The key to creating a successful job board nowadays is all in picking the right niche. While you could create a site like Monster it would be hard to compete and they aren’t the only job finding behemoth out there. If you don’t have millions to create a site as big as Monster your next best bet would be to create a job board that caters to a specific niche such as web design or graphic design. There will be less competition in these niches, but you need to make sure there is a demand if you want to make money.

Make Money With Job Boards Online

1. Picking Your Niche

Start by jotting down some niches. Once you have a list of 6-12 niches go to the Google Keyword Tool and start putting in search phrases like “Your Niche Jobs”, “Your Niche Job Board” and so on to see if people are actually looking for a place to find jobs online. Now organize your niches by demand so you can see which niches would be the biggest in terms of search traffic.

Now you need to check out the competition to see if its even worth it. Do some Google searches to see if there are any sites already up for the terms you want to target. If there are bookmark them and try to examine how big of a grasp they have on the niche. My favorite SEO tool is the SEO Book Toolbar. It will allow you to easily check things such as PageRank, domain age, number of backlinks and so on so you can get a quick idea of how difficult it would be to take over a niche with other sites already live.

Don’t be afraid to compete with other sites just make sure you know how much money and time it would cost you to get a big enough share of the niche so you can get people posting on your job board. So now you should have picked out a few niches that should work well and we can move on to the next step which is creating your site!

2. Creating Your Job Board

The first step to creating a job board is picking and installing software, so below we have linked to a few of the top pieces of job board software. Once you have your job board live you need to do a few more things. First thing is you should make sure your site optimized for SEO. By this I mean your job listings, home page and other important pages should have clean SEO friendly URL structures such as www.yoursite.com/data-entry-job-listing.html.

This URL uses only words and dashes and no weird characters, making it easy for search engines to read. You also need to make sure you have keyword rich page titles for job posts and your home page should be optimized for 2-3 of your most important keywords.

Top 3 Job Board Software Programs

• www.jobthread.com
• www.webscribble.com/products/webjobs/
• www.jobberbase.com

3. Monetizing Your Job Board

To start off you don’t have to charge to post jobs. Making it free could help bring some action to your board and get it going and then once you have a big enough audience and recruiters are getting applicants you can start charging for posting a job and or applying to jobs. Typically job boards offer bundles or use a credit system to allow people to post. For example if you went with bundles you could offer different pricing for a single job listing, 3 job listings or an even larger number for bigger companies.

If you went with the credit system recruiters would simply purchase a certain amount of credits, and you would have multiple types of listing such as basic and featured that cost a certain amount of credits to post. To make even more money you could charge for things such as bolding text or having the background color of the listing change to make it stand out more. The point of a credit system is to always have the buyer end up with some leftover credits so they are more likely to post again on your site to finish using them up.

You can also charge a monthly or flat fee to apply to jobs. This price should be much lower than the cost to post a job since the people applying will most likely want to apply to a bunch of jobs and are probbaly jobless and tight on funds to begin with. For example you could charge $4.99 a month to be able to apply to an unlimited amount of jobs while your subscription is active. This way you are not only bringing in large chunks of money from job postings but tons of money per month from members who are job hunting.

I would keep that as the sole monetization method and avoid cluttering the site with a lot of other banner ads or text based ads. Put the focus on posting and applying to jobs and keep as much traffic as possible flowing to the listings to keep recruiters happy and new listings on a regular basis.

4. Promoting Your Job Board

Two key ways to promote a job board online are via SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click). If you are not familiar with SEO you should consider hiring an SEO company that can rank for important search phrases related to your job board. This way you can get a steady stream of highly targeted traffic and when recruiters post jobs you should have enough people to respond to the ads.

You can also bid on keyphrases using Google AdWords. This can be expensive so you need to make sure your ads are good and your page converts well. Again you may need to hire an AdWords company, but if you are going to go into making money online for the long haul you should consider learning about SEO and PPC yourself so you can manage your online marketing more closely if you have the time.

I also highly recommend networking with bloggers, forum owners and other webmasters in your niche. They can provide you with valuable links and traffic to help your job board go from 0 to 100 in a short amount of time. A few blog posts on major blogs in your niche can go a long way in starting your site off right. You should also consider starting a blog of your own so you can direct the flow of traffic form your related blog to your job board which can also speed the process up.

Also don’t forget social sites like Twitter, FaceBook and StumbleUpon to take your online marketing to the next level. The more solid and detailed your online marketing plan, the better your chances will be for dominating your niche.

Lastly don’t be afraid to contact companies and recruiters in your niche or people who have posted on other job boards to let them know about your job board. You can start making money a lot sooner if you take the initiative. Just be sure your site gets a good amount of visitors so that anyone you contact will know your site is ready for new listings that hungry job hunters will want to eat up!

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