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Picture this, you’ve spent countless hours & loads of precious energy (extra energy is sparse for me these days) to start a blog & after many (MANY) nights, your blog is finally something that you’re proud of. You sit back to look at it and then….it all goes up in flames….because you failed to legally protect yourself & your hard work.
I’ve read countless “how to start a blog” articles but most of them leave out or breeze right over the legal part. Listen…nobody wants to drone on about legal protection, why you need it, or the ramifications if you don’t have it… that’s a fun stopper every single time.
Do you know what else is a fun stopper though?…. a lawsuit. A lawsuit is worse than that actually. A lawsuit is not just a fun stopper; it’s a show stopper, friends.
It’s reaaally easy to convince yourself that legal protection is not needed if you’re merely sharing your amateur opinion, offering advice based on your own experiences, promoting products you personally love, etc. You couldn’t possibly fall into hot water for that, right? WRONG!
What happens if someone takes your advice & it goes badly?
What happens if the product you recommended gets recalled?
By this point, I’m sure you catch my drift. The short of it is, ignorance is most certainly NOT bliss (nor does it count as a defense).
So where do you turn? I’ll cut to the chase.
Amira at “A Self Guru”
I first learned about Amira from another one of my favorite bloggers, By Sophia Lee. I turn to Sophia for a lot of blogging advice so, I trusted her recommendation on Amira.
Amira is a business lawyer, seven-figure blogger, and coach who teaches how to make money blogging while protecting your online business legally.
Honest to God, Amira takes everything complicated & scary out of legalities & breaks it down for us (“us” being anyone that’s not a lawyer).
I learned so much from simply perusing her website but one of the key takeaways for you (& for me) is that EVERY blog needs these 3 things at a minimum:
Amira explains that these 3 legal documents (& other legal documents, as applicable) need a page of their own (1 page for each document) on your blog.
Amira has editable templates for these 3 legal documents (& many, many others). They are so easy to navigate, easy to understand, & very easy to edit.
Most importantly, they ALIGN with the current (& ever-changing laws). If there is one thing I do not take for granted about Amira, it’s that she updates her templates as the laws change (& the laws most definitely do change). The privacy laws changed within the first 2 months of me purchasing the template from Amira; I got an email from her stating that she updated the template to reflect the new laws & it was available to me in the Membership Area.
I cannot overstate how truly valuable that is. I am capable of a lot of things but keeping up with, interpreting, & implementing changing laws is not one of them.
You can purchase each template individually or purchase a bundle. I actually purchased the VIP bundle (which includes 16 templates) and hired Amira to work 1 on 1 with me to start my LLC. I scheduled a 1 hour meeting with her and she helped me:
- Conduct the name search for my business
- File the Articles of Organization
- Draft the LLC Operating Agreement for my business
- File the Initial Annual Report Form
- Complete and File the EIN application
Amira offers LLC support in 1 of 2 ways: “done WITH you” or “done FOR you”. I wanted to learn how to do all of the things above so I opted for the “done WITH you” service. Over a 1 hour zoom meeting, I shared my screen & she walked me through everything.
I am truly blown away by how professional, RELATABLE, & friendly Amira is. For whatever reason, probably the mere success of her business, I wasn’t expecting to get her undivided attention and feel like she genuinely cared about my success but that’s exactly what I got.
I am just so thankful.
In the spirit of transparency, even though I do mean EVERY word of what I have said so far, these services, as you probably guessed, come with a cost. To be very honest, spending money on my blog before I even launched stung a little but I know that anything worth doing is worth doing in the right way. There is no workaround for legal protection; you’re either protected or you are not. For me, there was only one option.
Fortunately, Amira offers a generous affiliate program (40% commission on any product purchased with a personalized link) which is an opportunity to recoup some (maybe all) of your investment. Frankly, I had such a good experience that I would absolutely recommend Amira with or without the affiliate program.
I hope you found this helpful! I hope you choose to invest in YOURSELF and hire Amira but whatever you decide, I truly do wish you the very best.
Take care,
Kai
