If you are not actively pursuing affiliate marketing or advertising, one way to make money on your blog is by asking for donations. It’s most useful if you give something back rather than just go to people cap in hand, and it won’t work for everybody, but a few people have asked how I have created my Donation Page, so here’s how!
Create a WordPress Page on why People Should Donate
Far better than just putting a button on your sidebar, is to create a donation page. A number of reasons for this, the first one is because by having a Donation’s page you can explain why you are asking for donations, and why you should donate (mine doesn’t really, not yet anyway), but the other reasons is that if you don’t want to shove it down your regular readers’ throats your donation solicitations, you can push for it elsewhere. For example, on my wordpress plugins that are listed in the WordPress Plugins Directory, it allows you to specify a direct link to your Donation page. That reason alone is why it’s up there.
Anyway, to create a page, in the administration section of wordpress, click on “Pages > Add New”. From there, you should get a new page, call it something like “Donations”, add a few lines of text on why people should donate, and click on “Update Post”.
Be sure to switch off comments & discussion on the page as well, and note down the URL for future reference.
Get Your Paypal Button
Now to put the code into the page. Visit Paypal.com and login to your Paypal account. Click on “Merchant Services”, then “Website Payments” and it should take you to a range of buttons. It should look something like this:-
The button you want is the Donate Button. Go through the options for styling the buttons, and you get a small amount of HTML code to paste into your site.
Add The Code To The Page
Go back to your wordpress page and add the code to the page. Make sure you’re in HTML mode, rather than Visual mode. Select HTML and copy & paste in the code where you want it to go. Publish the page and you’re all ready to take donations!
How to get more Donations
Well that’s upto you! It’s really not for everybody – even I’m debating taking off the link from the navigation (though leaving it for WordPress.org users) – but some people have really done well from it. Jason Kottke gave all his content away for free, before asking for donations. I’m not condoning that route, but if you want to make a page, you now know how!
Tags: How To, paypal, wordpress | Comments: 9 Comments
Rhys Wynne, the author of this blog, is a 20 something web designer from Colwyn Bay. 
I was hoping for a tutorial on how you created your actual donation page. At least that’s what I was expecting from your article title. I may be missing something. It’s early still.
You just saved a few minutes of my life, thank you.
Btw. I guess that the design of the button can be modified, am I right?
@Doug – I’ve updated it to include how to create a page, didn’t really explain it that well.
@Lucnypes – Yes you can change the design to certain extent. I know that there are a number of designs associated with paypal, and you can upload your own image. However, you create familiarity by using the paypal design, as more people are likely to click.
thank you Rhys
basically my intention is only increase the size to gargantuan proportions
How’s the response to your donation page been? I put a donation page on my site for a few months, and the feedback I got was ads or donations, not both. My readers didn’t like that I had ads on my site and I was asking for a handout. Maybe it was the way I worded it. Anyway, I ended up taking it down because donations didn’t seem like a reliable business model.
Do you have any suggestions on how to get people to make donations on your site that really works? If you are giving free tips is that reason enough? Please let me know if you have suggestions.
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I totally agree with Tamahome. My readers were against the donations page too. Not one beer in over a year and then I decided to remove it. How’s the response for you?
Same story here, I once added a donation page, but never got any positive response to it, let alone a donation