How to Get Money via PayPal in (almost) One Click

In this article, I'll show you how to create a URL -- a simple hyperlink -- for use on a web page or in an email so that when somebody clicks it, they can give you money.

Here's how the link will look:  Buy me a beer!

The person who clicks the link is presented with a Secure PayPal web page, and he or she can then choose to login to PayPal or just use a credit card to send the funds to your PayPal account.
And of course, the potential donor can also choose NOT to send you money, simply by closing the browser window or otherwise leaving the web page.  
[step=""]Important:
This is not a scam.  There is no trickery involved.  PayPal provides this service to anyone who has a PayPal account.  There is no chance that somebody might accidentally send you money when they thought they were doing something else.  This technique is entirely honest.[/step]

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Get a PayPal account.  It's easy.  
Nearly everybody already has one.  Just click this link: https://paypal.com and sign up.
PayPal's screens may change, but I'm confident that the process will remain basically the same.  Here are the steps:

1

Go to your PayPal profile.  
Click My Account, and Profile.

2

In the Profile page, look below the Selling Preferences heading.
My Screen has "My Saved Buttons" but yours may say "Create payment button."

3

There are several options, but the simplest (and best for today's exercise) is to create a Donation type payment for a fixed amount:
a) Select Donations from the top drop-down,
b) Enter "Organization name" (I used Dan's Beer Fund)
c) Select Donors contribute a fixed amount and
d) Enter an amount (I used $5.00)

4

Set what's shown on top.   The Transactions notifications option is important because the text there will be displayed to the donor.  Your PayPal account can be associated with multiple email addresses, and I chose to show a newly-created Yahoo email address, since Yahoo mail is good at filtering out spam (always a risk when an email address is displayed to the public.)

5

Click [Create Button] to bring up this page:
There are two options here.  You can generate a "web form" that you can copy-and-paste into a web page (the "Website" tab) OR you can create a one-click URL -- which is what we are doing today.  

So click the Email tab, click the Select Code button and then press Ctrl+C (or right-click and choose Copy) to get the text of the URL onto your clipboard.  Here's mine:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=BGYT4PDHP5XLW

Select all Open in new window

That's all there is to it.

The key is that unique ID at the end.  PayPal associates that with all of the settings that you made earlier.   You can paste that URL into an email, OR you can put it into an <A> tag anywhere on any web page.

For instance:  If you click the following link:
       Buy Dan a Beer
... you will get to my PayPal-hosted donation page.

Notes:

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label that is just below and to the right of this text.   OR  Buy me a beer
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