Saturday, May 14, 2016

A Review of Wrike: Best Online Project Management Software

A Review of Wrike: Best Online Project Management Software

Link to My Blogger Tricks

A Review of Wrike: Best Online Project Management Software

Posted: 13 May 2016 12:24 PM PDT

A review of Wrike as the best Online Project Management Software. Wrike helps us easily manage projects, save time and get more work done.

When we launched STCnetwork as a registered company for developing web apps and mobile applications, we never thought collaborating with team members, meeting deadlines, and sharing resources among project members would be that difficult. We relied on traditional tools like email correspondence, private bulletin boards, or sharing files using Google docs, but as we grew we needed a more reliable, faster approach to increase our work productivity. I started a search to find the best online project management software to help improve our performance and work efficiency. Fortunately, one of my colleagues from India recommended we try Wrike, an online project management tool used by companies like Google, Paypal, Amazon, and HTC to improve collaboration, save time, and get more done. Since then, managing our blog network, collaborating with team members, distributing our work load, and meeting deadlines has been headache-free.

Wrike Best Project Management Software

 

Why Use an Online Project Management Software?

I'll explain why we at STCNetwork collaborate, manage, and track all our projects, deadlines, schedules, and other workflow processes using Wrike.

Before I begin, allow me to introduce my team members:

  1. Ahmed Nasir from Karachi
  2. Ramesh Kumar Khatri from Karachi
  3. Abdul Rehman from Afghanistan
  4. Haris Ahmed from Dubai
  5. Nida Zaidi from Karachi
  6. Qasim Zaib from Islamabad
  7. Yusra Adil from Dubai

You'll notice that our team is spread across several different cities and time zones. As a result, we have to put in extra effort to collaborate effectively, make sure we distribute our tasks efficiently, and stay on the same page regarding responsibilities and deadlines. This is where Wrike's online work management and team collaboration tools come into play: because it's a shared, real-time workspace, we each have full visibility into responsibilities and tasks, as well as high-priority projects and deadlines. All our work is easy to mange, and we're able to track work status, share files, discuss new ideas, and get great work done together all in this one tool.

STCnetwork Team

One of the features we rely on is the real-time Activity Stream, which displays updates for the tasks you follow. Any update or comment that a team member makes to a task can be viewed in real time by the rest of the team, so we're all up-to-date without having to send emails or hold status meeting calls. We don't have to worry about emails getting stuck in spam filters or being buried in busy inboxes. We also use the @mention feature in task comments to send instant notifications to specific colleagues or entire teams, which keeps the momentum of our work high since we don't have to wait for emails to be read and responded to. Communication and visibility is immediate, so we get work done faster.

STCnetwork Team

Since Wrike is an online collaboration platform, you don't need to download and install a large software kit on your operating system, and our team can easily access Wrike online through their laptops or smartphones by logging in from anywhere in the world. No headache of software installation, updates, or incompatibilities, and all our work data is stored and backed up through a secure cloud server.

Wrike has helped STCnetwork so much that we recommend it to anyone who's looking for an easy solution to their work management and collaboration headaches.

How We Collaborate Online With Wrike at STCnetwork

We normally start managing an online project by creating a folder. Each folder houses a series of different related tasks. Tasks are then assigned to members of our team, with details and instructions included in the task description and a specific due date set. Here's a snapshot of our folder structure in Wrike:

Our projects at Wrike

These are some of the projects we need to complete within the next 2-3 months. Here's how we use Wrike to distribute tasks among our team members:

Wrike Projects Table

As an example, the Android Development Kit project covers our mobile app development projects. Since Ramesh handles the mobile app development services, all the tasks that he needs to complete are contained within this folder:

Wrike: Assignment of Tasks

When you click a task, you get full instructions of what the task is about, what is its duration, who is assigned to complete it, and the current status of the task. With Wrike's live document editor, you and your teammates can each update the task description simultaneously, and you'll see everyone else typing and making changes in real time. You can also attach files directly to their related tasks, and edit those documents without saving them to your computer and reuploading them. No need to send email attachments back and forth ever again!

Wrike's editor includes formatting options, from text formatting to including checkboxes and tables. Nida often uses it to format blog posts. =)

Here is a screenshot of the task where I informed Ramesh about a client's SRS and asked him for a fresh Android APK:

Wrike Document Editor

Attach files either from your computer or from cloud storage services like Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and Microsoft OneDrive.

Wrike Attachment

Team discussions are included at the bottom of the task in the comments section.

Wrike threaded comments

You can schedule time duration during which the task must be completed.

Wrike: task scheduling

If Ramesh forgets to update me about the status of his assignment, then we can send him an email requesting a status update.

Request status update at wrike

Wrike: Status Update Email

Another one of our favorite Wrike features is the interactive Timeline view of your projects. This Gantt chart maker gives you a helicopter view of your progress and an overview of all the tasks involved in your project. We also use the Workload view to get quick insights into who may be overloaded with work and who is available to take on a new task.

Wrike Projects Timeline

 

Start Using Wrike For Free!

Wrike currently offers three pricing plans:

Free Plan

For small teams up to 5 users who need basic task management. We started with this plan and later upgraded to Professional our team grew. I strongly recommend this free plan if your team is under 5 members and you are in startup phase.

Free features include:

  • Task management
  • File sharing
  • Real-time Activity Stream
  • Free iPhone and Android apps
  • Integrations with Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Microsoft Office 365, OneDrive and iCal
  • 2Gb of storage space

Professional

For teams up to 15 users who need project planning and collaboration. This is the plan we are currently subscribed to. Investing $10 per user/month (less than our weekend McDonald's expenses!) on such a useful tool will more than pay off in increased productivity and efficiency.

Professional features include:

  • Dynamic timeline (Gantt Chart)
  • Subtasks
  • Mass actions with tasks
  • Shareable Dashboards
  • Search filters
  • Email Add-ins
  • Additional Integrations 
    (MS Project, Excel, iCal, RSS)
  • Storage space starting at 5Gb

Enterprise

For teams with 5 to thousands of users who need robust project management, custom reporting, and advanced security. Contact Wrike for a custom price quote.

Enterprise features include:

  • Custom Fields
  • Custom Workflows
  • Workload view
  • Time tracking
  • Critical Path
  • Real-Time Reports
  • User groups
  • Custom calendars
  • Salesforce integration
  • Single Sign On (SSO)
  • Extended security controls
  • Folder permissions
  • Controlled admin permissions
  • Network access policy
  • Branded Workspace
  • Storage space starting at 100Gb

How Do You Manage your Projects?

Using Wrike's marketing project management software is so far the only tool we at STCnetwork use to manage and track our projects, deadlines, schedules, and other workflow processes. Before Wrike, I was found it extremely difficult to keep emailing and texting my authors and developers about new assignments, but for the past 2-3 years, managing work has been extremely easy thanks to new technology and tools like Wrike.

How do you manage your development projects? How do you distribute work among your team members, and how do you keep track of progress? Are you able to meet all your deadlines? Share your productivity and work management tips with us!

Wishing you all a happy project management experience, free from stress and hassle. Peace and blessings buddies! =)

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Best 'Yoast SEO' alternative in WordPress Plugins

Best 'Yoast SEO' alternative in WordPress Plugins

Link to My Blogger Tricks

Best 'Yoast SEO' alternative in WordPress Plugins

Posted: 11 May 2016 07:05 AM PDT

YOAST SEO alternativeMost wordpress SEO Plugins including Yoast SEO are too overwrought and heavy-handed, especially for users who implement stuff like .htaccess, robots.txt and sitemaps via their own optimized methods. I love Yoast SEO plugin when it comes to optimizing blog posts and URL structure but I don't like it's XML sitemap generator tool which often fails to get all posts indexed by Google webmaster tools due to (maybe) its paginated format. For that I often use alternative plugins like Google XML sitemap to get the work done. Another issue with Yoast is that it does not provide keyword research support. You are not given keyword suggestions that could help you target quality organic traffic.

As a result of all these deficiencies, we researched and played with various WordPress SEO plugins but rarely did I find anyone plugin as advanced in features as WebTextTool (WTT). Indeed Yoast combined with webtexttool provides you with ultimate support to make your content SEO proof.

Install Webtexttool in your WordPress site

Before we begin I would recommend that you first install Webtexttool SEO plugin from WordPress plugin directory and activate it using your Webtexttool username and password.

  1. Go to the Plugins tab in your WordPress dashboard and select Add New.
  2. Type in webtexttool in the Search Plugins box.
    Note: Webtexttool has launched their WP SEO Plugin just few weeks ago, we are lucky to have tried it first since we are already subscribed to WebTextTool's silver plan. Webtexttool SEO Plugin
  3. Press Install Now to install the plugin.
  4. Activate the webtexttool plugin from the Plugins menu in WordPress.
  5. Webtexttool will now appear in your WordPress dashboard [on the left]. Webtexttool SEO Plugin for wordpress
  6. Click on webtexttool and login using your webtexttool credentials. If you don't have an account, you can create one for free in the plugin.

    Webtexttool SEO Plugin

Once installed correctly you will see it being displayed to the right of your WordPress editor.

Webtexttool Wordpress SEO Plugin 

you will also see a meta description box at top for easy access:

webtexttool meta description box

How To Use Webtexttool on a non-Wordpress site?

If incase you don't have a wordpress site and run a blogger blog or squarespace blog or tumblr, you can still use all WebTexttool tools, features and services by directly using their web application which can be found here.

Is WebTextTool The Best Yoast alternative?

It will be injustice to compare both these great plugins but satisfying a customer need is sometimes  impossible using a single tool or plugin. Sometimes you need to try out multiple things at the same time to achieve your desired objective. Optimizing wordpress sites is no more a complicated job or too techy task for bloggers today thanks to these easy to handle DIY plugins like WebTextTool and Yoast. This article will help you identify how webtexttool has a better front-end UI edge over Yoast and what are the unique webtexttool tools that Yoast does not support so far.

Yoast vs. WebTextTooL

Following are some areas where I found webtexttool extremely handy to use and more productive compared to Yoast SEO Plugin:

  1. Advanced Keyword Suggestion Tool
  2. More illustrative (no mess-up)
  3. More Descriptive and precise
  4. Real-time SEO Page Score tool
  5. Tracks Google Rank and Progress

1. Advanced Keyword Suggestion Tool

Yes webtexttool (WTT) has surely nailed Yoast in this feature without doubts! Our team is now addicted to WTT's awesome keyword research functionality that helps us find best keywords for our content based on Volume reach and competition. I have written a detailed tutorial where I explained step by step on how to do keyword research before writing your blog post.

For example I recently optimized our co-author Nida's post at richincomways using webtexttool:

Her blog post was on how Swede Mason became popular at youTube. So I picked the primary keyword as "Swede mason" to see what other possible keyword combinations we could use inside the post that people will be interested to search for.

webtexttool keyword suggestions After clicking the "Give me suggestions" button, these were the related keywords I got:

webtexttool keyword suggestions

I came to realize that he was more popularly searched as masterchef. Thus the idea clicked and we integrated these keywords in the blog post.

2. More illustrative (no mess-up)

The following is the content analysis reported displayed by YOAST SEO plugin:

Thing I didn't like is that all data is shown in one single bullet list in one go with no headings or illustration. This often gives content writers a headache and provides poor readability.

Yoast content Analysis

and following is the real-time optimization suggestions and analysis report displayed by WebTexTool.

Which one do you think is more illustrative? I let you guys to decide.

Webtexttool realtime SEO suggestions in wordpress

3. More Descriptive and precise

WebTextTool highlights each important SEO element in a separate section and gives you suggestions on how to improve it. Whether it be the image tags, meta description, title length, keyword density, intelligent use of Bold/italic text or heading tags, you are given clear and precise suggestions on how to make your content even more optimized and presentable for search robots.

Clicking any section will toggle display the best SEO practices that you need to follow in order to optimize your article.

webtexttool SEO suggestions

4. Real-time SEO Page Score tool

How can you get a quick idea of how optimized your blog post is? The only was to know that is through a scaling parameter that could quickly keep you updated with your optimization score. The higher your score, the better your content SEO. For this webtexttool makes use of a real-time SEO Page Score tool that automatically scans your content and calculates its SEO score based on the SEO techniques you applied. 

Webtexttool SEO Page Score

This score is all that matters for you now. As long as your score is above 80% you are good to go!

5. Tracks Google Rank and Progress

This is another unique feature of WTT that helps you track the Google rank of your published blog posts. I have written a detailed tutorial on how to track the SERPs rank of your blog using WebtextTool. Please read it for perfect clarification.

Shall you Stop using YOAST SEO Plugin?

No you must not!

Yoast is an excellent SEO plugin that can help you in several other ways. You can continue using it to optimize your URL and permalink structure, edit your .htaccess, robots.txt files and choose which pages to index. Yoast can also help you with real-time snippet preview.

As far as blog post content optimization is concerned I strongly recommend that you use webtexttool for major boost in your on-page optimization rankings. Your content is the only thing that matters more, it's the sole of your blog and is responsible for bringing you both traffic and search penalties. If you are careful in optimizing it, you will see your search organic graph climbing up and up. 

Have your tried WebTextTool yet?

Webtexttool SEO plugin has just been recently launched. Let me know how many of you are already using it and how has it helped you in better optimizing your wordpress sites. Our entire network blogs are now optimized using WTT and we have so far seen productive results. Do share your insights on this latest SEO plugin.

Feel free to ask for any help or assistance in the comment box below. Peace and blessings buddies. Wish you a healthy and optimized blogging career! =)

Thursday, April 28, 2016

How To Setup AdSense Page-level ads in BlogSpot?

How To Setup AdSense Page-level ads in BlogSpot?

Link to My Blogger Tricks

How To Setup AdSense Page-level ads in BlogSpot?

Posted: 28 Apr 2016 07:24 AM PDT

setup adsense page-level ads in blogspot blogsPage-level ads have been rolled out recently and now available for use for all webmasters and bloggers. Page-level ads enable you to display AdSense ads on your blogger mobile templates. It helps you monetize your mobile templates just like you monetize mobile apps with Google Admob Ads.

Some interesting facts about Page-level Ads:

  • Shown by AdSense at optimal times to help increase revenue and provide a good user experience
  • Two new ad formats: anchor/overlay ads and vignettes
  • Don't count towards your 3 ads per page limit - You can use them along with your content and link units.
  • Only display on mobile-optimized sites
  • Optimized to help increase revenue
  • Mobile Responsive!

I will discuss in detail the available Page-level formats, how to add code to the blogger template, and how to test the ads to see if they really work on your sites.

Page-level Ad formats

Following are the two types of Page level ad formats that are available so far:

Anchors

Anchor or overlay ads are mobile responsive ads that stick to the bottom of the user's screen and can easily be dismissed using the toggle down button at its top.

adsense page-level ads in blogger sites

Once the ad loads, an anchor is being displayed at the bottom of page that displays the ad. Users can simply slide the bar down to dismiss the anchor.

Vignettes

Vignette ads are full screen mobile ads that cover the entire interface of the webpage. They work exactly same as Admob's Interstitial ads used in mobile apps for android and iOS.

adsense page-level ads in blogger templates

Vignettes Ads appear as a popup between page loads on your blog. The user has the choice to either tap on the ad and continue to its destination, or close it and return to the webpage. The direct call to action and larger size combine make Vignettes Ads a particularly effective form of mobile advertisement.

Note:

  • Vignettes ads are displayed when the user leaves a page, not when when they arrive on one, so the user doesn't have to wait for them to load.
  • Furthermore, they're also limited in number per user to maintain a good user experience.

Implement Page-level ad tags in Blogspot Blogs

To setup these new revenue boosting mobile ads on your blogger templates follow these easy steps:

1 Log into your AdSense account

2 Follow this link

3 Switch on both Anchor/Overlay and Vignette ads by clicking the two toggle buttons

enable adsense page-level ads in blogger

4 After that scroll down and click the button which says "Get code"

enable adsense page-level ads in blogger

5 Copy the code

adsense page-level ads code

6 Now go to Blogger > Template > Backup your template

7 Click Edit HTML and search for this code </head>

8 Paste your Page-level code just above </head>

  • Note: In your Page-level code, make one modification. Replace the attribute async with async=''
  • If you don't make this modification, blogger will give you an error message.

Error parsing XML, line 1473, column 15: Attribute name "async" associated with an element type "script" must be followed by the ' = ' character.

9 Save your template and you are all done!

Test Page-level ads on your blogger template

  1. On your favorite mobile device, visit your blog to test Page-level ads.
  2. In the address bar of your mobile browser, add #googleads to the end of your blog's URL. For example in our case: www.mybloggertricks.com#googleads.
  3. Select the ad format that you want to test from the tabbed box that will appear just above your blog body..

Anchors and Vignettes Ads

      4.   See the ads in action!

Have you tried Page-level Ads yet?

Page-level ads were rolled out near October 2015 for specific locations but now they have been rolled out for all countries and publisher accounts. If you have already tried these new mobile optimized ads on your wordpress or blogger blogs then please share your experience with us and let us know how it effected your overall revenue.

If you have any questions related to the tutorial above, please feel free to post your queries below. Peace and blessings buddies! =)