How to make a niche job board successful?

[Criminy Jicket]

Does anybody here have any experience running a successful job board?

For over a year, I've been running a niche job board. I don't want to reveal too many specifics besides that it's targeted at expats who want to find a job in a specific country I'm targeting. This country is a popular tourist destination that has millions of visitors every year.

Despite working on my job board nearly daily for over a year, I still haven't made a single cent from it. In fact, I'm down thousands of dollars from monthly google ads, MailCheat(Chimp) subscription fee, domain/hosting, wordpress theme, etc.

My site is being visited and used by people (my google analytics is currently showing 50k views per month and 3.9k visitors per month). And I have over 1000 email subscribers who I send weekly job updates to.

But at the same time, I haven't had a single paying customer in my year+ of operation. 99% of the jobs on my site have been jobs I've personally scoured the net for and uploaded myself. And this is where I spend the bulk of my time -- searching for and uploading appropriate jobs to my site.

This was only meant to be a temporary plan until employers organically found my site and started to post their jobs. But this hasn't happened.

I've only had around 10 employers take advantage of a free job listing (their first listing is free. They pay after that). And nothing beyond that.

Oh and as far as marketing/gaining traction, here's some of the things I've been doing:

1. Google ads (I run small monthly campaigns. I only spend around $50 a month for this.)
2. Weekly email updates to my subscribers
3. I tried posting in relevant facebook groups but all my messages were marked as spam and my facebook account got shut down.
4. I briefly tried reddit ads and facebook ads but I stopped both of these because I didn't see much traction (at least compared to google ads)
5. Blogging (I have 15 unique handwritten articles on my site to hopefully draw people in to my site. I also have affiliate links at the end of each blog post but haven't got a single sale).
6. Adsense/other ad platforms. I tried to sign up for ad platforms and they all rejected me. Adsense rejected me too. And now I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to run adsense and google ads simultaneously.

I don't want to give up, but I also have to be aware if something isn't working and its time to move on to something else.

So any advice on this? What am I missing? Or is it time to cut my losses and move on??

 

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[Andy Black]

Does anybody here have any experience running a successful job board?

For over a year, I've been running a niche job board. I don't want to reveal too many specifics besides that it's targeted at expats who want to find a job in a specific country I'm targeting. This country is a popular tourist destination that has millions of visitors every year.

Despite working on my job board nearly daily for over a year, I still haven't made a single cent from it. In fact, I'm down thousands of dollars from monthly google ads, MailCheat(Chimp) subscription fee, domain/hosting, wordpress theme, etc.

My site is being visited and used by people (my google analytics is currently showing 50k views per month and 3.9k visitors per month). And I have over 1000 email subscribers who I send weekly job updates to.

But at the same time, I haven't had a single paying customer in my year+ of operation. 99% of the jobs on my site have been jobs I've personally scoured the net for and uploaded myself. And this is where I spend the bulk of my time -- searching for and uploading appropriate jobs to my site.

This was only meant to be a temporary plan until employers organically found my site and started to post their jobs. But this hasn't happened.

I've only had around 10 employers take advantage of a free job listing (their first listing is free. They pay after that). And nothing beyond that.

Oh and as far as marketing/gaining traction, here's some of the things I've been doing:

1. Google ads (I run small monthly campaigns. I only spend around $50 a month for this.)
2. Weekly email updates to my subscribers
3. I tried posting in relevant facebook groups but all my messages were marked as spam and my facebook account got shut down.
4. I briefly tried reddit ads and facebook ads but I stopped both of these because I didn't see much traction (at least compared to google ads)
5. Blogging (I have 15 unique handwritten articles on my site to hopefully draw people in to my site. I also have affiliate links at the end of each blog post but haven't got a single sale).
6. Adsense/other ad platforms. I tried to sign up for ad platforms and they all rejected me. Adsense rejected me too. And now I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to run adsense and google ads simultaneously.

I don't want to give up, but I also have to be aware if something isn't working and its time to move on to something else.

So any advice on this? What am I missing? Or is it time to cut my losses and move on??

I'm curious if any forum members have run a job-board.

I've never run one so take what I say with a pinch of salt...

What's a paying customer? A company paying to advertise a job on your site?

What are you running Google Ads for? Companies looking for staff, or people looking for jobs?

I'm curious why you're scouring the internet to find jobs to upload to the site. Can you just have a feed from various job sites (indeed, careerjet, niche job sites)? Or can you get an automation created?

I'm also curious why you only email once a week? If a new job gets listed on your site then would you not email there and then?

Do you just email for job alerts, or do you email tips and advice on how to get into that industry and how to move to and live in that country?

Do you have social media profiles where you post the jobs, tips, and advice? Can you send emails that link to those posts and get those 1,000 email subscribers to get initial traction on those social media posts? Can those social media posts get more people onto your newsletter somehow (thereby creating some sort of content flywheel)?

You can run Google Ads and Adsense simultaneously. Just be careful of the arbitrage policies.

Oh, and welcome to the forum. I like your username.

 

[theazizmoh_]

Does anybody here have any experience running a successful job board?

For over a year, I've been running a niche job board. I don't want to reveal too many specifics besides that it's targeted at expats who want to find a job in a specific country I'm targeting. This country is a popular tourist destination that has millions of visitors every year.

Despite working on my job board nearly daily for over a year, I still haven't made a single cent from it. In fact, I'm down thousands of dollars from monthly google ads, MailCheat(Chimp) subscription fee, domain/hosting, wordpress theme, etc.

My site is being visited and used by people (my google analytics is currently showing 50k views per month and 3.9k visitors per month). And I have over 1000 email subscribers who I send weekly job updates to.

But at the same time, I haven't had a single paying customer in my year+ of operation. 99% of the jobs on my site have been jobs I've personally scoured the net for and uploaded myself. And this is where I spend the bulk of my time -- searching for and uploading appropriate jobs to my site.

This was only meant to be a temporary plan until employers organically found my site and started to post their jobs. But this hasn't happened.

I've only had around 10 employers take advantage of a free job listing (their first listing is free. They pay after that). And nothing beyond that.

Oh and as far as marketing/gaining traction, here's some of the things I've been doing:

1. Google ads (I run small monthly campaigns. I only spend around $50 a month for this.)
2. Weekly email updates to my subscribers
3. I tried posting in relevant facebook groups but all my messages were marked as spam and my facebook account got shut down.
4. I briefly tried reddit ads and facebook ads but I stopped both of these because I didn't see much traction (at least compared to google ads)
5. Blogging (I have 15 unique handwritten articles on my site to hopefully draw people in to my site. I also have affiliate links at the end of each blog post but haven't got a single sale).
6. Adsense/other ad platforms. I tried to sign up for ad platforms and they all rejected me. Adsense rejected me too. And now I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to run adsense and google ads simultaneously.

I don't want to give up, but I also have to be aware if something isn't working and its time to move on to something else.

So any advice on this? What am I missing? Or is it time to cut my losses and move on??

Heya, yes I do run a niche job boarding site

I started the site 4 months ago.

So far, I haven’t made a cent yet.

Here's the stats:
Monthly visitors: 500
Monthly page views: 2,000
Email subscribers: 101
Resume database: 52
Linkedin followers: 275

I know it's not impressive.

But it's a good progress atleast.

I spent $0 on Ads, it's all organic.

Most of my traffic comes from Google and LinkedIn.

Plus I leveraged Google job snippets, which you can easily setup using schema.org.

Planning to monetize the site with "productize model" based pricing for now.

For example:
$25.00
- post upto 10 jobs
- jobs expires after 10 days
----

You get the point.

Just remember it'll take patience to make good profit.

I recommend just to focus on 1 or 2 traffic channels and go hard!

And make sure your job seekers actually land jobs that they applied for or atleast get an interview.

As same goes for the employers, make sure they get good candidates. They gonna come back everytime and pay you for new fresh candidates.

 

[Criminy Jicket]

Thanks very much for your response, Andy Black.

What's a paying customer? A company paying to advertise a job on your site?

Yep, that's right.

What are you running Google Ads for? Companies looking for staff, or people looking for jobs?

My focus with google ads has been on people looking for jobs. Because without job seekers on my site, it's useless bringing employers in. But even without employers, I've been able to attract people looking for jobs (by posting jobs myself).

But you're right, I should probably try to target employers, too with my google ads.

I'm curious why you're scouring the internet to find jobs to upload to the site. Can you just have a feed from various job sites (indeed, careerjet, niche job sites)? Or can you get an automation created?

I don't think I can get automation created for this sort of thing. A lot of the jobs I encounter aren't actually for expats/foreigners even if those keywords appear in the job listings. For example, it may say something like "Must be comfortable working with expats as our management team is from abroad" or something like that. But in reality, this job listing is not hiring expats so it would be a waste of time including it on my job board.

So I've found I have to skim through each job listing by hand to determine if the job listing is actually meant for my target group, expats/foreigners.

If there's a way to automate this process, that would be great! It would make my life easier since the bulk of my time is spent looking for suitable jobs and uploading them to my site.

I'm also curious why you only email once a week? If a new job gets listed on your site then would you not email there and then?

Do you just email for job alerts, or do you email tips and advice on how to get into that industry and how to move and live in that country?

I generally try to upload between 20-30 new jobs per week to my job board. So if I sent out an email for each new job I uploaded to my site my subscribers would be overloaded with emails and probably wouldn't be my subscriber for very long!

And as far as the structure of my email is concerned, it's a weekly update. So I say how many new jobs were added, and in what job category. For example, 6 Web/software dev jobs. 3 Teaching jobs. 1 Design and Graphics jobs, etc. And I'll link to the relevant job category of course as well.

In addition to saying how many jobs/job category, I usually link one of my blog posts as well. These blog posts are all about living in the target country as an expat. I used to write a new blog post every week but they didn't seem to get viewed much so now I just cycle through my previous blog posts (I have about 15 blog posts in total).

Do you have social media profiles where you post the jobs, tips, and advice? Can you send emails that link to those posts and get those 1,000 email subscribers to get initial traction on those social media posts? Can those social media posts get more people onto your newsletter somehow (thereby creating some sort of content flywheel)?

I haven't done too much with social media, but I did have a facebook account dedicated to my site that got banned. As I mentioned, I would post in relevant facebook groups (like "Jobs for expats in _________(country name)"). I always got flagged as spam and eventually my account got permanently banned. As far as making posts on social media (facebook, instagram, twitter, etc.), I haven't really considered it too much, probably because I personally wouldn't really follow a job board site on social media. Whenever I use job board sites, I sign up for email alerts, but I've never considered following the job board on IG, twitter, etc. But maybe that's just me.

You can run Google Ads and Adsense simultaneously. Just be careful of the arbitrage policies.

If that's the case, I'm not sure why I've been denied from adsense every time I've tried to join. When I asked other people about this, they said it was because I'm not allowed to run google ads and adsense simultaneously. If they're wrong, I don't know why I can't get approved on adsense. My site isn't spammy (or spammy looking) and doesn't have any controversial content.

It's just a job board.

 

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[Andy Black]

I generally try to upload between 20-30 new jobs per week to my job board. So if I sent out an email for each new job I uploaded to my site my subscribers would be overloaded with emails and probably wouldn't be my subscriber for very long!

And as far as the structure of my email is concerned, it's a weekly update. So I say how many new jobs were added, and in what job category. For example, 6 Web/software dev jobs. 3 Teaching jobs. 1 Design and Graphics jobs, etc. And I'll link to the relevant job category of course as well.

Segment users by job type and send email alerts when a job comes up? If I was looking for a job I'd want an alert as soon as one came up so I could apply before they get flooded with applications. Maybe it's less an email newsletter and more email alerts?

 

[MTF]

Maybe this will help:

Must ride mule (to & from) work location - Deep South Ventures

“David, this one, tell me about it …” He’d let me look at his domain name portfolio. Not names he owned and parked, but domains he owned & developed. This was another early project of his – a job board solely focused on the ranching industry. All aspects – cattle, outfitters, dude/guest...

www.deepsouthventures.com

The guy owns a super niche job board and it's working very well.

 

[theazizmoh_]

Maybe this will help:

Must ride mule (to & from) work location - Deep South Ventures

“David, this one, tell me about it …” He’d let me look at his domain name portfolio. Not names he owned and parked, but domains he owned & developed. This was another early project of his – a job board solely focused on the ranching industry. All aspects – cattle, outfitters, dude/guest...

www.deepsouthventures.com

The guy owns a super niche job board and it's working very well.

Oo I know this website, looks like he's making bank

 

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[theazizmoh_]

Thanks very much for your response, Andy Black.


Yep, that's right.

My focus with google ads has been on people looking for jobs. Because without job seekers on my site, it's useless bringing employers in. But even without employers, I've been able to attract people looking for jobs (by posting jobs myself).

But you're right, I should probably try to target employers, too with my google ads.

I don't think I can get automation created for this sort of thing. A lot of the jobs I encounter aren't actually for expats/foreigners even if those keywords appear in the job listings. For example, it may say something like "Must be comfortable working with expats as our management team is from abroad" or something like that. But in reality, this job listing is not hiring expats so it would be a waste of time including it on my job board.

So I've found I have to skim through each job listing by hand to determine if the job listing is actually meant for my target group, expats/foreigners.

If there's a way to automate this process, that would be great! It would make my life easier since the bulk of my time is spent looking for suitable jobs and uploading them to my site.

I generally try to upload between 20-30 new jobs per week to my job board. So if I sent out an email for each new job I uploaded to my site my subscribers would be overloaded with emails and probably wouldn't be my subscriber for very long!

And as far as the structure of my email is concerned, it's a weekly update. So I say how many new jobs were added, and in what job category. For example, 6 Web/software dev jobs. 3 Teaching jobs. 1 Design and Graphics jobs, etc. And I'll link to the relevant job category of course as well.

In addition to saying how many jobs/job category, I usually link one of my blog posts as well. These blog posts are all about living in the target country as an expat. I used to write a new blog post every week but they didn't seem to get viewed much so now I just cycle through my previous blog posts (I have about 15 blog posts in total).

I haven't done too much with social media, but I did have a facebook account dedicated to my site that got banned. As I mentioned, I would post in relevant facebook groups (like "Jobs for expats in _________(country name)"). I always got flagged as spam and eventually my account got permanently banned. As far as making posts on social media (facebook, instagram, twitter, etc.), I haven't really considered it too much, probably because I personally wouldn't really follow a job board site on social media. Whenever I use job board sites, I sign up for email alerts, but I've never considered following the job board on IG, twitter, etc. But maybe that's just me.


If that's the case, I'm not sure why I've been denied from adsense every time I've tried to join. When I asked other people about this, they said it was because I'm not allowed to run google ads and adsense simultaneously. If they're wrong, I don't know why I can't get approved on adsense. My site isn't spammy (or spammy looking) and doesn't have any controversial content.

It's just a job board.

You could scrape LinkedIn jobs based on the country name.

Btw what tech or platform did you use to build that job board?

 

[Criminy Jicket]

You could scrape LinkedIn jobs based on the country name.

Btw what tech or platform did you use to build that job board?

Yep, LinkedIn is already a big source of the jobs I populate on my site.

I created my site through wordpress.