We spoke to one of our clients about his magazine website - and he told us why he uses a WordPress link manager and the impact it has on his magazine website. Let's dig into!
Having an online magazine with a blog about start-ups and self-employment featuring plenty of written content, images and links requires effective management skills to maintain. As a passionate owner of such a platform, I am deeply grateful when I discover any helpful tool that makes it easier for me to balance it all.
Link management, in particular, can be a real challenge because they have to be set, regularly monitored and clearly defined. For example, when a target URL is no longer online, there are a lot of steps to perform on the back end to replace it on various pages.
Thankfully, I discovered the WordPress link manager, ClickWhale. With the help of this super easy-to-use plugin, the backend work for link management is much easier. It allows me to manage all links centrally and also replace link targets for existing links with just one click - no matter where these links are stored on my backend.
Keep reading because, in this article, I show you how I manage the links on my blog: bloggiraffe.de with this sophisticated tool.
1. Versatility in Linking: More Than Just Articles
Online magazines thrive because of their variety of content. From in-depth articles and engaging interviews to multimedia content such as videos and podcasts.
ClickWhale makes it possible to support all these different forms of content through effective link management.
With the ability to categorize and manage links, as a blogger I can ensure that readers can effortlessly navigate through the wide range of content available, greatly improving the user experience.
2. Improving Reader Loyalty Through Structured Linking
Keeping readers engaged is a crucial factor in the success of my online magazine.
ClickWhale contributes to this by allowing me to seamlessly embed links to related articles, external sources or affiliate products without the need for coding skills.
This strategic linking keeps readers on the site longer and encourages engagement by adding value through additional information or product recommendations.
3. Optimization of the Internal Link Structure for SEO
A well-thought-out internal link structure is not only beneficial for the user experience but also plays a crucial role in search engine optimization (SEO).
This helps me as an online magazine owner to build a structured internal linking structure that helps search engines to better understand and index the content found there.
This leads to improved visibility in search results and thus attracts more readers.
Practical example:
A WordPress link manager such as ClickWhale not only makes it possible to manage links, but also to have the links output via the existing domain/URL (masking).
This means that the actual target URL is replaced by a separate "slug" (part of a URL) - i.e. your own URL/domain structure.
So if you create a new link in ClickWhale, it will look like this:
- Enter your title, which is displayed in the link management in the backend for this link.
- Enter your slug, which will be appended to your domain. In our example, we have already defined in ClickWhale that we want outgoing links to automatically have the slug "link". We are therefore only attaching the slug for this specific link here, i.e. "example-link".
- This is where you store the actual link target or the link URL.
In other words, this means that the link in our example would be as follows:
https://bloggiraffe.de/link/example-link
The beauty of this is that this does not look like a "foreign" link to visitors to my blog, because my URL plus the slug is displayed as a singular link. I therefore gain significantly more trust from my visitors. As a result, visitors not only stay longer on individual pages, but they also click on the links much more often.
Of course, Google also thanks me for this, which has enabled me to increase my rankings in SERPS (results lists in Google). In summary, you can personalize and define your sensible link structure for all outgoing links.
4. Saving Time and Increasing Efficiency
Managing an online magazine is a time-consuming task, especially when it comes to updating links. ClickWhale automates many of these processes and ensures that all links are up to date.
If I want to change something, I can do so with just one click in the settings. This works just as easily as creating a new link (see practical example). This action increases efficiency and gives me more time to focus on what matters: creating high-quality content.
5. Analysis and Adaptation
Once you have created your links and integrated them into your pages and/or posts, you can also monitor them.
You can use the detailed statistics to see how often individual links are clicked. Knowing this helps you better strategize which links to feature and which links to do away with.
I have set the statistics filter to the last 7 days for the screenshot above (it was a little quieter over Easter). You can also filter by year, month or day.
With ClickWhale, you can also add or remove individual links from the analysis.
Below this beautiful diagram, you have a view of the "Total clicks" for the selected period.
Such an evaluation is incredibly helpful for evaluating and analyzing links, i.e. which link works well, and which doesn’t. Based on the evaluation and analysis, I can test different links and simply replace them if and when necessary.
6. Social Media: The Link Page
Another great function that ClickWhale offers is the creation of WordPress link pages for social media channels. Social media plays a particularly important role for online magazines, as it also generates new readers and clicks.
Hint: ClickWhale is a great and free alternative for Linktree
With the WordPress link manager plugin, this is easier than ever because you can create a customized link page. Having a customized link page in place as a bio link in social network profiles instead of a direct link to the homepage has several advantages:
Perfectly optimized view for smartphones:
Almost 95% of users who are active on social media use their smartphones for this purpose. A link page is optimized precisely for this and therefore offers a high level of user-friendliness.
Focus on the essentials:
Limiting the content present to the most important content or resources prevents website overload and focuses attention on what truly matters: a new blog post, a special offer or an upcoming event.
Effective cross-linking:
Through targeted cross-linking within the link page, I as an online magazine operator, I have the opportunity to direct users to specific content on my blog.
Automatic reading of blog posts:
With ClickWhale, another useful function is to display individual posts directly on the link page. This allows me to customize each category from the latest post or offering, which is displayed and linked accordingly within the curated WordPress link page.
This specification directs my audience to the most interesting content/articles on my blog, which they can then click on and read.
Conclusion
We hope that we have been able to show you understandable reasons why you need a WordPress link manager plugin for your online magazine website.
If you like, you can check out the live demo or download the free version, of ClickWhale.
