Niche communities are becoming increasingly popular. It's a way to connect people with a shared interest but is also emerging as a new marketing strategy. Whether your community is broad, for example a Facebook group around marketing, or hyper-specialized, such as a Slack community for ABM senior sales professionals: a job board can be a powerful way to tap into its value.
1. Create an automated revenue stream
Built around a specific interest, profession, or topic, niche communities attract individuals who share a common interest, making them highly targeted. And your expert members are what makes your niche community the ideal environment for a successful job board.
A niche job board corresponding to your community’s shared interest not only provides value to your members but also opens up new revenue streams for you.
And this is how you can earn revenue with a job board:
a) Get paid by employers for job listings
Having a pool of highly qualified and niche-specific people in your community, you are in a unique position to negotiate access to those professionals. Employers will pay to get their jobs in front of a specialized audience matching the skills they are looking for.
Targeting a small, specific audience means higher quality applicants and less time to filter out irrelevant applications. To make a job listing even more attractive, you can distribute your job listings on other channels, such as your newsletter.
b) Sell candidate access
Besides job postings, you can sell access to candidate profiles through a resume database. This allows employers to proactively find and reach out to potential candidates that match their criteria. Your members will enjoy suitable job offers to grow in their career.
c) Offer upsells
For an additional fee, you can offer employers featured listings for more exposure to your community. Here are some ideas for upsells you can offer to employers:
- priority placement at the top of your job board
- shoutout on your community’s socials, newsletter or slack channel
- short video Q&A about the role
- community founder features the job on their socials
- increased duration of the job listing
- support with sourcing candidates, such as first resume screening or personal recommendations
- actively advertising the job on your website
If you’re looking for a job board provider that is completely self-serve and low maintenance, check out Niceboard for your niche community. It’s as easy as configuring your community's branding, connecting your stripe account, and inviting employers to post. Sit back and watch revenue roll in with minimal effort.
Niceboard has given me a scalable, no-code way to run a job board. I've done minimal tech work, and the job board has generated six figures of revenue.
- Dave Gerhardt, Exit Five
2. Add value to your community
Whether your members are looking for a new role in your niche or want to hire talent, a job board provides a valuable service to your community members. Hence, making your community even more desirable.
For those of your members looking to take the next step in their career, your job board is a prime source of job opportunities relevant to their interests or skills.
No more sifting through 100s of jobs on generic job sites such as LinkedIn or Indeed. The roles on your niche job board align with your members’ expertise, filtering out irrelevant roles, and improving their job search experience.
Your community might also have access to exclusive listings not found elsewhere. Employers who value specialized skills may choose to post only on niche platforms, increasing your members’ chances of finding unique and exciting roles.
Curious to see how other communities have integrated a job board? Here are a few successful examples:
- Jobs by ROSTR is a job board for a community of music industry professionals. What started out as a directory has now grown into a full-fledged community helping their members build a network and a career.
- The writer's community Peak Freelance helps copywriters scale their own business. The job board listing freelance gigs is a cornerstone of the community and adds immense value to the membership.
- Bitcoiner Jobs is one of main offerings by the Bitcoin community Bitlist; they also provide a service marketplace and an event directory to their community.
For your members that are employers, the job board offers a pool of potential candidates who are already interested and engaged in the niche. This saves them time and effort in sourcing great candidates.
A job board can be the central part of your community: one of the main reasons people come to professional communities is to hire and get hired.
3. Drive organic traffic and attract new members
A niche job board will position your community as a trusted resource and authority in your niche, attracting more prospective members. It can be a powerful marketing tool that helps you build relationships with future customers (=members). Once they know, like, and trust your community for your job board, they will be much more likely to convert.
As your job board’s organic traffic grows, so does your pipeline of membership prospects. To make this connection, always include a link to your community’s website from your board.
And consider these three tips to improve your job board’s SEO to optimize for organic traffic:
- Use keywords in your page and job listing titles: matching the keywords used on your site with the phrases that job seekers might search for when looking for positions will increase your chances of ranking on Google.
- Connect your listings with Google for Jobs: the jobs posted on your board will get a boost in visibility for Google searches.
- Publish content around your niche: besides including keywords on your job listings, you also want to create content around common search terms.
An example: If you’re running a cybersecurity sales job board, the job seekers you want to attract might search for “land first job in cybersecurity sales”. Your blogpost with the title “How to find your first job in your cybersecurity sales career” will show up for this search, leading the job seeker to your job board (blog).
A job board can be a powerful tool for monetizing your niche community. It will help unlock a new revenue stream, add value to your community, attract new members, and drive organic traffic. So what are you waiting for? Launch a job board for your niche community today.