Starting A Job Board

Julie Shenkman
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Yesterday was a Canadian Holiday so I was thinking about job boards, domain names and google adsense. It seems last week there was lots of news and talks about people starting to realize that vertical niche job boards can work. So, what does one need in order to start a niche specific job board? I guess #1, You need a good domain name. I know there is a good argument to this but I still think if all things are equal, a good domain name helps. #2 You need content. From my recent conversations with CM Russell over the last week, he pointed to two companies that provide job descriptions to populate your Job Board. One of them is called Beyond and the other is called JobTarget. #3 You need to get some ads and maybe Google Adsense is the way to go. I only suggest Google because I see way more of their targeted ads than anyone else's. Here is a question, does anyone know anyone who generates over 150k a year through Google adsense on their job board? #3 You need to figure out where your audience likes to hang out on line and then get your company's name inserted in those places. Maybe you can get a list of 250 people in the audience you want to attract and call each of them and ask them what they read online. #4 You need to think about who you can do some snazzy co-marketing things with. This is something that I never would have thought of a year ago but I see now how many companies are interested in doing things together. #6 Make yourself very familiar with Steven Rothberg who runs a site called CollegeRecruiter.com Steven is all over the place promoting what it is he does which is really care about elevating the awareness of how conversations can be created and wrapped around the promotion of new available jobs for college students. This in turn gets the candidates talking and that is what you need. #7 Make a commercial and get it on the superbowl. Just kidding, but hotjobs did this and it worked and Richard Johnson who started hotjobs was a recruiter so maybe it is the recruiters who are in the best position to start a job board. #8 Spend some money and get yourself a great domain name. Wait. I said that already #9 Contact as many companies in the niche you are focusing on and see if any of them are interested in advertising on your site. Give them a link back to their website and I am sure there are at least 3 of them out there that will agree to this #10 let me know when you do it so I can have the opportunity to advertise on your new niche specific job board. posted by Jason Comments: Thank you for the kind reference, Jason. And happy Civic Holiday Day! For those of who are Canadian (or those of us like me who moved south to Minneapolis for the weather), the first Monday in August is a very popular holiday across the country. It celebrates, well, the first Monday in August. It is summer time! Winter isn't for at least another couple of weeks! Long weekend! Party! Seriously, I am flattered that you would use me as an example of someone who does a decent job of getting the word out about our career site. I try and sometimes succeed, but like a lot of marketing plans sometimes you have 10 ideas that all seem brilliant so you try them all and find that only one works and the others stink. That's okay, because then you've found a new marketing tactic or strategy. Also, in a way you referenced CollegeRecruiter.com twice in your list of suggestions because we're one of the 11,000 niche career sites that partners with Nexxt. By partnering with them, we can focus on marketing our site to candidates, employers, and other stakeholders and not have to worry as much about the customer service and technology issues. Some of the Beyond sites are completely hosted and managed by Beyond while others like CollegeRecruiter.com use them for parts of our site (i.e., job postings and resume search engines) but not others (i.e., our eight blogs). Posted by: Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com | August 08, 2006 at 04:22 PM 11,000 niche boards. I didn't realize there were that many. That is a huge number! Posted by: Steven Kempton | August 08, 2006 at 11:29 PM Provided by Recruiting.com A Recruiting Blog Community Portal
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