I’ve used Paypal for years, and you probably have too. If you don’t yet have a Paypal account, you can set one up for free at www.Paypal.com. And with a recent change, Paypal has made it easier for people to send you money.

For my computer repair business here in Safety Harbor, Florida, I have an online accounting program that sends out invoices, which makes things really easy. Of course, I have to pay for that service. What we’re talking about here is not so much for business (although it could be used for that) – this is more designed for when individuals want to send or receive money from each other.

In the past, if you wanted to send someone money through Paypal, you had to get the person’s email address, then go to the Paypal website, log in to your account, and click on “Send money” and put in the email address and the dollar amount. Not what you might actually call “difficult” but it did involve a few steps and it required the sender to know the Paypal email address of the recipient.

Just recently, Paypal added a new  feature that made it a lot simpler. You can create your own customized Paypal address, so that people can just click a link to send you money. You can even customize that link, so that the proper dollar amount is already configured.

But you need to get your customized Paypal.me address as soon as possible, in order to get the name you want to use.

Here’s how you set it up:

1. Go to the website www.Paypal.me and click on “Get started”

2. On the next screen, you will need to choose your link name. This is the name that will come at the end of your customized Paypal payment link.

When you type in the name you want to use, Paypal will automatically check and see if someone else has already grabbed that link name. Of course, just about all of the common names have been taken (I had virtually no chance of getting “Scott” for example). For me, I choose “PCTutor” so my full link is: Paypal.me/pctutor – you can actually click that link and send me money through Paypal. I encourage you to try that out! 🙂

3. Once you have chosen your link name, and Paypal has confirmed that it’s available, you just click “Grab This Link”. After that, Paypal will prompt you to sign in to your Paypal account so that they can connect your new link name with your account. If you don’t yet have a Paypal account, you can create one at this time.

And you’re done!

Now, if you want to make it easy for someone to send you money to your Paypal account, you just send them that link. And for even MORE customization, you can pre-select the dollar amount you want the person to send. For example, if someone owes me $15, I can send this link:

http://paypal.me/pctutor/15

And it when someone clicks on that link, it takes them directly to the Paypal site to send that amount to me:

It doesn’t get much easier than that!

You should also know that even though all you need in order to send someone money via Paypal is their email address, they do need to create a Paypal account in order to claim that money. But most people have a Paypal account anyway.