How do you launch a new job board? With link building!

May 21, 2008

How do you launch a new job board or website? Once it is designed and built, you have a problem -- no links, no Google PR rank, and no visitors. Even with the best content, traffic does not happen magically. You have a chicken and egg problem -- no one will take you seriously, until other people take you seriously. And launching a job board is more complicated than most other ventures. Joel Spolsky explains why in How Hard Could it Be?:

Of course, some companies sell to businesses and to consumers, but this is a tricky balancing act. If you raise prices too fast, you will lose consumers. But if you continue to charge low prices, businesses may think your product is cheap--and you won't be extracting very much money out of precisely the customers who are most willing to pay.

To successfully sell to businesses and consumers, you need to realize that you're building two companies, not one. You need separate product lines. Cisco does this well, selling home versions of its business products through its Linksys division.

If you have no jobseekers you'll get no employers. If you have no employers you'll get no jobseekers. You are starting two companies at the same time and each depends on the other for it's own success.

The basic mechanisms for growing a website are probably e-mail marketing, search engine advertising and search engine optimization. Of these, search engine optimization is the most interesting and complex. Google makes the rules and its algorithms mandate that we spend as much time link building as we do creating content. As they say, links are the currency of the web.

Sometimes with a high priority launch it's best to get help, as we did when we launched DiversityJobs.com. We turned to Joel Cheesman (before he became cheezhead) and within six months we held the number one Google rank for the very competitive 'diversity jobs' keyword.

Fortunately, link building can be fun and interesting and I am often a do-it-yourselfer. Some of our newborn websites where we are doing our own include InternetRecruitingNews.com and HispanicJobs.info.

Here's a list of some of my favorite reading about link building: