend Profit First by Mike Michalowicz [affiliate link].)
Sponsored or affiliate revenue streams: audit your website to assure that all your links and posts comply with the FTC rules
When you promote a product or service, either because you’ve been sponsored or because you are an affiliate, you must follow a set of FTC guidelines.
The FTC rules are pretty common sense when you think about them from the consumer’s standpoint. You need to make it clear that you are getting something in exchange for promoting the product or service.
You must do this with your:
- social media followers
- website visitors
- newsletter subscribers
And you do this by adding a notification to your content that the link an affiliate link. You might do this by:
- add the text [affiliate link] after any text or image link
- having a standard blurb that goes at the top of each sponsored or affiliate blog post
- add #ad to the beginning of any social media post
- Placement: You cannot hide the disclosure in the footer. It must be conspicuous and obvious.
- Action: You can’t require viewers to take extra steps to read the disclosure (e.g. no click-through links).
- Clear: Viewers must easily know that you are getting paid in exchange.
- Timing: You can’t just tell viewers once. Disclosures must be on every post, social media interaction, email, link, or comment.
(My trick to remembering these four elements is that you make a PACT with viewers to disclose when they are getting something in return.)
Your assignment: Create or update your policies around how you keep your PACT with your audience. And if you need to update past content, block off time to apply your new policy. (We’ve also got a resource for that in the artist’s Courtyard. Click here to rjoin.)
LLCs and corporations: document all major business decisions and hold required meetings
The whole reason you created your LLC was for three big benefits. And to keep your fence strong, you are required to document all major business decisions.
To document your decisions, you don’t need to do anything fancy. It can be as simple as summarizing notes from a meeting or writing down what your plan is. (In legalese, these are called Minutes of a Meeting and Written Consents.)
Your assignment if you are a corporation:
- If you haven’t held your annual shareholder meeting and board of directors meeting, hold one
- Write down all the major decisions you’ve made in your business in the first quarter of 2017 and add them to your central file
Your assignment if you are an LLC: Write down all the major decisions you’ve made in your business in the first quarter of 2017 and add them to your central file. (Don’t have a template for these? We’ve got one in the artist’s Courtyard.)
#TL;DR
In April, there are between three and five legal tasks you should tackle to legally maintain your creative business:
- evaluate (and update) your email marketing template
- update (or create) your website’s terms of service and privacy policy
- pay your taxes
- if you have sponsored or affiliate income, audit your website to assure that all your links and posts comply with the FTC rules
- if you are an LLC or corporation, document all major business decisions and hold any required meetings
Enter your information below to grab a workbook and checklist you can use to tackle these five tasks. So you can maintain the legal foundation of your creative business. And allow it to support you as you work to accomplish your big goals.
