3 Legal Tips to Prep for Black Friday + Black Friday Sale Rundown

Are you ready for Black Friday? Black Friday brings extra attention to your offers, so it's more important than ever to make sure you have the legal pieces buttoned up. Here are 3 tips to make sure you're ready for the extra attention Black Friday brings your way.

We're having a huge sale for Black Friday! We're offering 5 different deals this year starting on Monday, November 21. Listen in for the full rundown and head over here to preview the sale!

Key Takeaways

• Black Friday brings extra attention to your website - make sure it's up to snuff with the right policies and disclaimers
• Terms of Purchase are always a must when selling digital products
• Make sure any boundaries or limitations on your Black Friday sale are super clear on your sales page and social posts, or link to a Black Friday policies page to make sure it's all laid out clearly 

Resources Mentioned

• Preview our Black Friday Sale (sale runs Nov. 21 - 28)
• Learn more about trademark registration services
  
• Follow Amy on Instagram @artfulcontracts

Next Steps

Thank you so much for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please reach out and let me know by sending me a DM on Instagram @artfulcontracts

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• Leave a review on Apple Podcasts
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• Share the episode on social media and tag me @artfulcontracts 

Episode Transcript

Black Friday's coming! So exciting! I love Black Friday. So today I'm gonna be giving you just a couple quick legal tips to get ready for your Black Friday sale if you're having one. And I'm gonna give you a little rundown of the Artful Contracts Black Friday week sale. It's gonna be big. I'm really excited. So let's hop in.

Hey, I'm Amy Nesheim, licensed attorney for online business owners and founder of my own business, Artful Contracts. You're listening to Legal Made Easy, the show that makes the legal aspects of online business easy to understand and implement so you can grow your business with confidence knowing you've got it all covered. Let's dive in.

I love holidays. I have a really big family and we always have get-togethers, and it's always like a multiple-day event thing. So I love holidays. I love Thanksgiving and Christmas. And Black Friday kind of has a special place in my heart because I think it brings me back to like the first bonding experience I had with my sister-in-law. And my brother's older than me, so he's always the cool older brother. And they met when they were really young. So we're talking like I was a teenager and they were cool college kids, and they took me along Black Friday shopping with them one year, and that was like my first early morning Black Friday experience.

And we just like went to the mall and it was totally dead because it was like 6 a.m. But it's just had a special place in my heart ever since then, and we've like gone a few times together, and because she's really big into it and always does all of her Christmas shopping on Black Friday. So to me, it says family getting ready for the holidays, and it's just really exciting. And now that I have a business, it's actually even more fun because I get to offer like some really awesome specials and make a little extra money going into the holidays, and it's just a really fun time.

So we're gonna be diving into what the specials I'm running this year are in just a little bit, but first I wanted to give you a few tips if you're running your own Black Friday sale. Now I know a lot of you are service providers, so maybe this isn't a good fit for you. I know a lot of like you don't want to discount your services, so maybe you don't want to run a Black Friday sale, but you could, you know, add on some bonuses instead of discounting the price or run a special offer or something. So maybe this still applies.

But I know that Black Friday is really big for digital product creators, course creators, digital download products, because the offer is already created, so discounting it isn't really hurting you that much. So sales can actually be really beneficial for digital product creators.

So let's talk about what you need to do to get ready for Black Friday legally. Honestly, it's really not going to be that different than anything else I tell you for any other day of the year. But there is going to be more traffic going to your website. So that means the first thing to do is to make sure that you are up to snuff on all of your website policies, like your privacy policy, your terms and conditions, and disclaimers if those are relevant to you. Make sure you have them linked on your main website. And if you created a separate landing page for Black Friday, make sure those are on that landing page too. We're talking more website traffic, more eyes on your website. So it's extra important that you have all of those pieces buttoned up.

Now the next thing you should also already have in place, and that is terms of purchase for whatever you're selling. Now, for a service provider, you already have your one-on-one contract. That's fine. You just keep using that same one. You know, adjust the price or add in whatever bonuses you added to make it reflect the Black Friday sale.

But for digital products, you have to have terms of purchase that talk about the rules for the purchase. So this is different than terms and conditions because terms and conditions on your website are of talking to your website visitor, not someone who pays you money. Terms of purchase are for that relationship where it changes into where they're paying you money.

So that talks about how you handle their payments, their access to their product, refund policies, intellectual property rights for the thing that they bought. All of that stuff is not necessarily going to be covered in your terms and conditions of your website. So it needs to have its own place, and that's the terms of purchase.

The next thing that you need to do is be super clear on what the deal is, including when it starts, when it ends, what coupon they have to use, or specific link they have to go through. Get really clear on that and then communicate it. A lot of, well, most big companies will have a separate Black Friday policies page where they outline all of that. And sometimes they'll do a no refunds on Black Friday purchases. That's more common for physical products.

But if you think you just can't handle the volume, maybe that will make sense. They have deadlines for each of their discount codes, they have like eligibility requirements for certain purchases that are eligible or not eligible, they have processing times, which again is not necessarily going to be relevant for digital products that are delivered automatically and immediately.

But if you have any fulfillment that you have to do and it's gonna take longer because it's Black Friday and you're off, or it's just the volume issue, then that's something that's important. So all of these things are things to think about. Get really clear on what your answer is gonna be, maybe write it out for yourself. I have like a Google Doc that's just all of my Black Friday like outlined for myself. And then you want to put it either in a policies Black Friday terms page on your site that's linked on your Black Friday page or linked on your main page, main website. Or you don't have to do that. You can just make all the stuff clear on the site.

Like if you don't have that many deals going on, if you don't have a lot of product ineligibility, then you just make it clear 40% off everything from X date to X date to this time. So the sale starts at November 25th at 7 a.m. Eastern Time and ends on November 28th at 11.59 p.m. Eastern Time. And as long as you have those details there and accessible, findable, visible to your people who are taking advantage of it, you're good to go.

You just have to either have it right on your Black Friday page, right on your main site where you announced Black Friday and what the deal is, or you can have a separate terms page if there's multiple different offers and a lot of rules you have to put in there. Same goes with coupon codes or if they have to use a certain link to access the deal. Long story short, be super specific on the details of the sale and make it clear to your audience what they are so that there's no confusion around what products are eligible or the deadlines or codes they have to use or anything like that. And if you can put all the details of like the timing and everything right on the page, but then you have a couple details that you want to make sure are clear, you can also just add a footer.

You can check out my Black Friday page for an example of this. I have a 30-day money back guarantee on all of my digital products, but my Black Friday sales page also mentions my trademark services. And so I just put a sentence in the footer that says the 30-day money-back guarantee that's talked about on this page only applies to products and not to services. It's just a little extra bit of clarity so that I don't have anyone who's confused around that.

And that's really important because if they're confused around it and if they fight you on it, they're gonna win. There is a little bit of an element of the customer is always right in this stuff. If you put a guarantee, especially a guarantee, there's strict laws around guarantees. If you put a guarantee up there and it's not clear what it applies to, the default is gonna be on whatever the customer thought, not what you meant. So just make sure it's really clear.

Same goes with your social posts. Put the deadlines and everything on your social posts, the coupon codes. That's just good practice for getting people to be aware of when the sale ends. And then if you do have extra terms you can mention in your post, you can go see all the extra terms here at this link or even where they're linked. And again, this is all stuff that big companies do, so you can see lots of examples of it. If you just look around a little bit for all the tiny text on all the Black Friday sales stuff. That's your quick legal rundown on Black Friday.

First, make sure that your website is ready for the increased traffic with terms and conditions, privacy policy, privacy policy is not optional, and any disclaimers. Make sure you have terms of purchase in place for all of your digital products, and outline your Black Friday deals really clearly and write it all out. Put any limitations right on the page, or have a separate Black Friday terms page where you just have the details of the sale and any limitations to it. Like we usually have a refund policy, but there's no refunds on Black Friday, or this is the time deadline, or you have to use this code or this link, stuff like that.

Now let's get into the rundown of the Artful Contracts Black Friday week sale. And yes, it is a whole week long. I'm kind of jumping on the bandwagon of like recently, last couple years, I feel like Black Friday has stretched out almost into October, or there's like sales going on like at the beginning of November and then other sales.

Anyways, I'm kind of hopping on that and stretching it out a little bit. So we are going Monday to Monday, the 21st to the 28th, and it's not like a deal per day or anything, it's all the deals are available that whole week. So, what am I talking about? What are those deals? We have five different specials, five different Black Friday deals this year, and I'm really excited because we've never done it this way before.

If you have been following along with me for a while, I have always done a Black Friday template shop sale, but I've never done sales on any of my courses or trainings. And I migrated my website, so I actually have all my landing pages and all my checkout pages all on one platform now, which is great. Cause before I had my template shop on Shopify, so it was separate from all my other stuff. Now it's all together, and that means that we can do a big sale on everything.

Alright, so here it is. First Black Friday deal for Artful Contracts. 40% off everything in the template shop. I have a template shop page, and everything on that page is 40% off. That includes all contract templates and template bundles, as well as 40% off your first month inside my template membership, Legal Templates Unlimited monthly.

That means if you don't have those terms of purchase in place for your digital products and you want to sneak in on Monday and get them up before your sale starts on Friday, you can do that 40% off. We also have one-on-one coaching contracts, group coaching contracts, freelancer contracts, consulting contracts, bundles for coaches, bundles for service providers, and then my membership has literally anything you can need.

Things like a podcast guest release, testimonial release, speaker agreement, bundle collaboration agreement, copywriter contract, web designer contract, virtual assistant contract, online business manager contract. All of our specialized contracts are inside of the membership, and that's the only place you can get them.

That 40% off also applies to the annual option of the membership. If you take advantage of that, you're actually getting six months free because you already get two months free when you choose the annual option, and then 40% off that you pay for six months and you're in for the whole year.

So that's deal number one, 40% off all of our contract templates and template bundles on our shop page. The next deal, Black Friday deal number two, is $300 off. That is 60% off the website protection toolkit. If you missed out on step number one and you don't have your website policies in place yet, and again, you want to get in on that on Monday, have it all set up by Friday when your sale goes live, this is the perfect thing for that.

The website protection toolkit is a template bundle plus a mini workshop that walks you through all of the steps to protect your website and make sure that it is legally legit. So that has your privacy policy, terms and conditions, website disclaimers, and then training walking you through what all of those things are, when you need them, how to use them, as well as training on website accessibility and consumer protection.

All of those things, again, super important for Black Friday when you're gonna have that increased traffic. The regular price on this is $4.97 and on Black Friday it's gonna be just $197, $300 off. Super great deal. Black Friday deal number three is $150 off the trademark roadmap. I don't talk about this enough, but in case you didn't know, I have a full course on how to register your trademark DIY.

We went through the live round of it in the spring, and then I just like don't talk about it that much. It's available on my site, but I've never done a launch for it or anything. But it is so good. I was looking through it when I was creating this deal for Black Friday, and I was like, wow, I told I told you guys everything.

Like you learn like lawyer secrets that lawyers probably don't want to tell you about the trademark process, all the behind-the-scenes stuff. You actually watch me like file a trademark, and because it was a live, I mean it's all edited into like 10-15 minute videos, so that's really step by step. But because it was live, I actually like took trademarks that the students were giving me and I like did searches on them. I use them as examples, so it's super actionable and like really applies to my audience because I had people in there with me live doing it and giving me examples from you know my type of students, my type of audience, which are your type of business people.

So that's the trademark roadmap full-length DIY trademark course. If you want to register a trademark on your own, it's usually $497. The Black Friday price is $150 off, so that's $347. And if you use this to like register one trademark, you're saving so much money. But if you have multiple trademarks you want to register, it's like a no-brainer.

Black Friday deal number four. I keep saying I'm excited, but like honestly, I am really excited. So this is a brand new live event that I'm putting on in February. The Black Friday deal is a pre-sale ticket. This is a brand new thing just announced for Black Friday. We're calling it the copycat workshop. So this is a live workshop on how to protect your content and your work from copycats.

I get so many questions on this. People all the time want to know. Like, we work so hard to create all of our content, right? And as online business owners, the fact of the matter is we're content creators, and especially if you have digital products, it's so important. And it's also really scary. Like the idea that somebody else could copy your stuff and then sell it, that's a big problem.

So, this workshop, it's gonna be live on February 9th. Haven't picked a time yet, probably midday, but we're gonna go over what a copyright is, how it protects your content, if you need to register a copyright, how to protect your work from copycats, and then also what to do if the scary thing happens, if you find out someone else has copied your content, what to do and the steps to get them to stop.

And then we're also gonna talk about how to use other people's content legally, because that's a big problem in the online space. You need to know both ways. And I'm not just gonna like talk at you for half an hour. Well, it's gonna be like probably like 90 minutes, but I'm not just gonna talk at you. You are also gonna get the templates that you need to actually take action on the things we talk about. So that's a copyright cease and desist letter, DMCA takedown notice, intellectual property license agreement. If you don't know what those are, like the workshop will talk you through all of that too. Uh, and then also a fair use factors guide, so guidance on how to use other people's stuff legally.

The regular price for that when we promote it in January, February is going to be $197. Because again, you're getting so much live training from me with QA plus all the templates. So the price on that is gonna be $197. Black Friday presale price. If you get your ticket during Black Friday, it is just $77.

So if you want to make sure that your content is safe from copycats, come hang out with me in February. Get your ticket now and save your spot. We're probably gonna have to limit the number of spots. So sign up now and you'll get that presale price and you'll be in.

That brings us to Black Friday deal number five. If you book a trademark consultation call with me during Black Friday week, and by that I mean if you reserve a time for December, not if you get on the phone with me during Black Friday, because I'm not doing that. If you book your call for later, if you book it during Black Friday week, you lock in 2022 pricing on my registration services through the end of quarter one, 2023.

Let me break that down a little bit. My prices for my trademark registration services, my done for you trademark registration, where you tell me the mark and I do the rest of the work, prices are going up by $500 on December 1st. Current price is $2,000 per mark per class. After December 1st, it's gonna be $2,500 per mark per class. If you book your call by the end of Black Friday week, you get locked in on that 2022 price of $2,000 per mark. And if even if you're not ready yet, like you're not quite ready to pull the trigger in December on registering your mark, if you book your call now, you'll be locked in on that 2022 price until the end of quarter one, 2023.

So let's say you get on my calendar during Black Friday week, you book the call, we have the call during December, and then you're not quite ready, so you save up during December and January, then we can start in February, and you'll still get that 2022 price. So if registering and trademark is on your 2023 list, this is a perfect time for it. Book that call, reserve your spot in my calendar, and then we can get going on it in the beginning of 2023. If you are ready now, I do still have some slots to actually start in December. So again, perfect timing.

That is all of the Black Friday deals I'm having this week. There are five of them: 40% off the template shop, $300 off the website protection toolkit, $150 off the trademark roadmap course, a new live workshop coming in February. You can get in at the pre-sale ticket price, and you can lock in 2022 pricing on trademark services. And I have a rundown of all of this. I have a Black Friday sales page, and I'll put the link for that in the show notes so you can go check it out, plan your shopping. And again, that sale runs from 7 a.m. Eastern on November 21st until 11:59 p.m. Eastern on November 28th, Monday to Monday.

If you have any questions about Black Friday or if you're thinking about trademarks and aren't really sure if it's a good fit, feel free to DM me on Instagram. I would be happy to talk through it with you. Or if you need to like figure out what contracts you need, that's something we can talk about too. So DM me on Instagram at ArtfulContracts. Alright, I'll see you next week.