Sponsor My Blog

If you are doing something helpful for your readers in your blog you can add a Donation button so that anyone willing to support you will be able to send you small or big amount of money trough PayPal to show his or hers appreciation for your work. Donations are not something that will make you a millionaire overnight, but it will most certainly help you understand that people like what you do in your blog and would want you to continue writing useful and interesting articles. If you are developing a free theme or a plugin for WordPress or making any other free software you should definitely have a donation button and here is a short and simple step by step guide on how you can create one for your website.

But before we start with the guide, here is an example of working PayPal Donations Button so that you can see how it looks like and behaves and maybe even show your appreciation by donating something… ;)

1. Login in your PayPal account.

2. Click on the panel called Merchant Services.

3. Open the PayPal Website Payments Standard page from the left menu.

4. You should click on the Create one now link under Sell single items.

5. Now you should be at a form for creating and customizing your button, but here by default the dropdown box for Accept payments for is set at Products and you need to change it to Donations.

6. In the field Organization name/service you should type what is the type of donation, for instance you can write your blog’s name so that you know where the donation is coming form. That is especially useful if you have a few websites with donation buttons and/or even a webpage where you are selling something trough PayPal.

7. The next step is to customize the Donation button if you wish to do so. Our recommendation is to leave the default style, because most of the people are familiar with it and will easily recognize it. The default style includes a big yellow button with the text Donate over it and a logos of some of the most popular bank cards below it. You can remove the credit cards logos, make the button smaller or even use your own custom image instead the one provided by PayPal.

8. The dropdown box labeled Currency is where you set the default currency for the donations you’ll receive. It is good to set it to the main currency you operate with for instance USD or EUR, because PayPal’s currency exchange rates are not the best ones and you should avoid relying on them.

9. Now comes the Contribution amount selection. Here you can decide to set a given amount for every donation for example 1 USD, 10 USD, 100 USD and everyone willing to donate will have to donate the preset amount. The other option is to leave the person willing to donate the option to choose the amount of his donation – just $1 or maybe even a million if he wishes it. The second option is usually better, but some people tend to get confused what to do when they click on the Donate button and have to enter the amount of the donation.

10. You should now click on the Create Button in order to get the HTML code you need to put in your blog in order for the PayPal Donation button to appear there. Now you are all ready to receive donations trough PayPal from your satisfied visitors… just keep up the good work with your blog’s content.

– If you still don’t have a PayPal account, but want to make one…