how publishers could better link to their most important pages and suggests an optimal link structure for a page. Then it automatically adds and manages new links or redirects underperforming existing links.
“We could turn that link off, we could turn that link on, we could change where it’s going … we could send you to a partner site, we could have you go to an affiliate site. If you as a publisher wanted to sell that link, you could, so there’s a lot of flexibility built into it,” Sheinbaum says.
That all adds up to letting publishers know more about readers, keeping them engaged, and guiding them, Sheinbaum says. It also gives publishers more control than techniques like search engine optimization and gives them more information than a platform like Google AdWords, he says.
In theory, publishers already try to do what LinkSmart does when they add links to stories, but managing those links and going back to optimize them is cumbersome and boring. LinkSmart promises to take care of that by installing a small piece of code that doesn’t require changes to a site’s design or performance.
The software is powerful enough to benefit major publishers with a large portfolio of sites, but simple enough for the part-time blogger, Sheinbaum says. LinkSmart is a monthly subscription service with the price based on the size of the publisher, which features they use, and how deeply it is integrated into their site.
“Our system could be used by large media companies or even the smallest ones, because they have a use case around linking. Large media companies might want to deliver audience to one place, a small site might want to deliver a click to a commerce partner so they could get paid,” Sheinbaum says.
