I see a lot of attempts in the past few years from people trying to make money off job seekers by creating career advice and other products.
Sites like Career Brander, Career Successions, Career Shift have popped up offering comprehensive job search/advice services. So there are a lot of these kind of sites that have been launched over the past 10 years. The problem is they all make little to no money.
Here’s the dirty little secret of the online job search business. Job seekers are cheap, they want stuff for free and there are plenty of other sites to get it from, for free.
So my advice is not to launch sites whose primary revenue is supposed to come from job seekers.
Trust me, I speak from experience. I have tried over the years to sell stuff to job seekers with little success. The best I could do was create ebooks for $10 which sold a few copies or resume templates. Both ideas only generated $100 in my best month.
Even if you have a product or service that job seekers will pay for it will take tremendous volume to achieve success and profits. There are a few job sites like Flexjobs.com and WorkinSports.com that get paying job seekers but thats because they have listings no one else has. This ‘exclusivity’ enables them to charge.
There are a few job search management tools like JibberJobber which have been around for a while and make money. But these are lifestyle businesses that typically make $50k-$75 a year. They arent a real business so you have to keep it lean and mean. Work from home with as few employees as possible. If you have an idea for tools like this just do it all yourself or bring on 1 other person to help. Start small, keep your full-time gig until you get to a point where it gains some traction with users.
