Thread: Are You Making Money?

Are You Making Money?

I would be interested to hear from other JobRoller admins whether your site is making money. Perhaps your feedback would help the entire community. Here is my situation:

1. Started with an email distribution list of jobs for Northern Colorado (including Boulder) in December, 2010. Had to personally source all the employers and sift through their career sites each week to extract the new jobs and build a weekly list. Emailed the results to a list of job seekers that peaked at 3,800. Original idea was to "prime the pump" to grow the email list and that employers would then be willing to pay to be included to reach that channel. Bottomline: employers wouldn't pay. Went to a "job seekers pay" model in October, 2010 at $15/mo. They hated it. Less than 1% converted.

2. Launched a new job seeker subscription site in June, 2011 using Wordpress/S2MemberPro and a MySQL/PHP database. Continued to research jobs and listed the last 60 days worth in the db. Access was $15/mo and 6,000+ jobs were listed. Never had more than 40 subscribers.

3. Last chance, bought Job Roller and changed the revenue model and launched on March 1, 2013. Access to the database of researched jobs is now free to registered job seekers. We provide a link to the db on the dashboard. Also put up a db of the employer database we have built. 7,000 jobs and 2,700 employers are listed. Now covering entire State of Colorado.

4. Essentially have a two-tier system. Employer-listed jobs (thru Job Roller) are listed and searchable on the home page. Our proprietary research is available through the dashboard. Since you can't import jobs to Job Roller we had no choice.

5. We offer 3 free jobs to employers as a trial within their first 30 days. $99 per job after that. Also have job packs of 5, 10, 20 and 50 jobs with discounts to 50%.

6. We have contacted over 2,700 employers via email or LinkedIn about the site and the trial offer.

7. Since launch, we have had 14,000+ visits by 9,200 visitors generating 52,000 page views. We have 1,000+ registered users, 150 employer listed jobs and 225 resumes listed.

8. We continue to add 1,000+ jobs each week to our proprietary database through the painful process of personally sifting through 1,000+ employer sites. But this is our "bait" to draw job seeker traffic.

9. We promote the site through a weekly email to our list of 4,000+ job seekers. We automatically add new registered users to our list, so it is growing some.

10. We post daily on our Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn Group (600 members) and LinkedIn Personal (1200+ connections) channels. We post weekly when we add all the new jobs to 50 LinkedIn alumni, networking, tech and job-related groups under the "Jobs" tab. Combined membership of those groups is 180,000.

11. Net results after 3 months of launch. Sold two featured listings for $49 each. Sold one 5 Job Pack for $430. Have 35 subscribers to our paid weekly Job Report email for Northern Colorado for $500/mo in revenues.

12. Time invested to build, maintain and market the system plus do the proprietary research is 60+ hours per week. Revenues less than $600/mo.

13. Main competitive pressures - LinkedIn, Craigslist, employer career sites.

14. Main issues - no one wants to pay for anything. This includes well-known employers like Intel, HP and Oracle.

15. Our market is "All of the Good Jobs in Colorado". Think LinkedIn type jobs. $20+/hr. Probably require at least one degree. All sectors including tech, healthcare, education, research, government, manufacturing, etc.

That's my story and I would like to hear yours. If you have been successful, I would like to know what worked. I can't seem to get this one to even a minimal breakeven of $2500 per month. This is particularly frustrating given the reported revenues of sites like www.flexjobs.com that have publicly claimed 25,000+ paying subscribers or $300K/mo in revenues.