Trade specific or local websites have much to offer advertisers. The audiences for this type of website are often highly targeted, and businesses that seek the same type of audience can make their advertising campaigns more effective by advertising on the site.

For example, the manufacturer of wholesale cosmetics products may choose to advertise on a trade website dedicated to stylists and salon owners, or a tool manufacturer may elect to run ads on a trade website for carpenters and contractors. You may not know this, but the presence of a high quality job board makes online trade publications even more valuable to advertisers. Job boards not only assist with audience development by attracting new traffic, they bring back repeat visitors who are actively looking for new work or passively checking out the jobs in their trade. The same can be said for local news sites, where job boards bring back active and passive job seekers within specific communities. Attract more quality traffic, sell more ads.

Job Boards as Part of Your Site’s Advertising Strategy

If you’re not extolling your website’s job board as part of your pitch to advertisers, you should be. The information you learn from the people who visit your website and use your job board is extremely valuable. If you can tell an advertiser that your job board brought in X number of applicants for jobs in a particular industry, and that these applicants work in a field with an average annual salary of $Y, you have given that potential advertiser valuable information that can make the difference in signing that advertising contract. Ads purchased through programs like Google AdWords may or may not reach their target audience, but if an advertiser’s target audience consists of people like the ones who visit your website, the advertiser can purchase ads on your site and be more confident the ads will be seen by exactly the audience he/ she wants.

Selling Advertising on Your Site

There’s no real reason not to use ad programs like Google AdSense, but most websites cannot survive on CPM advertising revenue alone. Generally, revenue development depends on multiple revenue streams, like sponsored content, job board listings, and premium ads you sell directly to businesses. To attract great advertisers, your site must offer them something beyond a large number of page views. The more you can tell advertisers about your website’s audience, the more reason you give them to want to advertise there. Use your website analytics and analytics that come with top job board packages to show advertisers exactly who they will reach when they buy ads on your site. Showing proof that advertisers will reach their desired audience on your site will provide the information that will help you sell more ads.

Sweetening the Deal with Your Job Boards

If your website has a custom job board, there is another thing you can do to sweeten the deal for advertisers. As part of an advertising package on your site, allow them a certain number of discounted job listings on your job board. Employers are becoming more wary of huge job aggregators like Craigslist and Monster due to huge numbers of under-qualified or unqualified applicants that come through those sites. But listing jobs on niche job boards is much more targeted and brings in higher quality applicants while reducing or eliminated applications by those who are flatly unqualified. A certain number of discounted job listings on your job board may be exactly the little extra that convinces a company to advertise on your site.

Audience and revenue development require judicious use of site analytics in addition to the great content that consistently draws healthy web traffic. Adding a custom job board from providers like RealMatch, a provider of recruitment advertising for trade publishers, not only develops a promising new revenue stream, but also brings you additional site analytics that you can use to make the best possible case to potential advertisers. RealMatch encourages you to check out our terrific opportunities for adding a custom job board to your trade or local website.

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