PayPal is a great way to accept donations to any website. PayPal offers a simple button creation wizard that generates code any user can then paste onto his or her website for users to click on to make a donation. Sometimes, though, the button is not want you want and what you really want is just a simple link.

Getting a PayPal donate link is good for emails, for example, since a graphic like a button is mostly not supported. While an HTML email can send pictures, some people may have their email clients convert the message into text format, or perhaps the email client itself will not download pictures as a security precaution. Whatever the case, a PayPal link is sometimes preferable over a button, but how to create one?

The process is just as easy as creating a donate button, perhaps even easier!

Go to PayPal’s donate button wizard. You may be asked to sign in with your existing PayPal ID. Once signed in you will be redirected to the page below. The only two things you need to worry about here are the “Organization” and the “Donation ID.” You will see how these come into play in the final donate page. In this example, we simply use “GeekHelpGuide.com” as the Organization and “Donate Example” as the reference ID.

Ignore steps 2 and 3 and click the button on the bottom to proceed. You will get to the page where you would normally copy the code to paste into your website for the button. Since we’re not after that, we use the email tab (boxed in red) instead. That’s where the PayPal donate link resides. Copy that and you’ve got your donate link ready for pasting into emails, forums, anywhere you want.

Test out the page and see what it looks like. As you can see, the fields you input for “Organization” and “Donation ID” appear like so in the final results page.

Note that if you have a premier account, your email address will be visible at the top of the donate page.

A slight tweak if you want to set a fixed donation amount: you can do that from Step 1 of the PayPal donation button wizard. By default it is left up to the visitor to input any amount.