Got off the phone just now with a client who has a blog and wants to add a job board piece to it. He’s been blogging for a while about careers in a certain niche and already has 5,000 monthly visitors.
This is a great way to start a job board. By actually just writing about jobs in your niche first you can build up an audience that can eventually be used to show jobs to.
Remember you need job seekers to attract employers. So by first building the audience of seekers you have a better chance at attracting companies who need to hire. It’ll take you some time. I’d give it 9-12 months at least before you throw jobs into the mix. You need to think long term. Websites dont happen in 1,2, 3 months, they take time to grow.
So I suggested my client start slowly. Now that he has an audience he can start building a few sub domains and backfill it with an affiliate account from indeed.com or simplyhired’s jobamatic product. “Backfill” means becoming an affiliate of those sites which will allow you to display their jobs on your site and earn money when someone clicks them. You earn generally 5 to 10 cents per click and that money can add up over time. On a site that has 2,000 monthly visitors that could be as much as $100 per month in my experience.
A sub domain works like this. Lets say you have a website, lets call it aboutnursingjobs.com and you wanted to add a job board. Well you could create a subdomain like jobs.aboutnursingjobs.com (via your domain registrar) and put the jobs there. Or you could even create several if you wanted more “pages” like seattle.aboutnursingjobs.com, sandiego.aboutnursingjobs.com, etc.
Think of each sub domain as its own little micro site that just has nursing jobs in Seattle, nursing jobs in San Diego, etc.
Starting with some backfilled pages of jobs is the quickest, and fastest way to start a job board and prove your market first. It lets you “get your feet wet” in the job board industry while beginning the process of adding some incremental revenue to your bottom line.
To take it a step further and adding paid postings to your site you can use software like Jobamatic or from Jobboard.io which is a step up from just backfill. These platforms lets you also use backfill from indeed.com AND give you the ability to accept paid postings from employers. But they dont have any job seeker features such as a resume database.
So if you have a site or blog that fills a niche and doesnt have jobs yet, the above steps are a good way to start.
Rock on!
-Chris
