Promote Your Job Board With Communities

Digital spaces such as subreddits, Facebook groups, Discord channels, and Slack communities can be helpful in building momentum for your job board in its early stages.

In this article, you’ll learn how to leverage existing communities to drive traffic and how starting your own community can help promote your job board.

Strategy #1: Join existing niche communities & add value

As a job board owner, you’re clearly passionate about your niche. You can leverage your knowledge by joining corresponding niche communities, engaging, sharing valuable insights, and connecting with potential users for your job board.

The best way to approach this is by giving, giving, giving, before asking for anything from the community members. We recommend starting out be providing free value, answering people’s questions, helping them generate ideas, and becoming a trusted voice in the group.

Over time, you can naturally direct these interactions towards your job board content and email list, driving targeted traffic to your job board.

How to drive traffic from existing communities

The idea with leveraging existing niche communities is to tap into a pre-existing pool of potential job seekers in your niche. And here are the exact steps to drive relevant drive traffic to your job board with this strategy.

1. Identify relevant niche communities

• Conduct research: Start by researching and identifying existing communities that closely align with your job board's niche. These could be Slack groups, Substack newsletters, Facebook groups, or Reddit communities. We’ll point you to some concrete tools later in the article.
• Evaluate engagement levels: Before joining a community, look at the quality of discussions and how active the group is. Choose communities with an engaged membership base where your contributions are actually seen by a number of users.
• Join and observe: Once you've identified potential communities, join them and observe conversations. Understand common pain points, and make notes on some content gaps for you to add value.

2. Participate and provide value

Don’t start by promoting you job board outright. Instead, focus on contributing valuable insights and your unique perspectives.

Actively contribute to discussions, offer helpful insights, and share valuable resources related to your niche. This positions you as an authority and allows you to build relationships with potential users of your job board. Fill those informational gaps you noticed from #1.

If you have nothing unique to share yourself, you can act as a curator. Share relevant articles, tools, or resources that you use to stay up to date in your niche. This could be industry news outlets, your favorite creators, or niche newsletters.

3. Introduce your job board

Once you have established yourself and gained trust within the community, look for opportunities to subtly introduce your job board. For example, if you notice members proactively asking for ways to find jobs in your niche or someone posting relevant roles from generic sources.

That’s your chance to organically promote your job board:

• Share roles with a link back to your job board.
• Lead them to a helpful blogpost you wrote about the job search in your niche.
• Offer to moderate a separate job search channel in the community.

And always keep your goal in mind: Driving relevant job seeker traffic to your job board.

Tool spotlight: How to find niche communities

Finding a niche community that corresponds with your job board’s niche can be tricky. Here are some tools that can help you find those communities, forums or channels to join and engage in:

• Find A Forum lists old-school discussion forums by niche. What stands out is that a lot of the forums have been maintained for years, if not decades and have a highly engaged audience. Plus, traditional forums are an untapped form of community in the job board scene.
• DiscordMe helps you discover discord channels by category. This might not be a platform for every niche, but if your job board revolves around the gaming industry, investing/finance or programming, this directory is for you.
• The Hive Index provides curated lists of top online communities. While you can filter by topic, you can also chose communities based on the platform they are hosted on or the features they provide.

Bonus tip: Use Google Search strategically to find forums, discussion boards, and communities.

Insert your job board’s niche and test these queries:

• [niche] + inurl:”/forums/”
• [niche] + “discussion board”
• [niche] + inurl:”showtopic.php”

Another way to find a community is searching for your niche directly on the community platform that host those groups, such as Facebook, Slack, Skool, Circle, Discord, Mighty Networks, Patreon, and Substack.

Strategy #2: Create your own community around your job board niche

In addition to joining existing communities, another way to drive job seeker & employer traffic to your job board is building an active community around your niche. Building a community is a long-term game, but can bring many benefits, including:

1. Increase relevant organic traffic: Building a community can lead to organic growth of your job board. As the community grows, so does your pipeline of organic traffic from potential job applicants. This is crucial because the more specific your traffic, the more valuable your site becomes to job seekers and employers in your niche.
2. Attract employers: Growing the organic traffic to your job board in turn, will attract more employers to your site, creating a positive cycle of expansion. Data from your community can also be valuable to leverage in discussions with employers. You can show them that your community and therefore your job board is attracting the right kind of visitors—the ones they want to hire.
3. Capture passive job seekers: In recruitment, candidates are often categorized as active (currently job hunting) or passive (open to opportunities but not actively searching). While generic job boards only attract active candidates, your job board + community can help capture passive job seekers as well. By offering resources for career development and support, your job board can become a regular online destination for passive job seekers. And employers will highly value access to those candidates.

How to build a community around your job board niche

Now that you understand the benefits, let’s dive into the best tips to help you build a thriving community for your niche job board to drive traffic & create a lucrative business.

1. Define the community goal

Communities usually have two distinct goals:

1. Your goal: Understand exactly what you, as a job board owner, want to achieve with this community. Likely, it will be part of your organic traffic funnel to your job board. But a community can also help you create content ideas for your job board’s social media and blog, or help establish yourself as an authority in your niche for attracting employers.
2. Member value: Is your community a place to share job-seeking tips, receive feedback, or learn about industry trends? Consider what exact value proposition your community offers to members. Setting a shared outcome that your community will help members achieve allows you to keep your group active and oriented.

Tool tip: Reddit audience research with GummySearch

Reddit can be a treasure trove of content ideas. Since a lot of users are anonymous, pain points are shared more openly: a great opportunity to brainstorm solutions your community can provide for those pain points in your niche.

2. Set up, organize, and onboard

Choose a platform for your community and make the member experience seamless, from your job board to the group.

Consistent with the member value you defined during the previous step, you want to plan out different channels/rooms/threads for separate topics. For example, if your value is helping members land jobs in your niche, your channels could be divided into job/industry insights, career advancement resources, and networking.

The onboarding process should be as easy and quick as possible, while still providing some general community guidelines and introductions to your content. A welcome email sequence spread out throughout a few days can be wonderful way to facilitate new member onboarding.

3. Launch, promote, and track

Now comes the crux of running a successful community: getting new members to join, retaining existing members and continually improving your space.

How do you get your first members? A few ideas:

• Promote your launch across your social media platforms. Make access more exclusive by contacting a list of ideal customers via direct messages, giving them first access.
• Send out an email to your existing job seeker audience, introducing them to your community, the benefits, and inviting them personally to join.
• Place a banner ad or note on your job board to lead all visitors to your group. This might be especially attractive to those passive job seekers, wanting to stay in the loop until their active search begins.

FAQ: What is an online community

An online community is a group of people connected via a digital platform around a shared topic/goal/value.

Those virtual groups might be hosted by business owners, creators or even larger companies. They are usually focused around shared interests, common goals, collective experiences, or local initiatives.

They can be hosted on public platforms, like social media, or be private with exclusive access by payment or credentials.