This is how my blog / newsletter business works: I send out free writing advice, training techniques, and I maintain a free community group.

I also sell premium writing courses, and I ask people on my email list if they would like to buy them.

If you sign up to one of my free writing guides, online courses, newsletter, or community site, I will eventually include you in my paid course launch emails.

There is no obligation to buy anything, ever.

You can unsubscribe any time, or ask to be removed from my records.

I will never share your information with spammers.

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I may also send you an ad, once in a while, on a platform like Pinterest or Facebook. I have not done this very often so far, but I may start doing it to reach more of my email list during the windows where I am promoting one of my courses.

I may use the data from my email list and my website visitors’ info to create a “lookalike” or “custom” audience on Facebook. You’re going to see targeted ads on Facebook, whatever I do — that’s how they make money — so I think it’s morally acceptable for me to use Facebook’s systems to try to find more people like you, people who truly care about their writing and who like the way I teach.

However, I do not currently have the Facebook tracking pixel on my website. I am not encouraging Facebook to observe you while you are here.

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As mentioned elswhere on this site, some of the links on my blog are “affiliate” links. This means I get a finder’s fee from the seller if you buy through my link.

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This site is built with WordPress and hosted on Siteground.

My newsletter and broadcast emails are sent by ConvertKit.

My online courses are hosted here on WordPress, using the Thrive Apprentice plug in.

The community site is built with the open source Discourse application.

I use Dashly for chat.

The interactive quizzes are created in Typeform.

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Specific details:

Comments:

When visitors leave comments on the site I collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Cookies:

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

Embedded content from other websites:

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

How long I retain your data:

In this section you should explain how long you retain personal data collected or processed by the web site. While it is your responsibility to come up with the schedule of how long you keep each dataset for and why you keep it, that information does need to be listed here. For example, you may want to say that you keep contact form entries for six months, analytics records for a year, and customer purchase records for ten years.

Suggested text: If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data:

In this section you should explain what rights your users have over their data and how they can invoke those rights.

Suggested text: If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data:

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Akismet:

We collect information about visitors who comment on Sites that use our Akismet anti-spam service. The information we collect depends on how the User sets up Akismet for the Site, but typically includes the commenter’s IP address, user agent, referrer, and Site URL (along with other information directly provided by the commenter such as their name, username, email address, and the comment itself).