Introducing "Jumbo Share Counters" Plugin

Did you ever wish to show off your share counts and encourage more sharing on your websites and blogs? Now you can do both with our Free Jumbo Share Counters (JSC) which is a PHP driven free social sharing plugin with free cloud hosting and stats reporting to help you track likes, shares and tweets in realtime! You can integrate it easily in WordPress, Blogspot and even inside your static HTML5 webpages. JSC is inspired from AddThis Pro's Jumbo Share Counter and Mashable-style share counters. Amazingly our sharing buttons are absolutely free of cost with no $10/month hosting fee or credits links! Lets redraw the slow-loading official social media sharing buttons in a unique custom way. =)

UPDATE: If your facebook share count has stopped working, please use the updated code by clicking here.

Demo: Check the left and bottom of this blog post.

Over the recent two years web design trends have taken a whole new shape. Publishers today prefer big buttons, large photos, and lightweight share counters. I know most of you are tired of slow performing social sharing plugins such as Facebook like button, Twitter tweet/follow buttons, Google +1 button etc. which eats up to 30% of your entire website load time and badly effects user experience. According to Google PageSpeed insights, the code used by these social media networks contains both render-blocking JavaScript and tons of unnecessary HTML for tracking purposes which seriously affects the load time of a website in both mobile and desktop devices. Load time of a webpage is an important search engine ranking factor and Google surely favours sites in SERPs that load faster.

Keeping all these factors in mind we thus created natural look-alike of these official sharing buttons to provide the best free sharing solution.

The following features make "Jumbo Share Counters" the most advanced sharing plugin:

• Mobile responsive,
• SEO friendly,
• Lightweight,
• Animated number counter,
• Lightening fast,
• Natural in design
• Customizable
• 2 Themes - Floating bar & Horizontal bar
• Supports top 13 sharing buttons
• Eye catching and engaging
• Expand/Collapse option
• Hosted on cloud servers 
• Free of cost!

Let me introduce to you our free Jumbo Share Counters that uses the open source share count API provided by Donreach.

How Do "Jumbo Share Counters" Plugin work?

JSC uses Donreach's free open source PHP script called ShareCount to fetch the count of social shares and output it as JSON, JSONP or XML data with the option to cache the results using memcache, APC or file cache. We optimized this script by removing the cache and cookies code to make it load more faster. We have also removed the Twitter API from the list because Twitter has recently depreciated their share count API, therefore we can no longer display the tweet counts.

We uploaded the ShareCount API on two free cloud servers provided by redhat and herokuapp which is much faster compared to shared hosting.

Jumbo Share Counters API URL is hosted on: (use the working link only)

1. http://new-counters.rhcloud.com/   Working!
2. https://social-shares.herokuapp.com/  Facebook not working!
3. http://share-counters.rhcloud.com/  Facebook not working!
4. https://count.donreach.com/  Too Slow!

and it supports the following parameters:

Parameter	Default	Description
url (required)	none	The URL of the page you want to fetch the social shares for.
format (optional)	json	The format of the output. Can be either json, jsonp or xml.

To see share count stats for a specified URL, all you need to do is run this query inside your browser address bar:

http://new-counters.rhcloud.com/?url=http://www.google.com

You can replace the Google URL with any URL of your choice. The default format is set to JSONP so the output to the above query will return the following share counts for Google:

MBTshares({

"url":"http:\/\/www.google.com","shares":{


"total":16943080,


"facebook":16589903,


"google":1,


"linkedin":13356,


"pinterest":75108,


"stumbleupon":255416,


"delicious":0,


"reddit":0,


"buffer":9018,


"vk":278


}})

We have further optimized and enhanced the shareCount API by including support for additional buttons. Jumbo Share Counters Plugin is thus the most advanced sharing plugin with support for up to 13 popular share buttons:

1. Facebook



2. GooglePlus +1



3. Twitter - Will not display the tweet count because twitter abandoned their counts API



4. LinkedIn



5. Pinterest



6. StumbleUpon



7. Delicious



8. Reddit



9. Buffer



10. vk



11. Viber - Will automatically display in mobile devices



12. Whatsapp - Auto displayed in mobile devices



13. Print

Different Themes for Mobile and Desktop Screens

We have designed two different themes for JSC keeping the popular design trends in mind.

1. JSC Floating Social Sharing Bar

This widget floats to the left or right of your blog posts thus grabbing maximum reader attention to promote more likes, tweets and shares. It has a maximum CTR and visitors on our blog tend to share more using this design model for share buttons.

UPDATE:

• BLOGGER :- Install Floating Sharing Bar



• WORDPRESS :- Install Floating Sharing Bar

It is suitable only for Desktop and Tablet screens. By default it is programmed to displayed only in desktop screens and auto hide itself in mobile devices.

2. JSC Horizontal Social Sharing Bar

This design model for sharing buttons works best just below post title or at the bottom of post i.e post footer. You can add it in both these locations without sacrificing load time.

UPDATE:

• BLOGGER :- Install JSC Horizontal Sharing Bar



• WORDPRESS :- Install JSC Horizontal Sharing Bar

It is suitable for all devices whether Desktop, Tablets or Smartphones. To keep things simple, the viber and whatsapp share buttons will be automatically displayed only in mobile devices. They wont display for desktop screens but you can surely change the settings to display them in all devices if you want.

Installation Instructions

We will first help you add the necessary JavaScript code to your websites, in our next post we will share separate tutorials to add "Jumbo Share Counters" in blogger templates and WordPress themes.

The steps below are standard and are same for all CMS platforms:

1 Paste the following code just above </head> inside your template:

(OPTIONAL STEP) Skip this step if you have already added JQuery and FontAwesome libraries inside your templates.

<script async='' src='https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js' type='text/javascript'></script>

<link href='http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/assets/font-awesome/css/font-awesome.css' rel='stylesheet'/>

2 Paste the following JS code just above </body> tag of your template

UPDATE: Facebook has deprecated its REST API, as a result of which the facebook share count could not be fetched using our old files. I have updated the code with facebook Graph API and everything works just fine now. Please update the URL link below inside your template. Modified code is highlighted as yellow.

<script type='text/javascript'>

//<![CDATA[


/* ##### FREE JUMBO SHARE COUNTERS #######


Developed by: www.MyBloggerTricks.com


Dual licensed under the MIT license and GPL license.


Copyright (c) 2015-2016 STCnetwork.org


###### PHP script ########################


Developed by http://donreach.com/,


Optimized by STCnetwork.org


####### Animation ########################


Supported by: waypoints.js and Counterup.js


Customized by STCnetwork.org


Source: https://github.com/bfintal/Counter-Up


#######################################*/

ADD CODE HERE

/*##########Plugin Settings#############*/

$(document).ready(function() {


var shareUrl=$("link[rel=canonical]").attr("href");


$.getJSON('http://new-counters.rhcloud.com/?url=' + encodeURIComponent(shareUrl) + "&callback=?",function(data){shares=data.shares;$(".count").each(function(index,el){service=$(el).parents(".share-btn").attr("data-service");count=shares[service];$(el).text(count)});


});

/*#########Animation Settings###########*/

$(window).load(function() {


    $('.anim').counterUp({


      delay:20, //Smaller value gives more frames


      time: 1000 //Higher value slows down animation


    });


});

});

//]]></script>

Customization:

• If you have uploaded the scripts yourself then you can replace https://count.donreach.com with your API URL



• To increase the frames of the rotating numbers, reduce value of delay



• To slow down the animation speed, increase the value (in milli seconds) of time

3 In the above code replace the line "ADD CODE HERE" with this code

4 Save your template and all done!

Follow the coming tutorials to add JSC stylesheet and HTML to your sites.

Upload ShareCount Script Yourself - (Optional)

If you want even faster performance and wish to upload the shareCount API yourself on your webhost then you can surely do that. To upload files over a cloud server you need a SSH client such as PuTTY for windows. These days, SSH (Secure Shell) is used to log into and execute code on remote hosts and transfer files. Unlike FTP, use of SSH is a little more techy.

To upload the PHP scripts on your webhost or on a free cloud server, follow these steps to get started:

1. 
   
   Download the ShareCount script and upload it on a free cloud server using SSH Client like PuTTY. You can use herokuapp or Redhat's OpenShift cloud servers.
   
   



2. 
   
   If you are not comfortable working on a cloud environment then you can also upload the scripts on a shared hosting such as Hostgator using FTP client like Fileziila. Don't forget to tell your webhost to whitelist MOD security of your page. Read this Github thread where my discussion with Adam Bouqdib (developer of ShareCount API) could help you.
   
   

Credits & License:

 

� Copyright 2015-2016 STCnetwork.org

Beta Version: 1.0 (29 Feb, 2016)

Jumbo Share Counters Plugin by STCnetwork is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. JSC Plugin is dual licensed under the MIT license and GPL license. You are most welcomed to share the plugin with your audience as long as you attach credit links back to this webpage. Kindly avoid selling the plugin in a commercial product or service. Its use is restricted to individuals alone.

We have to thank a lot of people here for helping us in the Plugin development:

• 
  
  Adam Bouqdib who personally helped me in troubleshooting some of the errors.
  
  



• 
  
  Donreach for open sourcing their social share count API.
  
  



• 
  
  Herokuapp or Redhat OpenShift cloud servers for providing free hosting.
  
  



• 
  
  STCnetwork's senior developer, Ahmed Nasir  for giving a helping hand.
  
  



• 
  
  A special thanks to developers of waypoints.js and counterup.js for providing the animation effect.
  
  

Need Help?

Coding this plugin required great effort and a lot of time. We did all this for the love of knowledge. We just hope you like it. =)

"Jumbo Share Counters" plugin will tremendously help you boost your social shares and referral traffic. It will surely improve your social media optimization strategy and will positively affect your search ranking thanks to its lightweight and better performance.

Do let me know if you need any help with regard to any part of this introductory tutorial. We are always open to constructive feedback to further improve and keep developing JSC plugin. Peace and blessings buddies!

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11 Common SEO Mistakes made by Bloggers & Content Writers

Did you ever notice why some webpages rank higher in search results while some not, despite the same efforts? There are three popular reasons why a particular website content ranks higher. Firstly may be that particular website content has received more quality backlinks compared to its competitor, secondly may be it has a better keyword research strategy and thirdly may be it is well optimized with no content writing common SEO mistakes. Due to all these three reasons, your competitor is ranking higher and is better crawled and indexed by search robots.

In today's tutorial I will guide you on how to avoid these on-page optimization mistakes that is seriously effecting your organic traffic and wasting both your energy, time investment and efforts.

Every pro blogger has a secret tool that helps him dominate the SERPs, in our case webtexttool(WTT) has so far been a great affordable companion that has not only helped me but also my co-authors to polish our SEO skills and publish quality content that brings consistent flow traffic from Google, Bing and now even Yandex. Google keyword planner is just another free tool that we also use along with WTT.

80% of all content writers which includes both bloggers and freelance writers, often make at least one or all of these SEO mistakes unknowingly. You really need to rely on free on-page SEO tools such as webtexttool that we discussed earlier in order to make sure you find and fix all such SEO mistakes in real time while writing your blog posts.

Following is the list of some 11 common SEO mistakes that most bloggers and content writers make without even noticing them. Unless you rectify and fix these SEO errors and mistakes, there is honestly no easy hope for someone to rank well in search engines.

1. Not doing Keyword Research

Most bloggers have the habit of not doing a keyword research while preparing a blog post. They randomly select a title and then start writing whatever that comes to their mind. Using common sense is a good habit but how can you assume those billions of different keyword combinations that users type in Google without using keyword suggestion tool? May be your visitors are more likely to type "smartphone" and not "cellphone" or may be people in south Asia are more likely to recognize USB as a "Flash Drive" compared to people in USA who refer it as "Flash Disk"

How will you make sure that you use the best combination of keywords with low competition but higher volume reach in order to attract a huge wave of new visitors to your blog or website?

We always do keyword research either using Google keyword tool or using Webtexttool's Keyword suggestion tool. For example before I could begin with this post, I did a research on what title to choose for this post. Shall I go with "SEO errors" or "SEO mistakes"? Shall I choose the phrase "freelance writers" or "content writers" ? For this the best way is to see which keyword has a good reputation and has the potential to bring you more targeted visitors.

Doing a simple research on WTT keyword analysis tool, made it easy for me on which keywords to pick for this post.

WTT also offers you related keyword suggestions just like Keyword planner but with some additional info and better presentation.

• The search volume is an indication of the number of queries on your keyword per month.
• Competition is an indication of how strong competition is on your keyword.
• The overall score combines the search volume and competition

When required always go with keywords that have easy/low competition because these are keywords that give you the extra benefit of fewer competitors and better reach to a potential audience which are yet not targeted by your competitors. WTT also gives an estimate overall reputation score, which helps you to pick a keyword easily.

In our case I chose "Common SEO mistakes" which is sort of a long tail keyword and with very easy competition.

As far the second keyword phrase is concerned, I found "content writers" more preferred over "freelance writers" with wide volume reach, therefore I selected it.

Once you have completed your keyword research analysis, you are ready to choose a SEO friendly title for your post.

2. Title Tag Exceeding The Standard Length

You can now place both your WTT suggested keywords inside your title to draft a keyword rich title for your content. In our case we choose the following:

11 Common SEO Mistakes made by Bloggers & Content Writers

Length: 57 characters

Three things are important while writing a search friendly title:

1. Number of Keywords - Add your keyword one time
2. Number of Characters - Add at least 7 characters but maximum 60 characters
3. Number of Words - Add at least 3 words

Make sure your title contains your primary keyword or focus keyword and make sure your title does not exceed the 60 characters optimal Length for search engines.

Google displays the first 50-60 characters of a title tag. If you keep your page titles under 55 characters, you can expect at least 97% of your titles to display properly in search results. A title longer than 60 characters is chopped/cut by Google and is not given preference in SERPS.

To ensure your title is well optimized, click the "Use my keyword" button to open your Webtexttool editor.

and then type your title inside the editor and check the realtime results:

On your right panel, you can check if your title follows SEO best practices:

You can also use our Character counter tool for this purpose.

3. Meta description missing or too long in length

Next comes writing the search description for your blog content which is often avoided by bloggers because they have a false belief that search robots will pick it automatically from the starting paragraph of the page content. But this is a serious myth and SEO mistake.

Meta description tag is the soul of your entire content. It gives a simple, precise and summary of your entire article. A robot finds it extremely helpful when you provide a short 145 Characters summary of your blog posts. It is the second biggest ranking factor after the title. When you don't manually choose a description for your blog posts, you give your competitors a bigger chance to rank higher than you.

In blogspot blogs you can add content description inside the "Search Description" box. In wordpress, the meta description box is located just under your WP editor. 

Now to test whether your description is search friendly or not, test it with WTT in real time. Webtexttool gives the following suggestions for a SEO friendly page description:

1. You must add at least 8 characters or 2 words inside page description
2. Your Character count must not exceed 145 characters
3. Your description must include your primary keyword.

Paste your description inside WTT field and see if it qualifies the test. In our case we used the following description:

List of common SEO mistakes that most bloggers make while writing blog posts. Find and fix all these on-page optimization mistakes.

Length: 132 Characters

and thus we passed the test!

4. Un-Optimized Permalink

Most people do not realize that permalink is the third most important place after title and description, where they can insert their focus keyword for maximum search exposure.

An optimized permalink is a combination of targeted keywords that explains the content of your post. It should be precise and to the point. Long, lengthy links get chopped in search results and you loose the opportunity of ranking high in SERPs.

1. Depending on your URL structure keep it limited to 40 Characters
2. Must insert your Keyword in permalink
3. Keep it short and to the point

I have written a detailed tutorial on how to optimize permalinks and use correct URL structure. Please read this post for in-depth details:

• READ: Correct Way to Optimize Website Permalinks

5. Missing H1 heading tag in Content Title

After the title tag <title> if there is anything search robots value more then it the text inside the <H1> tag of a webpage. The title tag is what that appears in search result pages and <h1> tag is where you display the post content title to your visitors. In most blogging platforms like blogspot, the text inside title field (which is mostly <h3> tag ) is automatically inserted inside <title> tag but in WordPress you can choose to show a different title to search robots using the <title> tag and a different title to visitors using the <h1> tag.

Most wordpress themes and blogger templates are not well optimized with regard to the hierarchy of headline tags. 100% of all bloggers templates use H3 tag for Titles instead of H1. You must make this necessary change inside your template and themes to fix this major SEO mistake. I have written the following tutorial which will help you fix it:

• READ: Overused H2 tags and missing H1 tag in Blogger templates

If you notice WebTextTool assigns a major increment of 14% to SEO Page Score when you assign that the page has H1 tag by default. In other words with a missing H1 heading, your content is 14% less optimized compared to your competitor.

6. Missing H2 Sub heading inside content

Always use subheadings inside your blog posts. This increases both readability and SEO of your webpage. These subheadings help search robots to better understand your content.

In wordpress and Blogspot, bloggers  often use <h3> tag as the default subheading. Which though is not wrong but a better approach is to assign your sub headings a tag of <h2>. This way H1 tag will be assigned to your Post title and H2 is assigned to subheadings within the Post, thus maintaining the hierarchy correctly.

In Blogspot editor <h2> tag is called "Heading" and <h3> tag is called "subheading"

In Wordpress editor <h1> tag is labeled as "Heading 1" and <h2> tag as "Heading 2". Not much of a confusion here.

Webtexttool has a similar format like Wordpress

WTT will instantly prompts an alert when you avoid adding a subheading inside your article. It gives the following suggestions:

• Major emphasis is given on adding at least 1 H2 or H3-H4-H5-H6 tag(s) to your page
• It also suggests adding your primary keyword at least once in your H2-H6 tags.

I always try to use as many sub-headings in my blog posts as possible to divide the content in smaller paragraphs for better readability and search impact. I use H2 for subheadings and H3 or H4 for minor headings.

7. Not highlighting keywords with Bold or Italic tag

It's always a good habit to highlight your primary keywords and its synonyms to tell search robots that these words are important and needs more attention. You can also italicize focus keywords and phrases.

• Keywords can be bolded either using <b> tag or <strong> tag. Both works fine.
• Keywords or important phases can be  given italic style either using <i> or <em>

WTT gives the following suggestions:

It gives you on-page SEO suggestions in real time and helps you add anything you might have skipped or forgotten. This real time functionality of WTT is what that I personally love the most.

8. Not using Blockquote or Code tag

Always wrap scripts, off-topic words or HTML inside <code> tag and always wrap quotations inside <blockquote> tag. This is a healthy SEO habit and will not confuse search robot or distract it from understanding your webpage content.

Most bloggers literally spoil their blog by adding naked off-topic phrases inside the content. If you observe clearly in this post I have carefully enclosed all unwanted words and phrases such as "Flash Disk" and "Flash Drive" inside <code> tag and I have enclosed the post title and description inside <blockquote>

This will make my content keywords more clearer to search robots. These tags help you repeatedly use off-topic phrases and long chunk of code/text inside your posts as example without effecting the SEO of your content.

9. Writing Short Thin Content

Robots hate content which is not well explained or described. When your content length is short/thin you fail to use all related keywords combinations. You miss the opportunity to use different long tail keywords. Your competitor thus gets an edge over you and is given more preference in SERPs than you. Short blog posts or content less than 500 words in length never play long lasting in search and are often the first to be effected by Google Panda update.

A research done by serpIQ shows that the average content length of top 10 results in Google was over 2000 words.

As you can see, there is a drop in content length as you move from first to tenth position in SERPs. This shows that higher ranked sites have more content and thus they tend to attract search robots more compared to a content which is less than 1000 or 500 words in length.

10. Low Keyword Density

Rarely do bloggers even care about keyword density these days which is among the most popular of common SEO mistakes committed by freelance content writers. Keyword density means the ratio of your focus keyword compared to other related keywords. In short how repeatedly are you using different variations of your main keyword.

Publishers believe that the good ratio of keyword density is between 1.5%-3%. You are good as long as you are not repeatedly using your keyword over and over again and instead choose to use synonyms or LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords).

Read this detailed forum discussion where I have described in detail on what is the ideal keyword density ratio for an optimized content.

If you are not good with mathematics then you can surely use webtexttool to do the job for you. You can either write your blog posts inside WTT editor or you can write the post inside your blogspot/wp editor and then copy-paste the article inside WTT editor. WTT will then calculate your keyword density automatically to check if you have overused or underused your keyword.

For example when I pasted this article inside WTT editor to check how many times can I use the keyword "SEO mistakes", WTT gave the following suggestions:

Based on the above calculation I can use my primary keyword at most 15 times to make sure I don't overuse it. What can be more easy then this!

11. Blog Images with missing "alt" attribute

Remember the case study where I SEO audited one of my co-author's post and showed the accessibility mistakes made by her? Yes robots are blind to media! They can not read your images and videos unless you add a caption tag to your videos or alt attribute (alternative text) to your images.

If you are not tagging your images, you are loosing quality organic traffic from Image search and give an edge to your competitor again. People remember or like 80% of what is visual and just 10% of what they read. So if you are adding images like screenshots and info graphics then you must make sure to properly tag them.

Image search accounts to 70% of the traffic for one of my Indian clients who runs a blog on Indian dresses and jewellery. She achieved it by regularly tagging images and optimizing it with keyword rich description.

Alt attribute is added as shown below inside the image tag:

<img src="" alt="ADD IMAGE DESCRIPTION HERE"/>

Image description should be within 3-4 words and not more than that.

WTT helps you automatically detect images which have a missing alt attribute. This is done through accessibility checker tool. This tool will help you optimize media content by finding missing alt tags in your blog images.

Go to Tools > Accessibility Checker.

A window will guide you step by step to locate the errors in blog images and will give you option to fix it with a click of a button by optimizing blog images with keyword rich alternative text.

Which of the above Common SEO mistakes did you make?

I have shared the soul and spirit of on page optimization techniques with all of you that is enough to help you rank higher in SERPs and improve your search presence. If you strictly follow the above principles and continue using free tools such as webtexttool, you can expect a massive flow of traffic within a month. We are currently using the silver plan of webtexttool because it fits our budget. Webtexttool offers a free 14 days trial that you can try to explore this amazing tool. I will share some more tutorials in coming days on its advanced tools and features and help you make the best use out of it.

Which are some of the SEO mistakes that you often make and what are some of the on-page optimization mistakes that just came to your notice? I would love to hear your views on this important topic. Do post your queries and views on this latest story. Ask me for any help needed. I would love to assist you with as much help as needed. =)

Read More

PublicityClerks Review: The Best alternative to BuySellAds

PublicityClerks is a new rising player among popular Ad Networks that is gradually recognized as the best alternative to BuySellAds and Google AdSense. It uses almost the same technology used by BuySellAds to provide you a perfect medium to buy ads or sell ads. Small sites and blogs receiving a minimum of 50K impressions per month can easily get PublicityClerks approval to start making money by selling ad space. This new Ad marketplace has become a ray of hope for many bloggers and publishers who got rejected by BuySellAds or disapproved by AdSense. You can now easily sell ad space on your blogs and sites to convert every single page impression into a revenue stream. No need to feel depressed any longer!

After one of our clients referred it a serious debate started in our public forum on how to find BuySellAds alternatives, I had no choice but to do an in-depth full review of PublicityClerks' (PC) site features, payment options and customer service to see if it really qualifies to be the next big online advertising platform for webmasters.

Some Important Facts about PublicityClerks

Found in 2012 by James Hakim, PublicityClerks (PC) has succeeded in attracting over 10,000 registered websites and advertisers and serves over 15 million ad impressions monthly.

• It provides fully automated self serve ad marketplace with options to Backfill any unsold Ads to an Ad network of your choice e.g AdSense.
• It also offers a On-site cart feature for publishers to use on their advertise page. Advertisers can thus directly buy an Ad slot from your site.
• Publishers receive payments either through credit card or PayPal similar to BuySellAds. If you are living in India or Pakistan or anywhere in the world, you just need to give them your IBAN number and get all your revenue deposited straight in your local bank.
• You can cash out your funds once it reaches a minimum $25
• You are permitted up to 2 cashouts per month.

PublicityClerks VS. BuySellAds Review

You can't simply give a Win Card to a service which started earlier compared to a service which started later. What we can do best is to compare the features provided by both services and then draw a conclusion.

I am using BuySellAds since 2010 to sell ad slots for all my network blogs. BuySellAds as you all know was founded in 2008 while PublicityClerks just came into being in 2012. When something is new, people don't try it unless it has become a big brand and this is the biggest mistake of publishers. When we joined BuySellAds, bloggers rarely talked about it or trusted it. Today as a token of favor due to that trust that we had on BSA, they approve all our new blogs whether they meet their requirements or not. Its all about utilizing the opportunity and building your reputation with the company.

50% of bloggers today who fail to get BSA approval for their new sites are those who underestimated it back in 2008-2010 and preferred Google AdSense over BuySellAds. Similarly PublicityClerks (PC) is just a new brand today that offers newbie bloggers an opportunity to make money by selling ads on their sites. Its popularity is increasing on daily basis and more and more advertisers have started investing here. PC has started making their approval criteria difficult in past few months. Therefore before it's too late try your luck with it and earn yourself a long lasting business relationship with PC.

We did a detailed research on different tools, widgets, payment methods and technology used by BSA and PC, based on this research, I will share with you  some reasons which forced us to start considering PublicityClerks as one of the great alternatives to BuySellAds.

1. On-Site Shopping Cart Similar to BuySellAds

On-site shopping cart feature is an excellent way to help advertisers buy ad space directly from your advertise page. It gives advertisers a quick view of your site stats, available slots, monthly ad impressions and ad sizes.

PublicityClerks recently announced support for premium "Ad bundles" which will function similar to BSA and will be out this time next week. Ad Bundles are pre-selected, niche relevant advertising campaigns.

Publishers will soon be able to also sell ads per CPM and not remain restricted to only 30 days ad slot. Publishers will also be able to integrate their inventories with DFP (DoubleClick for publishers) to manage their ad zones all in one place. Both of these developments will be out this time next month.

2. Site Market Place Listing

All publisher sites are listed in the SEO friendly marketplace which is accessible to advertisers via both PC's directory and search engines. You can display your site description and a special message to advertisers on this page. This gives your site's an extra benefit of referral traffic from PublicityClerks!

3. Large Collection Of Quality Sites to Advertise On

I really liked the way PublicityClerks allows you to use filters to sort sites by category, price, impression, ad size and date. This indeed gives PublicityClerks a competitive UI advantage over BuySellAds.

The best thing is that new publishers are vetted, curated, and added weekly so advertisers always have access to the best content creators and the most creative ad products.

The BSA UI looks like this which is something they really need to work on more:

Note: If you love advertising on Facebook, Adwords, BSA, why not try on PublicityClerks? One of my loyal clients who often advertise at PC, gave me a $5 discount coupon that I would love to share with you all.

Here's the free $5 coupon code exclusively for MBT readers:

FREE5ONUS

PS: You can use this coupon on checkout after purchasing an ad slot.

4. Easy Cash Out System

The biggest problem for publishers in South Asia is unavailability of PayPal. Fortunately just like BuySellAds offers payment options of credit cards, wire transfer and PayPal, PublicityClerks also offers the exact same options. You can easily buy ads or sell ads using your credit card or PayPal account.

If you want ad revenue to be sent directly to your local bank account then you can choose the credit card option. Submit your swift code, account number and bingo! Start receiving payments straight in your account.

Note: Proper support for cashout via credit card will given early next month.

5. Strong Customer Support

BSA offers a ticket system where you can ask for technical help and support from the staff but PC offers a 24/7 Live Chat support system where you can instantly talk to an agent and ask for any help needed. You can also contact them via email at support@publicityclerks.com

These were some of the quick comparisons to give you an idea about the platform technology and features supported by BSA and PC. To know more about how PC works for publishers and advertisers, kindly read some frequently asked questions on PublicityClerks FAQ page.

How To Get PublicityClerks Approval?

We will now discuss some important tips to make sure you succeed in getting fast approval without facing rejection. Rejection is possible because their staff is really picky and they manually review and approve sites which meet their quality approval criteria.

These are the official requirements:

Website Approval Criteria:

1. Your site must be live, finished with fresh content.
2. Moderate to minimal advertising currently.
3. High-quality website design (Mobile Responsive layout).
4. Have a minimum of 50,000 monthly impressions

PublicityClerks will not approve sites that are:

1. Not a TLD domain (Must have custom domain)
2. Not complete
3. In another language (English only sites are accepted)
4. Have too many ads or pop-up's
5. Adult oriented
6. Old data (not updated frequently)

Note: If your website traffic generates less than 50K monthly pageviews then you don't need to loose hope and do apply. I have seen many of my clients who succeeded with both Publicity clerks and BSA with pageviews below 50K. What matters more is your website design, update frequency and quality content.

How to Start Selling Ads with PublicityClerks?

If your blog or website meets the above criteria then you can surely apply to PublicityClerks for an account. Follow these easy steps:

1. First click on this link to register with PublicityClerks

2. They will send you an email for verification. Click the verification link to verify your email address.

3. Once you click the verification link, you will have access to the dashboard settings. Browse to "My Websites"

4. Click "Add Website" to submit your website details on next page.

5. On the user submit page, make sure to give full description of your niche site. Explain as clearly as possible what your blog or site is all about and which categories of topics you cover in it. Try to keep your description precise, to the point and written in a professional style. Ad networks agents love sites which are clearly explained and described.

Note: Make sure you select the correct category while submitting your site. Choose a category that best defines your content. In the keywords field insert your main niche categories, tags or labels.

6. Finally hit the submit button and wait for a positive response from PC team!

For a successful approval make sure you do not submit the same site a multiple times and make sure you mention all details about your site as honestly as possible. The success rate of approval at PublicityClerks is so far higher than that of BSA, so I am pretty sure if you publish quality content and optimize your blog regularly, there is a big chance that you will be approved within 24-48 hours.

What makes PublicityClerks the best BuySellAds Alternative?

I emailed the PublicityClerks support staff and I asked them a simple question: "What sets you apart from BuySellAds?"  There response was extremely humble and made a lot of sense:

What sets us apart from the rest though is that we pride ourselves on our fast support, from processing cash out requests and new sites within 24 hours, replying to support emails within 12 hours and providing ad zone and on site cart setup for free.

I just hope most of you who requested me several times to propose a credible and trust worthy alternative to buysellads, may now have a clear idea of what option to choose. PublicityClerks does surely has a competitive edge over remaining Buysellads alternatives. It offers everything that a publisher and an advertiser wants for selling and buying ad inventory respectively.

Do let me know what are your views on selling ad space with PublicityClerks. If you need further clarification on any part of today's review then do let me know by leaving your comments below. I would love to help you out with the best of my knowledge.

I just wish the best of blogging for all of you. Peace and blessings buddies! =)

PublicityClerks Review
Published	Feb 14, 2016
Summary	PublicityClerks is a new rising player among popular Ad Networks that is gradually recognized as the best alternative to BuySellAds and Google AdSense.
Reviewer	Mohammad Mustafa Ahmedzai
Publisher	My Blogger Tricks
Ratings	4/5

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Our Visit To IEEE NCS Orientation Session 2016

On 8^th Feb, 2016 NEDuet university which is amongst the most popular engineering Institutes of the country, invited us for a motivational talk on Entrepreneurship and Corporate Slavery. This orientation ceremony was organized by the IEEE NED Computer Society with an intention to welcome the new batches with positive energy and offer them productive counseling on how to make best possible use of their four years bachelor's journey. This was my second most memorable visit to Civil Audio Visual Hall of NED after "BluePrint to PlanB" seminar. Last time I presented there as a student and this time I was honored to present as an Alumnus. I am extremely grateful to NED administration especially Dr Muhammad Khurram for all their love and respect. Today's blog post will discuss all important highlights of the event that took place and some untold stories which followed afterwards.

Event Venue and Hosts

The orientation session was organized inside Civil Audio Visual Hall and hosted by the IEEE NED Computer Society. Popular IT disciplines which participated in the event were:

1. Computer & Information System Engineering (CIS)
2. Software Engineering (SE)
3. Department of Computer Science and Information Technology (BCIT).

Event Page: IEEE NCS Orientation 2016

Topic: BE THE FIRST YOU!

Important elements of the discussion were:

1. Sugar coated truth about higher studies
2. Bitter truth of Silicon Valley
3. White and Black Entrepreneurship
4. Plan A and Plan B
5. The human survival race,
6. Corporate slave mentality
7. New faces of ancient black slave traders,
8. Online business myths and facts
9. Becoming a Programmer or Inventor
10. My journey as a student to becoming a father,
11. A surprise message to INDIA!

Important Highlights of the Discussion

When it comes to facing a crowd, it's something I love the most. This presentation was different because I had rarely slept properly since a month due to new year's projects and some pending clients' work. I only had 4 hours to prepare the slides before the event could start and yet attend calls from friends (including family of a hard working tailor who also wanted to know more about online business) who wished to attend this motivational session. Somehow I managed to get prepared, take my laptop and drive straight to the venue.

What I saw next was a house-full auditorium with a humble and enthusiastic crowd of over 300+ students. Their hospitality and kind gestures deserves an applause. After a routine introduction of the orientation ceremony, I was invited to attend the stage.

This time my focus was more on advent of corporate slavery after Industrial revolution in 18th-19th century and how it effected our academic goals, living standards and priorities in life. I explained in brief that though different empires abolished black slavery completely back in 19th century but it has taken a whole new shape in modern era.

Back in old age, feudalists or capitalists needed black labors to work in their firms on fixed wages. Later as the world changed and got illuminated with education, capitalists started drafting new laws to attract a more skilled generation of workers towards their factories and empires.

Amongst their biggest success was reshaping the academic system to achieve their goals. They did succeed in giving the mindset to work hard in school to get enrolled in a good college then work hard in college to reach a good institute then work hard in university to get a good internship and finally a good job! Millions of dollars are invested each month in advertisements, seminars and workshops where students are taught how to write a good CV, how to prepare for a job interview and how to become a good employee. Today the primary goal of higher education is transformed into employment.

Believe it or not, today the biggest dream of our youth is joining a multinational firm. To explain it in more better words: youth today dream of getting enslaved in a corporate firm on fixed wages.  Every IT student today dreams to join silicon valley and to become the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates but rarely do some choose to become the first him or her.

Mark Zuker Berg, Bill Gates and Steve jobs were all lovers of education but to live up their passion they preferred creativity and invention over following the social trends of better grades or GPA. They were considered as back benchers by their classmates but rarely did anyone realized that they were living a dexterous life that I call PLANB.

I am against higher education but never against higher education + skills combined.

Education is good only if applied else it will set you on a roller coaster ride with no direct path and goal in life. Academic education without skills equals multiplying equity with zero.

1. What good is that education if a MBBS doctor can not prescribe you a good tablet compared to a salesman who works in a pharmacy.
2. What good is that education if is a car mechanic knows more about how to tune an engine compared to an automobile engineer who read it only in books.
3. What good is that hard work when a student gets 100% in an exam paper but fails to remember even 50% of it the next day.
4. What good is that 16 years of education when a vegetable stall owner is earning more than a graduate doing job today?

All this is happening because we remember 80% of what we see and do compared to 20% of what we read.

Parents and teachers today are concerned mostly about a kid's grades but rarely do they care if the kid is provided with tools and resources to polish his technical skills.

A single Photoshop course at the age of 11, transformed me into a professional web developer today. Imagine if I had also practiced basics of programming at that age, I would have been an excellent programmer long before I joined the university.

Let me quote my last seminar speech here:

Today institutes, teachers and parents pay great focus to 100% excellence in education but rarely do they motivate students to distribute 70% of their time to education and the remaining 30% to extra curricular activities, innovations and building Tech skills. They would encourage a student with full attendance, great marks but never a student with 70% study performance who dedicated the remaining 30% to develop entrepreneurship skills. Nick D' Aloisio was an average school going guy but his summly App that he created during his 10th grade got sold out for $30 Million US Dollars to Yahoo. The credit goes to his parents who taught him programming skills at an early age when he was just 15! I salute such parents and such students.

To build an iOS app you need to have strong programming skills of Objective C. What Nick learnt at the age of 10, graduates today learn it after spending 2 years in a job that means at the age of 24-26!

Advice for parents and teachers:

Human is the most complex machine built by God with unlimited potentials. Where is it written that to learn or practice something you first need to wait for 16 years of education? Why can't our children be taught that they can practice a technology long before time.

Dozens of student commit suicides in India, Pakistan and USA because they fail to achieve their desired GPA in order to receive scholarships. Students today are so over loaded with assignments, exams, tests and forced attendance that they rarely get a chance even to put their creative ideas to execution.

We can't change this social system of education but we can at least change the way we counsel our children and attach expectations with them. Parents must allow their children to play with tools, learn their field related courses before time and participate in extra curricular activities. Buy your children an Apple laptop and iPad and ask them to start building apps. Give them such tools, the Dexter inside them will rise by itself.

Don't just buy them fancy books but also buy them gadgets to practice. When they break a toy or smartphone, don't punish them instead ask them to mend it through reverse engineering. Send them to participate in mini workshops, ask them to build an online store by learning web development, ask them to start a blog to share their random views with the world and cultivate in them the thirst for a startup business no matter small or big.

The benefits of such counseling are countless. They will be more mature than their classmates and financially established long before their graduation.

Advice for Students

Once a person came to Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) and he asked him that what to do for living. The Prophet (PBUH) advised him three things based on decreasing priority:

1. Start a business
2. or Do farming
3. or Find a job

The lowest priority was given to employment. Today the biggest priority is given to Jobs by the highly educated community of Indo-Pak. If you read the stats, most of the businessmen, stock market tycoons, real estate tycoons, transportation and textile tycoons are people with no Harvard or MIT degree but with simple 10th Grade certificates.

You need to choose one option out of the three below to decide your goals in life:

1. Study like a nerd and work like an ass for a firm - PlanA
2. Don't waste time studying and instead only develop skills to establish a business - PlanC
3. Study like a nerd, develop skills to start a business and work like an ass to live up your dream! - PlanB

I chose the third option i.e. PlanB when I was a student and I am really thankful to God for this selection. Now it's your time to decide whether you will live someone else's dream or you will work hard to live a life of your own.

If you are an IT student, don't wait for years to learn programming from your professor, go learn it within few months from a nearby credible institute. Practice all basics programming languages within a year and start building mobile/web apps the same year. Yes your code will look ugly the first day but the more you practice it and take inspiration from successful products in the market, the better will you program. If you have 2-4 years before graduation than start a blog and share tutorials on whatever tools and technologies you know best. This blog could become a parallel source of income for you in future after graduation just like it become a source of living for me.

Can a Pakistani Student earn ?�2000 in two days?

Utilizing your energy and applying your skills in positive things can help you do wonders. Just now when I am writing this tutorial, I received a surprise visit from one of my closest high school classmates, Hussain Ali. His story is something that could be an inspiration to those who are seeking education abroad and fail to meet their educational expenses.

While Hussain was pursuing his bachelors in civil engineering degree from Imperial College London, he started looking for ways to afford his academic expenses which was around �26,000 annually. Instead of working like a normal boy at McDonalds or some other cafe, he used online technology to find students for tuition. Just within a year he managed to earn ?�2000 each weekend that helped him pay his annual  �26,000 university fee. He did it by simply posting free ads on sites like thetutorpages and gumtree. This is one practical example of using online power!

PS: I am sorry Hussain but I had to share your story and photo because your story does surely deserves an applause! =)

Hussain Ali and Mohammad at STCnetwork Head Office

Why there is no barkat in a job?

If hussain had given preference to an odd job, he would be making �7 an hour at McDonalds compared to �200 an hour giving tuitions which is something he loves to do.

Barkat in Islam means the blessing on whatever we have collected (assets).

• In business you have the option to multiply your coins and you have no fixed boundaries. In a job you are limited to a fix monthly wage/salary.
• In business you often have leisure time to try out new things or test your creativity. In a job you barely find leisure time to test your innovational skills and you are limited to a fixed SOP (Standard Operation Procedure).
• In business you earn the reward for every effort you put in. In a job, all credits are attached to the company's name. You may know how great is bill gates but you don't know those thousands of engineers who worked for him in developing Windows OS.
• In business there is Sabr and Shukr. You thank God when their is profit but you turn to God even more when you are in a loss. But In a job, an employee is more concerned with his monthly wage and less with whether the company's graph is going up or down.
• This list can go on...

A Surprise Message Of Love To India

Following is a message of love that the students of Pakistan wanted to give to their Indian brothers and sisters. It's also a video message on Indo-Pak peace from Pakistani Bloggers to India which was requested by my brother Abhishek Mishra from India.

Event Photos

Thanks to NED Photography society and Omais Siddiqui, we have plenty of HQ pictures to share with you all. Full list of pictures can be downloaded from this FB link and here.

Thank you President IEEE Syed Usama Jamil for this kind honor and brother Usama Masood Siddiqui for inviting me. =)

Thank you everyone! =)

Your Views

Respect comes from God. I was and I am just a small man who is trying his best to learn and share every single day. It's the greatness of this country and this youth that has given me so much love and honor. Throughout my 7 years of online business if there is anything that has helped me maintain barkat in my online endeavors then it is only through learning, practicing and sharing.

I am leaving you all with one important note:

Always remain thankful to your God for blessing you each day with a new sunshine. With the same healthy body but a fresh new start. God has placed all puzzles to success in front of you, you just need to join the dots to reach your targets. Never stop learning and sharing. And you must never fall a prey to pride, ego or prejudice after attaining success, they will destroy you inside and outside morally forever. Never give up hope because great future comes to people with great patience. If you are alive today that means, success is still watching your doors. Just let it in!

Wishing you all the best of life and a successful future a thousand times better than me or anyone else, full of happiness and joy. God bless you all buddies!

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