Monetize Your Website: Donation Widgets

Adsense not making you money? Not earning from your affiliate links? Consider asking nicely for a virtual handout.

Donations from the public are sometimes an effective alternative source of income for bloggers and webmasters. There’s no monetization involved and you don’t have to bother with factors such as ad placement or affiliate promotion.

In this post, we’ll look at some of the tools which allow you to set up automated donation widgets on your website.

What are the chances of successfully getting a donation?

This really depends on what kind of website or niche you are in. Here’s an example: charities often receive donations because of the cause or goal they support is generally legitimate and socially beneficial.

Visitors to UNICEF or Mercy Corps trust these organizations with their money because they are reputable and genuine.

In a similar light, consider your website or blog. Are you offering content that’s helpful to your readers? Do your readers trust what you offer? Where does the donation to your website go?

Does it help ensure further research on quality content that’s not readily available somewhere else? Are you a good cause to support?

While certainly not covering the whole spectrum of this issue, these questions and their possible answers do determine the extent to which you are likely to get donations from your visitors.

In any likelihood, you could just take the hit-or-miss approach by includiing a donate button on your sidebar. Who knows? You might just get some money from a kind soul or two.

Collect donations from a button on your website, or even using a link in an email! PayPal Donations is a low cost way for you to accept credit card and bank account donations. Integrate PayPal Donations with your website in a few easy steps.

Benefits of Paypal

1. Save time and money collecting donations with PayPal
2. Easy to implement - no CGI scripting necessary
3. No up-front costs - same low fee schedule used when you receive other PayPal payments
4. Collect with ease - PayPal maintains detailed transaction records on our website
5. Freedom for your donors - donors can choose the amount of their secure donation, or you can set a fixed amount.

ChipIn

Our mission is to make it easy to collect money. We enable users to organize group payments and fundraisers (�ChipIns�) in a quick, easy, and secure way. We also make it simple for organizers to publicize their ChipIns, by providing powerful fundraising widgets that can be embedded in social media.

ChipIn allows anyone to collect money for a personal cause, group purchase, or fundraiser using their own custom ChipIn page.ChipIn enables bloggers to create an interactive widget that allows them to raise money directly through blogs and other social media.

ChipIn empowers non-profit organizations to engage a distributed network of supporters in blograising campaigns for major fundraising efforts.

Here’s an example of a ChipIn widget:

I pretty fancy the Chipin widget.. It looks pretty cool and I love the idea of tracing progress towards a definite monetary goal. I think this would be especially useful for open-source programmers, independent journalists or researches who need funding.

Likewise, local charities will definitely work and you can even try using it for other personal causes by using a heading such as ‘New Apartment‘ , “Server Costs” or ‘Debt Reduction‘. ChipIn processes donations via Paypal’s system.

BitPass

Bitpass is a service that enables merchants of any size to profitably charge for access to their online content and services. You can sell at any price starting from $0.01 — and remove the hassles of merchant accounts, SSL certificate management, shopping cart software, and development of authentication and access control software.

How are you different from PayPal?

PayPal handles the transfer of money between two parties but does not manage access to online content. For example, PayPal gives you the option to direct a Buyer to a website URL after making a purchase.

However, that destination URL is not secure and can be accessed directly without payment. In contrast, Bitpass combines money transfer and access control services into a single solution that is flexible, affordable, and easy to use.

While they mostly focus on the the selling of digital content, Bitpass can also be used to collect general donations and goal-oriented donations. There are no monthly or setup fees involved and Bitpass uses a transaction fee-based model.

I do think Bitpass is a very good option if you run a blog or website on your own domain and hosting. You can’t sign up immediately but visit this page to contact an account manager.

Amazon Honor System

Your Web site’s visitors return time and again for great information, entertainment, and community. The Amazon Honor System lets them show their appreciation–by giving you cash.

How does it work?

1. A visitor clicks on a paybox on your website
2. The visitor arrives at your PayPage on Amazon.com
3. The Visitor pays with the 1-Click system
4. Amazon pays you!

Note that Amazon’s honor system is only currently available for U.S - based credit cards. Do leave a comment if you think I’ve should have included other note-worthy donation tools.