How to Add a PayPal Donation Button to Your Blog

This article explains how to add a PayPal donation button to your blog so your readers can contribute money to help offset your operational costs.

How to Accept Donations With PayPal

To add a donation button, sign up for a PayPal account and follow the instructions on the PayPal Donations web page. Through this process, you'll obtain a code that will link to your PayPal account.

Next, copy and paste the code into your blog. Many bloggers put it in the blog's sidebar so the button appears on as many pages as possible.

Once the code is inserted into your blog, the donation button will appear automatically. When a reader clicks on the donation button on your blog, they'll be taken to your PayPal donation page. Whatever money they donate will be deposited directly into the bank account you chose during the setup process through PayPal.

The donation process through PayPal is easy for donors to navigate, and you'll be able to see all the details on each donation.

PayPal Donation Administrative Costs

Setting up PayPal for donations doesn't have an initial cost, but when you begin receiving donations, PayPal charges a small fee based partly on the amount donated.

Using a Plugin

If your blog runs on WordPress, you can add a PayPal donate button using a WordPress plugin. Like the button method above, this plugin adds a widget to the sidebar of your blog that you can customize with text and other settings.

Why Bloggers Add a PayPal Donation Button

If you spend time on social media and visiting other people's blogs, you've probably noticed donation buttons on many of them. Some may be obvious with "Donate" calls to action, while others are simply linked lines of text that say, "Buy me a cup of coffee."

The words and appearance may vary, but the purpose is the same: The blogger is asking people who read and enjoy the blog content to donate a little money to help them keep the blog going.

Costs of Blogging

Setting up a personal blog is fairly simple and incurs little expense. Any public blog that is updated with new content regularly and has traffic that amounts to more than a few people each month has costs, though. These expenses typically include the domain name, webspace and bandwidth, and the time and talent of content creators who write what you read when you visit.

Of course, if you run your own blog, you're already aware of the investment in time and money required to keep it going.

Managing Expectations

You shouldn't expect to receive a lot of money in donations; however, if you were to raise more than $10,000 and aren't a verified nonprofit, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) may ask you to show how the donations were used.

A donation button is not likely to bring much revenue, but its simple setup and use make it worth considering.