Using Job Boards to Monetize Your Website

Online job boards have been increasingly used by blogs as an additional monetization strategy. I was checking my Feedburner stats today when I came across an ad for Simply Hired’s Job-a-matic, a website which helps you to make money from your site through ready-made job boards.

Initially launched in January 2007, Job-a-matic might not be new to some of you out there. I’ve never written about Job Boards as a way to monetize a blog or website before and I’ll thought it’ll be interesting to examine their potential in general.

Part of the reason why I decided to focus on Job-a-matic was because they offered Feedburner flare integration. Many Dosh Dosh readers are bloggers and Feedburner users as well, so I thought this would be particularly relevant.

How does Job-a-matic Work?

It basically allows you to monetize your site’s audience by selling job listings on your own customized job board to employers who are looking for talents in a specific field.

According to Job-a-matic, putting up a job board on your site adds value to your readers because these targeted listings provides an additional service/feature that is directly beneficial for them.

While your readers will likely tolerate advertising, they’ll view targeted job listings as a valuable addition to your site. And revenue from job listings can quickly outpace that from standard CPC advertising programs as you build your base of listings customers.

How do I Make Money with Job-a-matic?

There are basically two ways you can monetize your site through Job-a-matic:

• Click-based revenue from paid job listings from Simply Hired’s database. You’ll earn 30% and they’ll keep 70%. It’s not clear whether if this is on a pay-per-click basis or you’ll earn only when the applicant you referred is hired by the employer.




• Sell listings on your own job board. You can set your own price per posting as well as the length of the posting period (E.G. $20 for a period of 30 days).

Job-a-matic is owned by Simply Hired, a vertical search engine which has a large online database of over five million jobs.

These job listings can be easily displayed below the listings that you’ve sold directly on your job board and allows your visitors to access more relevant jobs through your site.

The additional benefit of this is that you’ll also stand to make money by promoting the other paid job listings from Simply Hired’s database.

More information on why this is beneficial for you:

Simply Hired’s paid job listings will appear beneath those that you sell yourself. This feature ensures that the jobs section of your site is always full of listings that can earn you money, even if you don’t have time to sell as many listings as you’d like.

And your visitors always find interesting choices when visiting your jobs section, which keeps them coming back. Which makes it easier for you to sell listings in the future.

Creating A Job Board with Job-a-matic

I’ve signed up for the Job-a-matic and tried creating a job board for Dosh Dosh. The three step process was fairly straightforward and only took a few minutes.

I had the option of setting it on my own domain but I’ve used the default Job-a-matic domain so you can get a rough idea of how the job board looks. All of the current job listings on it come from Simply Hired’s database.

A look at Job-a-matic’s Features

Most of the functionalities available in Job-a-matic can be found in almost all of the other job board providers on the market.

• Custom header or footer for the Job Postings, Job Details and FAQ pages




• Multiple color themes from brown to green. Very simple and basic color schemes. Functional but not extraordinary.




• Use your own domain name through domain mapping. For example, this allows me to use jobs.doshdosh.com instead of the default jobs.jobamatic.com.




• Restrict job posts to certain regions in the U.S.A. For example, for New York you can limit jobs to regions like Long Island, Hudson Valley or the Metropolitan Area.




• Create custom categories which your jobs will fall under. This determines what types of listings you will get from employers.




• Determine if paid job listings or ‘back-fill jobs’ should show up on your job board or not. You can also choose to display a specific number of jobs to show.




• Ability to create dynamic widgets to display on your website’s side bar. Needs some tweaking before they can fit perfectly with your site theme. The default widgets are decent but don’t look very impressive.




• Promotional Banners and Links. There are currently only five types of promo banners available and I’ll really like to see more creativity and options in the near future.




• Feedburner Tools. You’ll be able to advertise your jobs in each feed entry using a Job-a-matic Feedflare.

Other Job Boards and Monetization Potential

The concept of site monetization through job boards isn’t exactly ground-breaking. Other similar companies like JobThread and JobCoin also offer webmasters an easy way to monetize their sites through the inclusion of sponsored job listings.

What stands out is Job-a-matic’s promotional strategy. Unlike other job board services, Simply Hired seems to have specifically targeted blogs through partnerships with Six Apart’s Typepad as well as Feedburner, which has a sizeable market of ready users.

An requirement for monetary success when using job boards is your niche and the size of your audience. If your site is about software programming and commands a very large readership, it won’t be hard to be imagine employers paying for job ads on your site.

Consequently, smaller blogs won’t do well with job boards, even though they might make a very small amount of money through occasional user clicks on other paid listings.

Then again, why would visitors use the job board on your website when they can use a dedicated job search engine like Indeed.com?

Are Collaborative Job Boards the way to go?

A few months ago in January, Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington wrote about Job-a-matic and job-boards in general, offering some insight into site monetization and the Job Board Bubble:

Tools to easily create a job board are great for bloggers who don’t want to spend a couple of thousand dollars to build it themselves. But it will only exacerbate the problem we already have – too many niche job boards all over the place.

Instead, I’d like to see a single job board for tech bloggers, one that we can all sell into, and share the revenues pro-rata. There’s no reason why TechCrunch, VentureBeat, GigaOm, Guy Kawasaki and the others should all have their data in separate silos, aggregated only at the SimplyHired or Edgeio level along with other less interesting listings from all over the planet.

Problogger, a giant in the professional blogging niche has one or two new listings almost everyday on its jobboard. Part of it has to do with Problogger’s overall popularity and part of it has to do with its tight niche focus (Part-time/Staff blogging jobs).

Unlike Arrington, I don’t really think that ready-made job board systems like Job-a-matic lead to the problem of an over-proliferation in niche job boards.

Job boards derive their attractiveness from the size of the host site and the popularization of ready-made job boards just accentuates the importance of having a large site audience AND a strong niche focus.

I do however agree that collaborative job boards can be useful. I’m quite sure that Dosh Dosh doesn’t yet have the leverage to attract advertisers en masse and so I thought of working with other like-minded bloggers to set up some sort of a collective job board.

Integration and revenue share would definitely require some planning and communal agreement, which can be time-consuming and difficult to engineer. But it does remain an attractive idea.

What if an advertiser paid $50 a month and were able to have their job ad replicated across 20 medium-sized blogs in different specific fields?

I’m sure it’s a rather attractive proposition and one that may even more effective than only having their job listing posted on one single large blog.