Job Website Created… Now it’s time to grow it!

[Mattyds]

Hey Everyone!
Thought I’d give a bit of a background on myself, my journey to creating this website, and my current tasks. I’ll also be using this thread as a journal to mark my progress. My names Matt and I’m a web developer. My jobs so far have been a shelf stacker at a grocery store, a web developer, and a QA engineer. However, once I got the QA engineer role, I was disappointed with what the job was like because it was vastly different from what I had been told it would consist of. After this disappointment, the idea of my website came to me.

The website is Jobs Defined and it is a database of job descriptions. Ideally, people create a job description stating what they do, relevant qualifications, their average day, and what they like/dislike about their job. And for all job seekers, they can go online and read what other people have to say about the jobs they are looking into so they have a better understanding about what will be involved in the job once they get it.

I originally launched the website approx 4 months ago but I had great difficulty in getting people to add descriptions as they had to log in with their email address and people didn’t want to have their emails associated with talking about their jobs. After some consideration, I decided to remove the requirement for people to log in and redo the whole website. This change has definitely made it so people are more willing to input their descriptions as it’s streamlined the process.

The next step is getting it in front of people who I don’t know. I’m currently running Facebook ads but they don’t seem to be converting as well as I had hoped. My next step is to create traffic through Reddit with either paid traffic or posting about it there.

Does anyone have any tips on how to grow a website like this?

 

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[astr0]

Honorable idea.

Do you have any monetization strategy for it?

What would make people you don't know leave an honest and good description of their job?

If you don't have a good monetization strategy than probably the best ways would be to leave links on Quora and forums like this one.
And get to a good ranking in Google.
Maybe I've missed something, but from what you described people will come, read about a few jobs they're interested in, maybe leave a comment about their job, leave and won't come back for a long time.

You need really good marketing/brand building for that to work.

 

[Mattyds]

Honorable idea.

Do you have any monetization strategy for it?

What would make people you don't know leave an honest and good description of their job?

If you don't have a good monetization strategy than probably the best ways would be to leave links on Quora and forums like this one.
And get to a good ranking in Google.
Maybe I've missed something, but from what you described people will come, read about a few jobs they're interested in, maybe leave a comment about their job, leave and won't come back for a long time.

You need really good marketing/brand building for that to work.

Thank you.

For now, my plan to monetize will be through ads. However, I don't plan on including the ads until it gains a bit more traction as it might dissuade people from staying on the page. If it does end up gaining a lot of traction, another monetization method could be to become an affiliate of job board websites.

This is an issue I have yet to fully answer. I know I would be more than happy to supply the information knowing that it might help someone in the future and I assume parents would think the same if this information could benefit their children. However, I need to make people think that including this information would help others while they are on the website.
When I first came up with the idea, I didn't think people would be against leaving a job description since plenty of people leave similar descriptions about the companies they work for on sites like Glassdoor. However, this does not seem to be the case.

Quora and forums are great suggestions! I will read up a bit more on Quora etiquette to ensure I'm not spamming my website in the responses.

Yeah, for the person who is comfortable with their job that is the what I assume will happen. But for job seekers who are unsure about the direction they want to go, I believe that there will be quite a lot more visits. This is especially true for school students who are reaching the end of their schooling and are unsure of what job they want once they have finished school.

 

[Charnell]

For now, my plan to monetize will be through ads. However, I don't plan on including the ads until it gains a bit more traction as it might dissuade people from staying on the page. If it does end up gaining a lot of traction, another monetization method could be to become an affiliate of job board websites.

I know Indeed has an affiliate program you can use and they also have the option to import jobs and showcase them on your website. You could display those on a given job title's page & geotarget via IP address.

Eventually, you could move into creating your own job board. That's going to be difficult as a general board, trying to compete with Indeed, Monster, CareerBuilder, etc, but certainly not impossible.

 

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[Danny01]

I have a similar site started about 3 months ago. The website is Recruitment Beam - a Job blog targeted at a Nigerian Audience. Traffic is about 2k daily from Google and increasing greatly.

 

[astr0]

Yeah, for the person who is comfortable with their job that is the what I assume will happen. But for job seekers who are unsure about the direction they want to go, I believe that there will be quite a lot more visits. This is especially true for school students who are reaching the end of their schooling and are unsure of what job they want once they have finished school.

So just hang out where they are. Get your website in front of them. Think of some more creative ways to do it.

Ad revenue won't give you enough ROI to run paid ads to your web site. Affiliating with Job offer site probably can get a positive ROI, need to test.

 

[Mattyds]

I know Indeed has an affiliate program you can use and they also have the option to import jobs and showcase them on your website. You could display those on a given job title's page & geotarget via IP address.

Showing the specific affiliate program based off the geotarget is a great idea! Definitely going to implement once it starts to gain more traction.

So just hang out where they are. Get your website in front of them. Think of some more creative ways to do it.

Ad revenue won't give you enough ROI to run paid ads to your web site. Affiliating with Job offer site probably can get a positive ROI, need to test.

That's the plan!

That makes sense. Will definitely start to test it when I gain a bit more traffic.

 

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