How to promote your job board
Over the years we’ve gained some valuable experience learning what works and what doesn’t when it comes to promoting our niche job boards. We thought we’d take some time to share some tips with you.
Grow. Your. List.
We’re talking about email here folks. Email marketing is still one of, if not THE most effective way to drive traffic to your job board on a regular basis. You’ll want to make it easy for site visitors to sign up to your list – and be clear and specific as to what they can expect to receive. Generally you’ll want to offer some sort of weekly newsletter of jobs. We like to use elegant lightboxes on our sites. And don’t show it on the user’s first page view, wait until they’ve gone at least two pages deep – these means they’ve actually had the opportunity to digest your site’s content and are interested in more.
Our integration with Mailchimp <- they are awesome(!) makes setting this up dead simple.
Back(fill) it up!
Nobody wants to post a job on a site that looks like a graveyard. If you are just getting off the ground, and don’t have a lot of inventory, feed in jobs from another source. This is generally easy to do w/ RSS. Our jobboard.io platform makes it easy to backfill using the RSS feed of your choice. We also recommend manually adding some jobs as proper postings on your site, particularly if you experience a lull in posting.
Sitemap
Having a XML sitemap is a must. Make sure you have a Google Webmasters account, and then setup your sitemaps for submission. This will make sure Google can crawl and index all the jobs you have available. You can see a sample sitemap here: http://www.webopsjobs.com/sitemap.xml.
Use the Twitters
Twitter has been immensely valuable in driving both traffic and brand recognition for our niche job boards. The first thing you should do after buying your domain and setting up your site is get a Twitter account for your brand. You may even want to do this before setting up your site, it’s that important. Once you’ve got the account, make sure you put a Twitter “chicklet” somewhere prominent on your site so folks can follow you.
But the real power of Twitter is combining it with a service like Twitterfeed. The beauty of Twitterfeed is it allows you to automate a large part of your Twitter account. You can tie it to an RSS feed which will be auto tweeted by your account. We like to setup up two feeds:
1. The main RSS feed of actual purchased jobs on our site
2. A 3rd party RSS feed of jobs in your niche. These will not link through to your site, but will provide a good amount of volume which will help you pick up followers.
Crucial to this is setting up proper hash tags to go along with your tweets. For example something like #jobs #yourniche – etc.
Google Adwords
While not free like some of our other suggestions, using Google Adwords can be highly effective in driving focused, engaged traffic to your niche job board. This is particularly important if your site is new and does not have high rankings in search.
Hopefully you found this helpful, and would love to hear your feedback in our comments.