Criminy Jicket
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- Apr 15, 2024
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Does anybody here have any experience running a successful job board?
For over a year, I've been running a niche job board. I don't want to reveal too many specifics besides that it's targeted at expats who want to find a job in a specific country I'm targeting. This country is a popular tourist destination that has millions of visitors every year.
Despite working on my job board nearly daily for over a year, I still haven't made a single cent from it. In fact, I'm down thousands of dollars from monthly google ads, MailCheat(Chimp) subscription fee, domain/hosting, wordpress theme, etc.
My site is being visited and used by people (my google analytics is currently showing 50k views per month and 3.9k visitors per month). And I have over 1000 email subscribers who I send weekly job updates to.
But at the same time, I haven't had a single paying customer in my year+ of operation. 99% of the jobs on my site have been jobs I've personally scoured the net for and uploaded myself. And this is where I spend the bulk of my time -- searching for and uploading appropriate jobs to my site.
This was only meant to be a temporary plan until employers organically found my site and started to post their jobs. But this hasn't happened.
I've only had around 10 employers take advantage of a free job listing (their first listing is free. They pay after that). And nothing beyond that.
Oh and as far as marketing/gaining traction, here's some of the things I've been doing:
So any advice on this? What am I missing? Or is it time to cut my losses and move on??
For over a year, I've been running a niche job board. I don't want to reveal too many specifics besides that it's targeted at expats who want to find a job in a specific country I'm targeting. This country is a popular tourist destination that has millions of visitors every year.
Despite working on my job board nearly daily for over a year, I still haven't made a single cent from it. In fact, I'm down thousands of dollars from monthly google ads, MailCheat(Chimp) subscription fee, domain/hosting, wordpress theme, etc.
My site is being visited and used by people (my google analytics is currently showing 50k views per month and 3.9k visitors per month). And I have over 1000 email subscribers who I send weekly job updates to.
But at the same time, I haven't had a single paying customer in my year+ of operation. 99% of the jobs on my site have been jobs I've personally scoured the net for and uploaded myself. And this is where I spend the bulk of my time -- searching for and uploading appropriate jobs to my site.
This was only meant to be a temporary plan until employers organically found my site and started to post their jobs. But this hasn't happened.
I've only had around 10 employers take advantage of a free job listing (their first listing is free. They pay after that). And nothing beyond that.
Oh and as far as marketing/gaining traction, here's some of the things I've been doing:
- Google ads (I run small monthly campaigns. I only spend around $50 a month for this.)
- Weekly email updates to my subscribers
- I tried posting in relevant facebook groups but all my messages were marked as spam and my facebook account got shut down.
- I briefly tried reddit ads and facebook ads but I stopped both of these because I didn't see much traction (at least compared to google ads)
- Blogging (I have 15 unique handwritten articles on my site to hopefully draw people in to my site. I also have affiliate links at the end of each blog post but haven't got a single sale).
- Adsense/other ad platforms. I tried to sign up for ad platforms and they all rejected me. Adsense rejected me too. And now I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to run adsense and google ads simultaneously.
So any advice on this? What am I missing? Or is it time to cut my losses and move on??
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