I am the worst blogger in the entire blogosphere, World, Galaxy, Universe and probably the multi-verse. If you are looking to make money from, or learn how to blog for a business, then you don’t want to be paying attention to what I do on this blog. I post at all the wrong times (like late Saturday night in the UK) I hardly ever search engine optimize these posts/this blog and I hardly ever ping it or anything like that. I am already a few sentences into this post, and the keywords in the title haven’t even been mentioned once!

If you’ve been reading this blog long enough though, you know it’s just a place for me to document my journey from rat race worker to, self-employed successful entrepreneur. So far, I have achieved self-employed entrepreneur status, but the biggest piece of the puzzle is still missing; the “successful” part. As I go a long though, if I learn something cool, valuable or worthwhile, I will also make a post about it. This is one such post. Today we’re going to talk about covering your ass and it will be particulalry useful for those of you who reside on the European side of the pond in the UK.

We’re going to talk about professional insurance, the use of mailboxes, registering businesses and covering your ass legally. If that doesn’t sound fun to you, that’s just tough, because you really need to hear what I have to say. Let’s get stuck in.

Professional Indemnity Insurance. Have you got it?

If you are offering advice, consultation or even selling information products, it would probably be worth having. Now you don’t hear many information product and consultant gurus telling you that a lot do you? No you don’t. And why doesn’t it get discussed? Because it’s not sexy, and it’s one of the steps you should be taking when setting up a REAL business.

You see if the online marketing gurus were honest about what you REALLY needed to do to setup a business, you might be put off from doing it, and you wouldn’t buy their $47 ebooks, $197 webinar courses, $997 seminars or $1,000 a month consultations.

If you are offering advice, providing services (SEO for example) you’re going to need and want professional indemnity insurance. You see, while joe-public who spends his weekends and nights buying clickbank products might not think to sue you, but other professionals, business people and other legally versed people may just be tempted to bring a case against you if they feel their business has suffered fromt he services or advice you have given them, and that can cost a lot of money. Professional indemnity insurance helps protect you from such frivolous claims and is well worth having.

Here are another two things you need to do to protect yourself:

1. Setup a Limited company (I think is called an LLC in the USA). When you setup a limited company you effectively create a legal person/entity that can have it’s own bank accounts and assets. The company owns your property not you. What this means is, when some one comes to sue you, they will have to bring their case against the legal entity you created (the limited company). This means if they win, they can only get access to the assets your company owns and thus, because they are not suing you, they can’t get their hands on your personal assets like your house etc.

2. Buy some basic template legal documents, privacy policies and terms and conditions. I bought mine this week and it cost me £60 off an online store (this is about $100). It was well worth it. I am now displaying what I am legally required to and have covered my ass up to a point. Nearly no one does this and it’s something they should think about.

You can never cover yourself totally, but it’s worth taking every reasonable precaution you can to make it that bit more difficult for people to come at you. Let’s talk about protecting your address.

If you are in the UK and running a business from home, but want to set up a Ltd company, then you need to register it some where, like your home address. Unfortunately this means that your home address goes on a publicly searchable register. It also means, you have to put your home address at the bottom of all your emails with third party autoresponder like getresponse.com and aweber.com.

To get round that, it is now permissible to rent a mailbox (in the same way you do a PO box) and register your business at that address. Thus your home address is protected and you can use that address for correspondence and use it on your autoresponder emails. Perfect. Now you don’t have to worry about nut-cases turning up at your doorstep!

Finally, because I am storing people’s information and contact details, I have had to register under the Data Protection Act here in the UK. It’s about £45, so it doesn’t exactly break the bank, but if you are storing people’s data or details in this country, you need to register for this.

So that gives you an insight into what I have been doing and sorting out in the last week, alongside selling to new customers, hiring different web developers for the social network and working on current projects. Living the dream? Maybe not. But I am happy for now.

I am *thinking* about running a special market test in the close future about a product that webmasters and affiliate marketers maybe potentially interested in. I will be updating the blog closer to the time when I do this. It’s not an information product, it’s a service (and a cheap one at that) and I’ll post here when it goes live, and I’ll let you know how the test goes at the end as well.

Thanks for reading as always. All of you return visitors are very patient visitors, listening to me rant and rant and rant on. I hope you get something out of my posts, I know I do.

Feel free to reach out, get in touch or leave a comment.

Take care.