One of the biggest worries business owners have is getting sued.

Case in point.

I’ve been managing multiple finance e-letters for over a year now.

And one thing I’ve found crucial when putting together content is…

Your copy must be compliant with the regulations of your niche.

Regarding the finance niche, we have the FTC (Federal Trade Commission).

The FTC is constantly evolving and changing its rules.

One area to ensure FTC compliancy is in our testimonials.

For example, we get customers telling us about their trading wins all the time.

It’s awesome to hear about their successes.

But the truth is…

Anybody can claim to make a winning trade.

And it’s tempting as an amateur copywriter to shout all your customers’ wins to the rooftops.

“Like hey co-workers, this member in our forum said they made $1 million off on one trade. This is gold, Jerry, gold.”

But as soon as you start thinking “I can’t wait to share this,” you should stop and ask yourself…

Is your testimonial compliant?

Luckily at Oxford Club, our gurus know pretty instinctively if somebody is full of shit with their testimonials. So we sift those out pretty quick.

However, even a true testimonial still needs to follow several crucial steps.

First, you must provide a timeline for trades that are reported by your customers.

The FTC is pretty strict when it comes to showing proof – and they’re always implementing new rules and guidelines to ensure people aren’t getting scammed.

For example…

If somebody gets into a trade, you need to…

1. Show when they got in the trade and at what price
2. Show when they got out of the trade and what price
3. Report the percentage gain
4. Report how many days it took between the opening and closing of the trade.

So an example of a testimonial would look something like….

“I got in TSLA at $4,06 and got out at $7.08, a 30% gain (in 4 trading days). Thanks XX guru!”

Notice how that testimonial illustrates a clear timeline of when somebody got in and out of a trade.

You can see this is a visual example here…

Here’s a quick breakdown of these two testimonials…

In the first one, we mention when the person got into the trade (in this case Coinbase or COIN), how many contracts they had (2) plus how long they held the stock (eight trading days), and the percentage gain they had.

All those elements are crucial for compliance.

In the second example, it was an options trade and the person bought calls. They got in on LW (Lamb Weston) at $3.40 STC (sell-to-close which means sell in order to exit a position) at $5.17 for a 47% gain overnight (less than 1 trading day).

Other areas where you need to include timelines…

Timelines are crucial in testimonials, but you also need to include them in other areas of your copy.

For example, if we’re selling a promo that involves a guru who made X amount of dollars, we need to provide a timeline for how long it took him to make that money. We also need to verify his trading profits to ensure he/she is the real deal.

You’ll see that in an example below with one of our guru’s Nate Bear. This is a P.S. at the end of an email where we push to his free livestream.

Quick breakdown of this: Notice in the sentence that starts with “This is the essence of the system.” I mention how he transformed an account into $2.7 million in verified trading profits over a four-year span. So we have a timeframe and a verification (which we show in the form of visual proof in the actual livestream).

If I’m writing about his trading successes in a promo for an email somewhere, I must include the timeframe of how long it took him to make $1 million. Otherwise I’m leaving it up to the audience to fill in the blanks, and they might interpret as him getting rich overnight or something.

Key takeaways

Regarding writing for compliance, some good rules of thumb include…

• Be as specific as possible when describing member trading wins in the finance niche (include timelines, when they got in and out of the trade and how long they held the stock for)
• When using big-money claims in promos, make sure to get the trades verified by a legal team and show real proof  via screenshot if applicable in the promo itself 
• Keep up with the rules and regulations of your niche (I talked a lot about the FTC in this article, but this can applied to any and all niches).

That’s everything. Hope you got some value out of this article.