Linkedin has a lot of eyeballs and if you play your cards right you can leverage it for a certain amount of free traffic. Here’s how I do it.
If you have a job board you’re going to need a blog for this. A simple wordpress site or tumblr will do the trick. Create a subdomain like blog.jobboardname.com and link to it from your main site.
For my new startup, CareerCloud, the site is still under development but I started a blog to build interest around the site until we launch. In the meantime I’m taking full advantage of it to write posts and get traffic. CareerCloud is going to be a social recruiting platform so I am naturally blogging about all things: social recruiting.
TIP: use your blog to write about the industry you serve. If your job board is about marketing jobs write about them, how to get them, the salaries, etc. If your site is a local one, write about the local job market.
You need to write posts that provide VALUE to the reader. For example on my manufacturing job board I recently broke down the top 10 states for manufacturing jobs. Its great link bait and people LOVE to read top 10 lists. That brings me to the CareerCloud blog. I wrote two interesting pieces recently that have resulted in hundreds of Linkedin visitors over just a few days.
The first was about ESPN’s new mobile friendly job ads.
http://blog.careercloud.com/post/29409545314/espns-awesome-mobile-job-descriptions
The second was about a hiring tweet that went awry.
http://blog.careercloud.com/post/29898596897/a-twitter-recruiting-tactic-gone-awry
I belong to several large recruiter/HR groups on Linkedin;
…and about 10 more. Do a search on LI in the group section for keywords like staffing, recruiting and HR. Join the BIGGEST ones with the most members. Some have tens of thousands of members. There are plenty of local and industry focused ones to join if you need them.
I posted the one about mobile job descriptions last week to 8-10 groups and got over 200 visitors from LI in just 2 days! The other day I posted the article about the tweet that went awry. In the first day (and the day aint over yet) I got over 115 by 4:30 that afternoon.
And here you can see the actual referral pages. So write something of interest to your users and use the groups on LI to your advantage. Just remember to give back value and write something that people will WANT TO READ.
