A privacy policy for the website is a set of statement that discloses all the possible ways the website collects user data. The contents of privacy policy will depend upon the applicable law and may need to address the requirements of multiple countries or jurisdictions.

Some services like online store takes a lot of personal information from the user that includes sensitive data like credit card number, name, address, phone number, etc. Hence, it is needed to guarantee them that their data will be safe with the site owners and that it will not be misused or sold to third party.

Why should your Website have a Privacy Policy?

Privacy policy basically declares the type of data that is collected from the users and that it will be solely used for the communication or business with the website owners or the company respectively.

This can also guarantee the users that their data will not be misused.

Many online services, social communities and other online business has a privacy policy because they collect user details. But you might be wondering what information can a blog collect when its just an informational blog.

The need for having a privacy policy on a blog also comes when most of the Advertising networks these days including Google Adsense has made it mandatory for the website to have a privacy policy.

Possible ways a Blog can collect user information

Blog Comments: Almost all the blogging CMS have a commenting feature for the blog posts. The most important details taken during commenting are Name and Email ID. These fields are mandatory and must be filled. Of course they are needed to identify the commentator. But, these details can be used to create a list of members to send offers or newsletters to.

Not every bloggers does that but this can be a rogue trick to generate an email list. The names and email ids used on all the comments on the entire blog can be extracted from the database in PHPMyAdmin.

Further this list can be sold to third party at a small price. Many such email list sellers will use forums to sell the list.

Newsletter Sign up: All the bloggers wants to increase their website readership and hence they will provide an option for Newsletter sign up that requires the Name and Email ID of the subscriber.

Here you are intentionally making an email list to send periodical newsletters creating a need of having a Privacy Policy.

Guest post Registration: If you are accepting guest posts then the chances are you providing a registration form on your blog for guests to register themselves. Some blogs can have an email option for submitting guest posts. Many guest posters can provide their personal information that can include their name, photo and email id in the registration form.Hence, having a registration form creates a need of having a privacy policy on your blog.

There are many online privacy policy generators that you can use to create a privacy policy for your blog. But at a times they can seem bigger for your blog because a blog does not collect a lot of personal details from users. You can try this free privacy policy generator service: https://www.freeprivacypolicy.com/

Getting personal can mean anything from discussing a topic other than what your blog is primarily about or simply your personal experiences or an event. Many bloggers does that.

Last month i wrote an article on how i solved wordpress 3.0.1 widgets drag and drop problem and its so well indexed by search engine that i get hundreds of visitors from search engines for those keywords.

If it wasn’t for that article i wrote that day, i wouldn’t be getting so many visitors for this website.

When you blog, what you write does matter

When you start a new website, it is necessary to write SEO titles and use relevant keywords in the article consistently. It can be good to get some organic traffic to your website.

The primary focus is always to get traffic.

When is it the right time to get personal?

If you are blogging then the right time to get personal in your blog is when you develop a consistent readership. When you have enough traffic and returning visitors to your blog.

So one of the focus should be to attract traffic and write articles from that perspective. Writing about a personal event at first won’t bring in any good traffic. If you have a huge readership then those posts on your events  and other personal experiences will be shared by them if they find it useful. But at first place, it is unlikely to generate any organic traffic.

Then it won’t really matter what you write about, your posts will always be read by hundreds of visitors.

For this article i could have written a very informal title but i had to write it from SEO point of view and as long as it makes a total sense and is relevant to what the article content is about, the title is totally fine.

This article is based on my experience so you can try following it if your blog is new. The whole point is to get organic traffic and develop a consistent readership.