My
HomePage
Helps
Setting up a new HomePage is easy, but first you need to decide which country your target audience is as the features and services of the site will differ.
Go to www.myhomepagehelps.com, select 'Sign Up' from the menu and you will see the countries that we currently support. Click the corresponding flag and you will go to that countries site. The countries site are always prefixed with a two letter code so for the UK it is uk.myhomepagehelps.com and for the USA it is us.myhomepagehelps.com etc.
Once you are at the correct countries site, select 'Sign Up' and you will see the Sign Up screen.
You should make sure that you are happy with the terms and conditions of the site including the privacy policy and the cookie policy before you start to sign up.
You then need to decide what name you want for your site. This will be the name that appears in the address bar. For example, this how_to will use 'yourcharity' as the site name. It needs to be unique, lowercase and without any special charachters.
You also need a password. The password needs to be at least 6 charachters long and should not be one that you use for anything else. With all passwords, make sure you use good practices to keep them safe and difficult for anyone to break. You can reset your password later on if you need to.
Re-enter your password to ensure there were no mistakes.
Once you have entered your details, make sure that you did read and agree to the terms and conditions, then click the checkbox to verify this.
OK, you can press the 'Create My HomePage' button.
Congratulations - You have created a new HomePage ... or you got an error message. If the HomePage name is already taken, then you need to choose a different HomePage name, or there is something wrong with your password.
Once you have created your HomePage, you are now into the dashboard where you can make your page look pretty, sign up to services and let us know your unique code for each service so that we can point the links to you.
The first page of the dashboard asks you to specify a title for your HomePage. Hang on, didn't we just do that? The limitations of the HomePage name is that all charachters are lower case, so the title allows you to specify the name of your site in a more pleasing way. So our site is 'yourcharity' but our title is 'Your Charity'.
Next section is to enter your Charity number. If you do not know this or do not have one then do not worry, leave it blank. If you do have one and you let us know, then it may affect how we can distribute any funds to you that end up with us. Our aim is for funds to go directly to you, not through us, as the less admin involved, the more money gets to the causes that need it.
Next section is to tell us how great your charity or good cause is. This goes right below the search bar on the HomePage and reaffirms why your supporters are supporting you. It can also be used to notify your supporters of anything newsworthy. It is easy to edit and you can easily add something temporarily.
Finally for this section is your own actual website address. Make sure to specify http:// or https:// at the start. This will put a link to your website on your title or logo at the front of your page. This will result in your supporters always being one click away from your website. Your website will be written with your charity in mind, this HomePage is designed with your supporters in mind. It is quite an important difference, but the HomePage needs to primarily help the supporters which secondly helps your charity or good cause.
Once you have completed these sections then click the 'Update Your Details' button.
At any time you can scroll to the top of the page and click the ' View Your Page ' link which will show you the current look of your HomePage. If you cannot see the changes on your HomePage that you have made, you may need to press CTRL + F5 to hard refresh your web browser.
The second section of the dashboard is titled 'Contact'.
This section allows you to specify who the primary contact is for this site. It is useful for a number of reasons, and the email address on file is the one that will be used to reset your password. If you do nothing else, fill in the email and allow us to email you, so that we can let you know if we have added another service. Otherwise it is pretty self explanatory. None of the information in this section is displayed on the HomePage.
Once you have completed these sections then click the 'Update Your Details' button.
You probably have your own website that has it's own scheme and logo, and so you will probably want your HomePage to match. This section allows you to upload your logo so that the HomePage identifies with your brand.
You do not need a logo, but if you have one in jpeg, gif or png format then you can upload it here. Make sure you have a copy of the logo on your device, select it by clicking 'choose file', find the file in your system and select it. Then click the big orange 'Upload Your Logo' button and your logo should appear on the dashboard. If it doesn't after a couple of attemtps then send us an email and we will make it work. That goes for any problems you are having, just email us and we will make it work a different way.
The Style section lets you add your own design scheme to the website. The default is for dark blues and light blues with a white background but you can choose any background colour, any font colour. You can really go to town on the buttons, with different colours for the background, text and icon symbol in normal, hover and selected. So you should be able to match your existing website.
If you have a particularly difficult colour scheme then let us know again by email as we can always add a custom css file to your HomePage.
When you signed up for your page, several things were automatically generated. The address folder, a short link, a QR code and a social media poster with the short link and the name already on. You can change the colours of the social media poster to match your scheme.
And you can see the short link, the QR code and the social media poster on the Promote page which is found with the icon.
That is it for this section and is the end of the setting up part of the site. Next we will add some revenue streams.
We currently have two ways of getting donation money to you. One is via paypal. If you have a paypal account for your charity, then you can set up a way to receive donations when you log in to paypal. They provide you with a code to use, but the important part of the code is the 'hosted_button_id' which is how paypal knows who to give the money to. Let us know the hosted_button_id value and then we will display that on your page so that if any of your supporters have the desire to donate money, you are perfectly placed to receive it.
Paypal, like many of the sites we will see, give you a unique id number, this one is called hosted_button_id but others have different names, but they all do the same thing, they all identify you as the recipient of the money or reward etc. You can also use the same paypal code on your own website if you haven't already. As always, if you have any difficulties then send us an email and we will see if we can help. If you have different ways of receiving donations then let us know and we will see how we can incorporate it.
Now your HomePage is populated with a Paypal donate button.
The other way to send you money would be via check. It is important to get the right name on a check, otherwise the bank may not cash it. We do not anticipate sending you a cheque at the moment as we are trying to make sure that you receive all monies directly from the services rather than coming through us which only adds admin costs, so feel free to leave this blank for now and if we ever need to send you a cheque we will email you first and you can update it then.
For the UK you are spoilt for choice here. All cashback sites work in the same basic way, somebody shops through their site and the site gets some of the cashback which they share with you. There is the famous easyfundraising.com which many charities are signed up with. We recommend signing up with all of the sites, you may already have signed up to them and if you have great. They all have a referal link that you should let us know and then we populate the HomePage with that link instead of our own link. Note that you should put in the entire referral link, including the http part at the front.
There is a special mention here for TopCashBack as they have a way for your supporters to use your link without creating their own account, and creating an account can be a big barrier for some people. Therefore it is really important to sign up to TopCashBack. On the shopping page your supporters can use this link to shop, providing you with the cashback. In the picture above you can see that our referal link for TopCashBack is 'myhomepagehelps', and in the image below you can see that after searching for 'Just Eat' there is a link which is faded (as the mouse is over it when the screen shot was taken) and if you look in the bottom left hand corner it shows you the destination of the link is https://www.topcashback.co.uk/share/myhomepagehelps/just-eat/ which has our 'myhomepagehelps' reference in it, when you have told us your reference it will have your reference in it.
When we click that link we get taken to an intermediate page, so that there is no doubt what-so-ever that your supporters are going to a site but any cashback will be for your charity.
Your supporter has to click the link 'continue to merchant' to be taken to the Just-Eat site
Now TopCashBack creates a series of links for Just-Eat so that they can get the cashback on your behalf (all of the details after the '?' in the address bar.
And now the supporter is at the Just-Eat website and can shop as normal, except that any cashback generated goes to your charity account.
Some people already have a TopCashBack account or Quidco account, they are popular, and may wish to collect all of their cashback for themselves, but both TopCashBack and Quidco allow supporters to donate their cashback, so you might still get some of it when they are withdrawing their cashback. You must let them know separately that you would like to be listed on their charitable donations list. There is a link for this in the expandable sections.
Don't overlook the cashback sites, take the time to sign up to them. Some people won't use them, some people will buy a holiday through your links, and with cashback running between 2% and 10% (or significantly more in some cases) this can really add up. Also, make sure your supporters have a choice. Different people have different affilliations, and so you want to cover as many bases as possible. Someone who doesn't like one of the sites for whatever reason, may be more than happy with a different site. They are all free to sign up to, so just sign up.
At the moment we have two advertising sites. The first is the big one, Google Adsense. Google Adsense allows you to show adverts on your website, but that is not what we want from it. A more interesting part is that it also has Google Custom Search which lets you have a Google Search Engine, so when people click through the adverts on their Google Search results then you get part of the advertising revenue. It is not easy to get approved to Adsense, you need to apply via your own website (not this HomePage site), which you should have owned for at least three months. Google will ask you to put a code on your website, and then they will assess as to whether they want to allow you to show their adverts. If you get declined, then they normally give you a reason, so make the adjustments and try again.
The second is via clickbank, one of the oldest online affiliate market services there is. Acceptance to the program is normally immediate and once you are signed up you generate a 'hoplink' which lets clickbank know where to send any sales revenue. Commission is normally very high, so 2-10% is normal for shopping sites, 50-75% commission is normal for clickbank. Let us know your account nickname sometimes called a 'hoplink' and you are ready to earn with clickbank.
For a detailed guide on how to get your clickbank nickname, see the how-to-get-a-clickbank-username section.We should really say sponsors, partners and friends.
This section allows you to add any company to your page that you want to be associated with, or that wants to be associated with you. These might be friends of you charity or partners, such as a companion charity that you work well with, or an information site that complements your charity.
The Sponsors implies that there is a revenue attached to it, and you can absolutely charge a company to allow them to be highlighted to your supporters. If you have 1000 supporters, that view their HomePage four times a day, that is 1000*4*30=120,000 impressions a month for that company to a subset of people that are aligned with your charity. You may or may not recognise just how powerful this is, but with the right alliance it is incredibly powerful. The sponsoring company can sponsor the charity and get all of the benefits that go with sponsoring a charity. But instead of that sponsorship being largely lost in the background, it is now being directly exposed to the wider group of supporters. And you are not limited to just one sponsor, you can have as many as you want. Perhaps you would rather try your hand at more affiliate marketing. You can have affiliate links in here instead of sponsors, and get a share of any revenue generated from sales. You may wish to investigate awin or admitad if this is what you want to do.
You could also have any Justgiving or Virgin money links in this section, anything you want, it is flexible and you can tailor it to your needs.
To set up a new sponsor click 'New Sponsor', this will open up the input options.
Fill in the details of the Title, Link to an image (this needs to be the full link with http or https at the start), link to the sponsors website if they have one, a section on why the Sponsor is so good, and finally what level of sponsor they are. There are 5 levels to choose from, Level 1 has the biggest impact, Level 4 only shows the image, Level 5 only shows the Title. See below for All 5 levels of the same Sponsor.
You may need to think carefully about how much text you use and what level you give each Sponsor to optimise the look. Changes on your HomePage may require CTRL + F5 to update if you do not see any changes when you refresh the page.
Once you have input your Sponsors information, then press 'Create Sponsor'. You can also edit the Sponsor and Delete the Sponsor if you wish at any time.
The analytics section is where we simply collect how many hits and how many unique hits your page got each day.
If you have got to the bottom here and filled in the form, then you should have a robust and exciting money making HomePage for you supporters to use. Now you need to ask your supporters to set their default homepage to your HomePage. This means every time they start a new internet session, your page is the one that they see, and there are many ways that using this page can make your charity money, not just once, but over and over, day after day, week after week, month after month, yet not costing the supporters or the charity any money.
Feel free to email us if you have any problems, or when you have enormous success. We cannot see how much money your HomePage is making as the money goes directly to you, not through us, so feel free to let us know.