GDPR: The essential guide for internet marketers

Key Takeaways

hello I'm professor Ricky with income school and today on ask the professor we will be talking about the GDP our [Music] today's question on ask the professor comes from well many of you about the GDP are what is the GDP are and what does it mean for you and your website well today we're going to cover as much of that as we can but here's the thing I'm a professor I'm not your lawyer so nothing that I say today should be construed as legal advice if after this video you're still kept awake at night worrying about the GD P R then I highly encourage you to consult a lawyer who is read and understands the entire GDP our good luck let's start by talking about what the GD P R is g.d.p oh that's an R so first what is the GDP are the G DP R is the general data protection regulation it's a not exactly new piece of legislation that was passed in the European Union that regulates how we're able to collect process and use people's personally identifiable information now personally identifiable information that's things like their name their email address and even their IP address that apparently in the EU is considered personally identifiable now this law was not passed just to be a royal pain in our took Isis but the fact of the matter is that's exactly what it is you see you may be thinking that the GD P R doesn't apply to you if you don't live in the EU but the fact is that even if the users on your website are just in the EU at the time that they use the website any of those users then this law applies to you and you need to comply it's probably a lot simpler than you think especially if what you have is a simple WordPress website that you use for internet marketing the way that we teach here on income school you see if you get it wrong you could be subject to a fine of 20 million euros or 4% of your annual revenue whichever is bigger but that's just the worst-case scenario and these are the numbers they're using to try to scare us to death chances are even if they did come after you they wouldn't come after you with this because the fact is that the GD P R is a piece of legislation that was designed to target large companies that are using large amounts of our information our personal data gathering at storing it using it for marketing and whoever who knows what else and who are doing so without our express permission so you and your WordPress website are not really the target but you do need to comply so let's talk about the places where you may be collecting processing and deleting people's personally identifiable information the first place you're likely gathering and storing people's personally identifiable information is in the comments section of your website or if you have any memberships when people submit a comment to your website they usually have to provide their email address this pulls their Gravatar image if they have one and and allows you to identify who they are it's great right except that because you're grabbing their their email address and potentially even their name for their comment this is personally identifiable information now what you're going to need to do is get people's permission to do that now WordPress is coming through for us this could have been pretty pretty complicated in addition to getting people's consent to collect that information you also have to give people a way to find out what information you've stored on them as well as have the ability to delete that information from your entire website well that would have been complicated but WordPress came through update for 9.6 for WordPress gives us the ability to do this you're going to want to have some sort of explanation for how you use this information in your privacy policy on comments specifically and you're going to need to link to your privacy policy from the comment form in addition WordPress now has a tool where you're going to be able to when requested send people the information that you've gathered on them as well as delete that information if they ask you to there's going to be a couple ways to handle this and I'll talk about that a little bit more in a few minutes I also lumped memberships into this section you see WordPress integrates with a lot of aftermarket and premium plugins like learn - and member press that are made for membership sites or course websites now when somebody signs up for a course or a membership on your website they've provided you personally identify information now these plugins all the smart ones at least they know that if they don't get gdpr compliant they're going to be in trouble and you're gonna be looking for a new provider so they are working on integrating with WordPress so when people request that information that I just told you about and WordPress does an extract for you while it's gonna extract all that information as well and be able to pass that on to the person requesting it and delete it a fast the second place you may be collecting personally identifiable information is through a sales checkout now if you're using a third-party tool like send owl it's actually them collecting the information and you're probably okay they should be gdpr compliant now again any time you collect somebody's personally identifiable information like when you're selling them a product info product or physical product you're going to want to link to your privacy policy so that people can find how you collect and store and use their information the third place that you're probably collecting personally identifiable information on your website is for your Google Analytics you have placed a tracking code on your website if you're using Google Analytics that's collecting the information about how people use your website it's doing this by collecting their IP address as well as gathering any other information about them that they can based upon their Google login or whatever and Google there for is able to give you demographic information where they're from all sorts of information about how much time they spend on your site where they go it's great data for us to have as website builders but it does include personally identifiable information now because of that Google's gotten smart see Google Google knows what they're doing and Google has the biggest skin in the game when it comes to making sure that their GDP are compliant so Google is working on creating all the right tools to help you identify or to extract that personally identifiable information like we talked about WordPress doing and they're also making sure that everything they do is GDP are compliant they're going to be anonymizing IP addresses and all sorts of things to make sure the ID information they collect is not personally identifiable and if it is that they're following the laws and making sure that you on your website are compliant with the gdpr the fourth and final place that most of us are collecting personally identifiable information is for our email list now this one could get a little bit hairy if you're not careful because a lot of people what they're doing is using some sort of lead magnet or a freebie something that they're giving away for free for people that will just provide their email address the problem is when people provide their email address for the freebie they're not giving explicit permission for you to send them follow-up emails like a newsletter or other marketing emails and because they haven't given that explicit express permission for you to use their email in that way if you send them another email you are not complying with the gdpr this is the one that could take some work if that's how you collected emails then for everybody based in the EU what you're going to have to do is get their permission to keep sending them emails or just wipe them off your email list now if you're watching this before the gdpr starts being enforced on May 25th 2018 then then you've got a little bit of time you could send out an email to everybody that's in the EU or for who you don't have a location giving them a link to sign up for a new email list and and then you just have to pitch to them the reasons why they want to be on your newsletter now there are a few ways to do that one is on your opt-in form where you're going to give them the freebie once they give you your their email address you can have a checkbox or have them answer yes or no on whether or not they give you permission to send follow up marketing in newsletter emails that by default has to be selected no or an unchecked box the other thing about that though is they have to still be able to get the freebie even if they don't check the box you just can't have them on your email list that could be frustrating right so another way to do this is to have the consent to be on the email list somewhere else in that that chain of where you of where they sign up for your free be you could have them give their email address and sign up for the freebie and you're gonna send them the free day one way or another but then maybe it takes them to another page where they can consent to sign up for your email list now all those are perfectly fine approaches but that's not the approach that I'm taking the approach that I've chosen to take with my websites where I have an email list is actually on the signup page I have them signing up for a newsletter now there may be a promise of freebies in the email newsletter for example we often will do that we'll have a giveaway something that they're going to get for free as part of the newsletter and so what I do is I tell them everything that they're going to get on that page I say you're gonna get our regular newsletter you're gonna get this you're gonna get that and in the very first email you're going to get this specific freebie by doing it that way when they give me their email address they've already given me express permission to put them on the newsletter because that's what they signed up for now I told you WordPress was doing a really big favor for us update for dot 9.6 is the one to watch out for if you haven't already got it on your website make sure that you put it on there right away because 4.9 dot 6 makes WordPress gdpr compliant it gives you a template with a whole bunch of legal language for your privacy policy now WordPress has made this easy they give you a really nice template for how to do that and if you have a privacy policy linking from your footer is perfectly fine but that's not going to be enough to satisfy gdpr what you're going to have to do is in addition to putting it in the header or rather the footer menu rather than putting it just in the footer menu you're going to have to put it all over your website anywhere where you collect user information if this information was helpful to you or maybe just entertaining please click the subscribe button below and if you're really serious about getting started building your own websites and generating a passive income 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