How to drive traffic to a job board?
Hey đź‘‹
I’m seeing a lot of smaller job boards popping up here and there. Remote jobs, startup jobs, you name it. It seems like they’re all targeting some kind of smaller “niche”.
I can’t help but wonder how they all gain traffic? It seems like they have a good amount of postings there. So I guess they must both have good traffic and good revenue 🤔
The most successful ones I've seen get the traffic first by providing something of value and then bolt on a job board later. Two-sided marketplaces are very hard to bootstrap from nothing.
StackOverflow and AngelList both went down this path of first generating traffic and then later adding job boards.
This.
I am also only guessing:
You're the only person who answered the question, and your first answer is the most likely. I've worked at the largest job board group in Europe and SEO and SEM was the number 1 driver of traffic by miles, they spent millions with Google. That said, not sure how niche sites compete, I'm betting most make little to no money and are just fun projects for people as it's easy to aggregate job listings
Any suggestion tool for aggregate job lists? i am working on this now and its not possible to load all job lists manually everyday.
It's been years since I was anywhere near job board stuff to be honest so I can't help I'm afraid :(
I used to run a job board and I'd get traffic from other jobs. I'd post (and pay for) my jobs as "sponsored jobs" on their boards. They'd get their traffic from... Google :) Basically what they were doing is arbitraging. Buying high priced ads from the Goog and selling to other small boards (like mine) laundered through their site :)
Depends on the model, the job boards I worked for had recruiters directly listing their ads with them because they had millions of candidates visiting the site every month. But yeah I like that idea of using their sponsored jobs feature to list your own and using their traffic, quite a nice option. The job boards I worked for basically had a recruiter pay like $100 for an ad listing (for example) then we'd spend like 10% of that on adwords or whatever
Yea, I'm just saying that's what I did, specifically, when I had a job board. Of course different companies/products/etc... will have different biz models ;)
FWIW, the job boards that I listed my "sponsored jobs" on were all PPC based. So if they paid $5 for a click from the Goog, they'd have 10 other guys like me paying $1/click on their board.
A lot of these smaller "niche" job boards tend to scrape other listings in order to "prime" their job board. They typically don't have as many paid listings as it seems.
I'd love if someone created a board of job boards... so many have popped up, but they're next to impossible to find. I'd do it but I'm too lazy (and know very little about job boards)
I built it as a shipping speedrun goal (I released the project within 10 hours) : https://100jobboards.com.
Thanks for the suggestion !
this is great! definitely find it useful. Could you somehow scrape the jobs (or use their APIs) and put them on your own site, in a sortable fashion? :P
I dont know if I want to go this path, I am afraid I will end up with a big generalist job board which may not have much value. What do you think ? :)
hm ok yeah good point. As a metaboard, what do you think would provide value? What would really help me is there was a way to search, and it'd search through all boards, maybe kind of like the meta airline search engines, like expedia or hopper?
Basically I want to save time + effort, and don't want to find job boards (which you've helped with) and don't want to dig in and search each board.
Not sure what your path to a business model is though. I think Expedia gets a small cut of sales or affiliate link? Not sure if that would work with job boards.
I get your point. Searching through all existing boards is much more ambitious but definitely brings more value. I will consider it.
You're describing a directory of job boards, and we have built something similar but even cooler :)
We own and operate the .jobs TLD, and we've created a network of thousands of job sites in all niches and locations imaginable. If you post a job on our system, it is automatically distributed to all of the relevant niche sites. For example, if someone posts a job looking for a nurse in Chicago, that job will go to nursing.jobs, hospital.jobs, healthcare.jobs, chicago.jobs, illinois.jobs, and many more. The end result is greater exposure for job posts while also having more relevant candidates.
Could you do a write up on your experience buying a tld?
I joined long after the TLD I work on was acquired. I haven't experienced it first hand, but I've gotten a lot of exposure to how it works and could answer some questions here.
You must submit an expensive application to ICANN, and applications are only accepted for certain gTLDs and only open their new rounds every couple of years. I know it gets very complicated, so much so that there are some companies that specialize in acquiring gTLDs in this process. You should definitely research Afilias and Donuts, both of which have successfully acquired dozens or hundreds of them.
that's really cool! Would love for you guys to add a lot more jobs now. They're so spread out on so many boards. Reminds me of the XKCD standards comic, except for jobs: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png
Many will start by scraping/listing job ads from other sites specific to their niche. With the right keywords used in their pages, in 6+ months you might get picked up by search engines.
I figured that they’re probably scraping jobs. But that can’t possibly be a viable tactic. I suppose it would count as duplicate content, and never properly rank.
That is my experience. We have been online for more than 6 months and are not showing up on Google.