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If you’d like to add a paypal donate button to your self-hosted blog either on a posted page, or on the sidebar of your blog, this video will show you how in a couple of minutes.

First up, you’ll need a paypal account, and for this feature it needs to be a premiere or business account. If you have one sign in from Paypal.com, otherwise you’ll need to get set up from one here. Once I’m logged in, I’ll need to head to the merchants tab up here, and then scroll down to choose the “Donations” option here. It sometimes moves around with layout updates, but you’ll find it in this section either way.

First, I’ll add a name, which people will see when they donate. Otherwise, it just shows my email address which looks kind of rubbish. And I can check the customization options out here, to tweak how I want the donate button to look. I can even add my own image. If I want to do that I can head to my media library in WordPress, click view on the image I’ve uploaded (or upload one first, obviously, via “Add New”). And then right click on the image, selecting the “Copy Image Address” or however that’s phrased in your particular operating system or browser. Then back in the paypal website, I just need to paste it here.

Next, I’ll want to set my currency and decide if I want to fix the amount that people can donate or leave it up to them to decide how much they donate and it’s a good idea to go into the “Advanced Customization” options down here, and change the default message and anything else that works for you. You’re probably more likely to get people to go through with the donation if that’s the case. Once that’s done I click on the create button and I’ll see a chunk of text I can copy to my clipboard. I can now paste this into a page or post, making sure I’m in the HTML tab of the editor for this part.

You can always switch back to “visual” afterwards if you prefer to. Or, I can head to Appearance > Widgets, create a text widget and paste the code there instead if you want a sidebar donate button. And that’s it – once I’m published, I’ll see a button in my sidebar or, in my post or page. When someone clicks through, they’ll be taken to the page I customized through Paypal advanced customization, and Ta-da! I’m good to go and start accepting donations on my blog. So that’s how to set up paypal to work with your blog.