Front End Remote Jobs
Job board for front end devs looking for remote work.
I got super busy at work and stopped making updates for many months. Then I quit my job in September and had some more time to work on this.
Shipped
I shipped:
- a reverse job board for front end developers which already has 60+ profiles on it.
- a blog post on how to hire a front end developer
The numbers:
Let’s run through some numbers for the past 5 months.
Profit: -$86.33
This is sad. Really, I need to sell job listings. If I can't sell more than 1 job listing a month by the end of the year, then I need to stop spending time on this project.
Revenue: $29.43
- Job Listings: $0
- Medium payments: $9.11 (from cross-posting blog posts to medium)
- Affiliate Links: $20.32 (Swapstack)
Expenses: $115.76
- IFTTT: $4
- Domain: $1.25
- Plausible Analytics: $7.5
- Mailerlite: $17 (now $25)
Next focus
Going forward, my focus is going to be on sales. Gonna experiment with cold outreach over the next month to see if I can make any sales at all. If not, I either need to shut this down or at least reduce the cost to run it so it can go into passive / maintenance mode.
The Numbers:
Profit: -$12.75
Revenue: $0
Expenses: $12.75 (monthly)
IFTTT: $4
Domain: $1.25
Plausible Analytics: $7.5
My main goals for the month were to:
- expand SEO strategy (kinda did this, kinda didn't)
- put up a page for hiring managers (added here
- automate the social media
Automating the social media took a lot of my plate and helped double the traffic from Twitter and LinkedIn, so I count that as a huge success!
A couple other things I shipped:
- An automated monthly trends report (example)
- experimented with affiliate ads on the newsletter and on the site
- added a sponsorship link to the newsletter page
- for fun, an AI Cover Letter helper
- light redesign on the newsletter
I feel good about what I shipped and feel like I made progress on at least creating opportunities to make money - now just need one of these options (post a job, affiliate ads, newsletter sponsorship) to pay off!
Back in July of this year, I decided to sunset Front End Remote Jobs. I wasn't maintaining it, I wasn't adding any jobs, and no organic sales were coming in. I set up a 301 redirect to a landing page on my personal site and took the whole thing offline.
Shortly after I implemented that change, Peter Askew (@searchbound on Twitter) posted a thread about how to create a niche job board (How to Create a Niche Job Board: (https://ben.robertson.is/notes/how-to-create-a-niche-job-board/).
Then I heard the japan-dev.com story on the Indie Hackers podcast--another success story about a niche job board!
The backdrop of all these success stories in my mind is the rapid shriveling up of the venture capital market. The VC market has drastically changed this year compared to 2020. With the market looking like it is, bootstrapping a business seems like a safer move than ever.
So I decided to relaunch Front End Remote Jobs. In the first month since making that decision I:
- relaunched the site with a full redesign
- worked to get the site re-indexed by google
- curated 15 jobs
- added automated tag pages for technology, seniority, and region
- added a dynamic fallback page for pages I used to have but don't have anymore so they don't 404
- migrated analytics to Plausible
- started taking some SEO courses to develop an SEO plan
Results:
- traffic was 1.3k unique visitors (plus 1k from same time last year)
- net newsletter subscriber movement: -14 (it's an old list and they hadn't heard from me in a loooong time)
- site is re-indexed on google and driving search impressions again (+900 over the first thirty days)
(Full summary is here for the curious: https://ben.robertson.is/notes/month-one-summary-front-end-remote-jobs-relaunch/)
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago
Two exciting things happened this week 🙂
First, a new email subscriber reached out to me to ask about a premium version of the newsletter where I send out instant alerts. I forgot I even advertised this in the welcome email! He was interested in signing up, so I got him going at $9/month. I added a reminder in the weekly newsletter that this exists to see if I can convert a few more users.
Second, the day after I implemented the pay what you want model, I got my first ever job listing sale! A customer posted a job for $100!!! This was a prospect I had reached out to a couple times before and never heard back from. I emailed some new prospects and a few old ones about launching pay what you want right after I launched it.
It was so awesome to see 2 emails from Stripe in my inbox this week 💪
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Third sale came in today. Just $1, but still exciting to be making sales!
Following @coreyhaines example on Hey Marketers, I'm going to test out a "Pay what you want" pricing model through the end of the year.
I'm really curious what kind of data points I'll get regarding what companies are willing to pay. I haven't had anyone actually pay for a listing yet...but my outreach has been very sporadic. We'll see if this changes anything.
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
Today, a hiring company reached out to ask me to take down a listing because they were getting too many applicants and the position has been filled.
I'll take that as a sign that my growth techniques are working and people are actually finding and applying to jobs thru the site!
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I think it also depends on who is applying. We've had issues in the past where too many people without the right working requirements/visas were applying.
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Yeah that definitely could be the case. They didn't seem to indicate there was a problem with the applicants, but that might be a good question to follow up with.
The role in question was a junior role, and remote junior roles are really hard to come by and usually are the most popular on the site.
As I'm thinking about this, I definitely should see if they have any feedback about the kind of applicants they were getting. Thanks @rosiesherry!
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I've done three things over the past month to keep monthly users growing:
- New Landing Pages
I implemented experience and tech tagging, so I could build smart landing pages based on technology / experience levels that developers are searching for. (Thanks to @harrydry for the ideas from this post)
For instance, all jobs tagged as javascript now display on a page for Remote Javascript Developer Jobs. Or, one of the more popular ones is the Junior Remote Front End Developer Jobs page.
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Add Structured Data
I added structured data so I could participate in Google's Job search results. Google will now display jobs from frontendremotejobs.com in page 1 fancy display. -
Twitter Outreach
I started running twitter searches for users looking for front end jobs, and responding to their tweets with relevant landing pages (from step 1) based on their experience / what they are looking for. I've seen a big increase in newsletter signups since I started doing that, like a 10% leap in the day or so after I reached out to a bunch of users.
Here's a snapshot of the Google Search Console showing the slow but steady growth over the past 90 days: https://monosnap.com/file/ezmKv3yNVf1znxyeu1E8dKSQ7EEHKX
Back in June, I was working on ideas to drive more traffic to the site. I googled "Remote Front End Jobs". I found this Gist of job sites for front end developers looking for remote jobs:
https://gist.github.com/stowball/26fb03aeaa0e8de1def00dcb5d8f425e
And added a comment with a link to my site.
Since then, I get referral traffic from that link almost every day, and my organic traffic from Google has skyrocketed (not sure if the organic growth has to do with that). The organic traffic has been pushing the growth which has been awesome.
I added a Post a Job form to the site.
Users can now submit a job post for $25 for 30 days.
They can also opt to feature their job for an extra $25.
I launched a blog on the site with an initial blog post: The Cover Letter that Got Me a Remote Front End Developer Job.
This is my first step in building a larger audience. I submitted the article to freeCodeCamp for publication to start reaching a larger audience of front end developers. Consistent writing and promotion of the writing is my plan for driving traffic to the site in 2019.
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