1. Offer unique value

Choose a niche that is poorly served that you can dominate very quickly.  Bells and whistles do not qualify on their own unless you are planning to spend tens of millions of dollars at a very minimum. 

2.  The right domain

Does it contain your keywords? Is it short, easy to pronounce, spell and remember? The right domain puts the wind at your back where you want it.

3.  Create more value than you capture

Some say the domain name isn't important...  just look at Google with its gibberish name! In my experience, the name is important. So, if you are starting a job board, I think this list of job board domain types will be useful for you. 

These are all the prefixes, postfixes and conjunctions I came across in my research for the top 100 niche boards report. The '_' in this list represents the name of the niche or profession as in "marketing" or "marketers".

Years ago, I got very excited about networking and we filed for a patent that described a 'brilliant' way of integrating social networking into a job board. But when we started implementing the idea that I had, it went nowhere and I became disillusioned.  Recently new software platforms have proven that the networking idea was not at fault, rather it was our implementation that was to blame. 

As little as six months ago I thought that social networking was a bubble about to pop...  now I think it is more like an earthquake for the recruiting world.  One of the websites that convinced me is Chris Russell's Jobboarders.com.

And yet, it will still take years for a lot of really viable niche sites to emerge.   Yes, these sites can grow very quickly, however, a social networking site needs much higher traffic than a job board does to become a valuable recruiting tool.

There was a time, believe it or not, when we thought LatPro might raise $10 million in venture capital and head for an IPO shortly thereafter, lol. Today, I don't envy the public companies and am glad we didn't raise the money.  Here is a list of those less fortunate job board companies who call themselves public corporations.

Job board experts agree that running a job board is getting more difficult as time goes by -- but launching a board is easier than ever. In a couple of hours, without even pulling out your credit card you can create a reasonably functional and good-looking website with today's social networking tools or blog software.

How times have changed... To start LatPro in 1997, I learned to program in Visual Basic and wrote all the code myself for a little more than two years. That code was all replaced in 2000 and today comprises 162,000 lines of java code, 310,000 lines of PHP code and 43,000 lines of html. Much of it will get replaced again. At LatPro, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on our software and infrastructure.

I love the job board business but could never have imagined the roller coaster ride that it is... sometimes talking to other job board people is just good therapy, because many of these things or some variation on them will happen to everyone sooner or later. This morning, I started this list in frustration after a database server crash.

Competition

Inspired by Sahar's how to ruin your health, here's my advice for how to fail in business on the Internet:

10. Write long e-mails, click more, faster. Most people read carefully and repetitive strain injuries do not happen to entrepreneurs.

9. Think about nothing but your business as long as you are awake. Do that 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, year in and year out. It’s good for your health and relationships too!

8. Stay highly focused. Avoid networking and do not attend events outside your niche. You can get more done at your desk than anywhere else.

The free classifieds and free job boards have fascinated me for years, perhaps because back when I was starting LatPro, the hottest thing around was headhunter.net. It was growing like wildfire and was perfectly free. Times have changed a lot since then and there is a whole new crop of free job boards -- here's the list:

A job widget is a tool used by a job board to display its jobs or search box on other web sites. It's basically a banner, button or skyscraper with customized content which is of course job ads. But if a picture is worth a thousand words, look to the right for the LatPro widget and below for a really good example of a jobs widget from jobtonic.com. For more about them have a look at Born's widget reviews. Here's our job widgets list: