Lesson 6: Getting Visitors

So you've made your job board reflects your brand and you're ready to take payments. With the site ready, how do you drive traffic to it? We have some tips on how you can market your site and start driving traffic.

MailChimp

Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your job board on a regular basis. JobBoard.io makes it easy for site visitors to join your mailing list with integration with MailChimp.

Generally, you’ll want to offer some sort of weekly newsletter of jobs and promote it to your visitors. JobBoard.io includes smart lightboxes that only appear when appropriate until the visitor has gone at least two pages deep. This means they’ve actually had the opportunity to digest your site’s content and are interested in more.

If you've never used MailChimp, you can learn more about the service at their site. If you have a MailChimp account already, follow the steps below to begin driving sign-ups through your job board.

1. Login to your MailChimp Account.
2. Click our Profile Name, then choose Account Settings.
3. Open the Extras menu, and choose API keys.
4. Copy one of your existing keys, or get a new one by clicking the Create A Key button. If you're stuck, MailChimp has more information on API keys here.
5. Back in your JobBoard.io Admin panel, click Site Config and choose the Integrations tab.
6. Scroll down to the MailChimp integration, and paste your API key in the Mailchimp API Key field.
7. Select the Mailchimp List you'd like to add subscribers to.
8. To enable the pop-up, check the Activate Email Sign Up Form box. Add text to the pop-up with the Email Sign Up Form Header and Text boxes.
9. Add a checkbox for your newsletter to the Job Apply form with the Prompt Job Applicants to join this email list box.
10. Scroll down and Save.

Backfill

If you are just getting started, and don’t have a lot of inventory, you may not be able to meet the needs of all job seekers. If job seekers don't find relevant jobs on your site, they aren't likely to return. You can fill in the gaps by feeding in jobs from another source. This is easy to do with our tight integration with ZipRecruiter.

1. Click Job Settings in your JobBoard.io admin sidebar, and choose Backfill.
2. Click Create New Backfill.
3. Select ZipRecruiter from the Backfill Method Options.
4. Complete the form to match your search criteria and location.

• API Key: To obtain an API key, e-mail your ZipRecruiter sales representative or [email protected].
• Status: Set to Active to Enable this Backfill. Only one Backfill can be active at a time.
• Default Search: Enter terms to use by default. If you have a niche board, this will help ensure your users see relevant jobs in the Backfill on your homepage. Check the Append default search box to add this value to all subsequent searches.
• Location: Filter Backfill jobs by a specific location.
• Radius: How far from the location should the search radius extend?
• Enable for Job Alerts: If you're using JobBoard.io powered alerts, you can use this option to add Backfill jobs to your existing alerts.

See our tutorial on adding backfill here.

Twitter

Twitter has been immensely valuable in driving both traffic and brand recognition to niche job boards. The first thing you should do after buying your domain and setting up your site is to get a Twitter account for your brand.

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:

• The main RSS feed of actual purchased jobs on our site. You'll find an RSS feed for your site under Job Settings -> Syndication.
• 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 hashtags 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.

Candidate Profiles

Encourage applicants to create a profile on your website and to subscribe to your job alerts. Both of these will encourage applicants to return to your website when they are searching for their next job opportunity.

Employer Profiles

Encourage employers to create a profile on your website. They will be listed in your employer directory, helping to add content to your new job board.