Do you have a job related domain thats just sitting there doing nothing? Well, you have the chance to monetize it with a job board if you do it correctly. Many times I get consulting clients looking to do make some money off their job related domains. Here are my general guidelines for doing this from scratch.
1. Start a blog right away.
Begin blogging on the industry for whatever that domain targets. Do it for 6 months before you launch any jobs. Why? Because its better for search engine ranking. Build up a list of content before you add jobs to the mix so that you actually have an audience. You’ll need to write about job related topics such as what are the typical salaries for that niche, how do people get jobs in it, what are the best resources to help educate or train them, how to write a resume for that niche…you get the idea, right?
If you are not a good writer hire someone. Go find somebody on Fiverr.com or hire an intern to do the writing for you. Post at least 2-3 articles a week on your blog. There are plenty of good writers out there.
2. Use cheap job board software to begin.
Dont spend a lot of money on building or buying job board software. Start small with one of the cheap solutions like a WordPress job plugin or SimplyHired or Jobboard.io. These platforms allow you to get off the ground cheaply and they support backfill from the major aggregators. If you have access to a developer and want to build something more custom, you can sign up to be an Indeed publisher and use their API to display jobs and a search box on your site. This allows you to have jobs right away and a small source of income while you work to attract employers.
3. How To Monetize.
Your new site should make money one of 4 ways;
- Job postings
- Adsense
- Backfill
- Other affiliate programs
These are in the order of most promising from a revenue standpoint, with one caveat. Job posting revenue during your first year will be lighter than normal because it’s your first year. You might find that adsense and backfill drive more of the revenue initially. You need time to get traffic and it wont happen overnight which is why content is so important.
4. Domain Name.
Depending on what type of domain you have that could be good news or bad news. If you are launching a site in an existing niche, that already has a number of job boards, you’ll have a harder time gaining traction. So do some competitive research first to see what the competition is like. If there’s only a few you stand a better chance at success. Small niche job boards in my experience can bring in up to $1,000/month. Look for areas of the job market that are newer like this drone site I started. Just over a year old the site is now #1 for the term ‘drone jobs‘ and gets 1500 uniques per month all through SEO.
5. It takes time.
Any new job board needs to be online for 1 year in order to really monetize it. Making money off Adsense, backfill and affiliates is fairly easy if you throw enough content at it. But to make money off postings you NEED job seeker traffic. Employers will not come back to post jobs unless they get initial results from their first try with you. You may want to advertise each job on your own through google, facebook, etc in order to guarantee that job posting some traffic.
