Ready to create a job board and start making more money from your website? Let’s talk about it. I’m not going to go into detail about hosting, installing WordPress, or anything you should know how to do. There are plenty of resources for that which are a search away.
What I am going to talk about are the benefits of creating your own job board, driving traffic, and additional earning potential from your job board.
The Benefits of Starting a Job Board
The biggest benefit of starting a job board on a brand new website or an established website is the huge monetization potential with little additional effort on your part.
What I mean by that is if you know how to drive traffic or already have a healthy supply of traffic, there’s little additional work for you to do once you’ve established your service. It’s not like working as a recruiter needing to find candidates. You just need to make sure the companies posting jobs are able to find candidates they’re looking for.
For a small investment of a few hundred dollars, I was able to make over 10x that in the first year alone, including those months when no one was even coming to the site.
Besides that cash flow, there are other benefits that something like an affiliate website or display ads based website can’t compete with.
Keep 97% of Revenue
Instead of getting a small percentage of an affiliate sale or a few pennies from display advertising, after payment processing fees, you keep a huge portion of revenue.
Repeat Customers
If you set up your email marketing right, you’ll get repeat customers for months and years to come. You’re building your mailing list from actual customers, not free opt-in subscribers. They’ve already bought from you once so if they find a candidate there going to post a job again.
Additional Products & Services
Once you turn into a business resource, you can offer additional products and services to your customers. For instance, in addition to the job board, I have resume templates for sale and resume reviews & rewriting services.
Content Expansion and Easier Backlinks
If you’re into SEO and content marketing, your pool of potential articles goes up considerably and backlinks are easier to obtain. Instead of only being able to write about product X or clickbait article Y, you can write in order to drive customers to your service and create backlink bait articles.
More about those later in the article.
Increased Valuation
If you’re ever on the market to sell your website, because you’re selling a product that’s digital and requires no extra effort on your part, your valuation multiple goes from basic to premium.
The Plugin I Use for My Job Board
I use WP Job Manager for my job board and runs around $125 a year for all their additional plugins like accepting paid listings and allowing candidates to apply to jobs on your website.
You can buy the additional plugins individually, but to be fair you’ll make the yearly cost back with a few job postings.
At the bare minimum, you’ll need to spend $39 a year for the paid job posting option.
There are other options out there like WPJobBoard and Job Board Manager, but I don’t have experience using those so I can’t speak on them.
Of course, if you know how to program, you can do this all yourself.
Any theme will work for the job board.
Driving Traffic to Your Job Board
There are a number of ways to drive traffic to your job board if you don’t already have a healthy supply of visitors. Some of my favorite are cold email, SEO, social media, and recently email marketing. If you have methods of driving traffic, get after it.
I can only speak about what I know.
Cold Email
Probably the easiest way to get your initial traffic if you just start your website. Since I launched in January, those baby spikes in traffic until May when organic kicked in were from cold email.
You’ll be looking primarily for human resources type positions. Think of who would be hiring for the companies you’re targeting.
When I was doing a lot of cold outreach, I tried to keep my emails short and to the point.
Hey [name],
I just wanted to throw on your radar our new job board addition to [URL]. Right now we’re getting around # job seekers to the website and it would be irresponsible of me not to let you know at [company_name].
Thank you,
[signature]
Short, sweet, and to the point. I was using AgileCRM to handle my cold email.
PROTIP: use an alternative website to send your cold email. If your website is jobboardfun.com, use jobboardfun.net to send your emails and link back to jobboardfun.com. Your deliverability could be affected if you abuse cold email.
SEO
Probably my favorite source of traffic besides direct, SEO can be an “easy” way of getting organic traffic. You’ll want to break down your content into two categories: informational content and service content.
Informational content is used to drive traffic to your website and garner backlinks. Examples of informational content would be
- What to include in an [industry] cover letter
- Best universities for [industry] in [country]
- How to become an [industry profession]
- Cost of living in [city]
- Best restaurants in [city]
- How long does it take to learn [skill]
- How to get [industry certification]
Product & service content is used to talk about your product or if you’re doing something like affiliate marketing for products related to your industry or region. Examples would be like
- Where to find jobs in [industry/city]
- Best [product or service you offer]
- Best [product your industry uses] for [industry]
Social Media
I break down social media into two categories: timeline social and evergreen social.
Timeline social are websites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. For these social media sites, I automate as much as possible because hours after you make your post the piece of content is lost “forever.” I don’t have the time to stay on top of timeline social media sites for my business.
Evergreen social media are websites like Pinterest and YouTube. They have a great search engine attached to them for people to find your content months and years after posting.
As you can see from the screenshot, I uploaded a number of videos around August of 2019 and they continue getting 30-70 views per day. That’s 30-70 new people being introduced to my brand every single day from a video created months ago.
Find a timeline social platform that continues to drive traffic and views 10 months after posting.
And the videos? They’re not impressive. At first, I did voiceovers on PowerPoint presentations, turning my articles into videos. Then I used Amazon Polly to do text-to-voice to create the videos and use stock footage for a visual.
PROTIP: your SEO will improve when you embed the videos back into your articles. The videos will improve your clickthrough rate and your rich snippet chance increases.
Push Notifications
This was a hell of a lot easier to use a few months ago, but they have since been harder to get opt-ins. Kind of a pain in the ass to go from 5% opt-in rate to 5 opt-ins a week.
Email Marketing
Not to be confused with cold email and not to use the same lists, email marketing is for people that are your customers already or have opted in to your list in one way or another.
You’ll want to set up the e-commerce basics like
- Welcome emails
- Win back emails
- Abandoned cart emails
- Thank you emails
- VIP emails
You can also do something like a newsletter you send to your list when you publish a new article.
Additionally, one-off emails are great. I’ve sent thank you emails to potential customers and made a few hundred dollars off of 3 sentences. Coupon codes for no reason are good, as well as announcing new products and services.
Monetizing Your Job Board
Your largest source of revenue if you’re starting a brand new website is probably going to be the job postings, like mine.
A whopping 61% of my revenue came from job postings, andĀ companies were able to post for free. That money came from featured listings (meaning they appeared at the top of the list of jobs and were highlighted for attention).
The two products are both digital goods that candidates can purchase and download. They’re not information products. No course or anything like that. They’re templates for resumes and portfolios.
A large portion of my content is affiliate content. For instance, if I had a job board for construction workers, an article would be “Best Work Boots for Construction Workers.” I’ve found that adding theĀ for modifier gets less traffic initially but is easier to rank for. Your mileage may vary.
The advertising was from using AdSense, which gives absolutely terrible rates. I’ve since installed Ezoic and immediately tripled my monthly advertising revenue.
You can offer additional services like resume services or training for hiring authorities if you feel so inclined. Courses if you really know your industry.
The options are endless.