Earn Referral Payments By Posting Relevant Job Listings On Your Website

One thing I am always on the lookout for are new and creative ways to earn more money on the Internet. Here at MakeUseOf, I’ve covered a number of resources you can use to generate income, such as selling eBooks, selling online computer support, and a whole list of things teens can do to earn money on the web. So, I was very excited to discover yet another tool you can use to generate another stream of income with your online endeavors.
This new approach requires very little work on your part, but it does require that you have a website or blog with a fair number of readers interested in a particular topic. You’ll find this opportunity at JobCoin, a very cool service that acts as a “middleman” for both businesses and companies looking for wide exposure for their job ads, and online publishers like you who have both web space and a readership interested in applying for those jobs.

While you could always integrate a job board on your own website, you’d also have to manage that job board. You’d have to manage the back-end database, obtain employers who are interested in posting their job ads on your site, and then handling communications between the employer and the applicant. Instead, JobCoin lets you simply embed their fully-functional job board on your website, and then employers pay you to let them post their job ads on your website. It’s one of the easiest ways for you to kill two birds with one stone – you offer your readers a valuable job hunting tool, and you earn money. It really is a win-win setup.

Signing Up For Your Customized Job Board

In this example, I’m going to use JobCoin to generate a custom website geared specifically for my readers at FreeWritingCenter. My readers there are typically online writers and bloggers who are interested in SEO tips and earning money online.
When you first visit JobCoin and click to sign up, you immediately start out by defining the look and feel of your job board widget. You can make it a larger full-page listing, or a sidebar menu listing. In my case I want to fit the job listings into the right menu, so I chose the vertical widget listing 4 jobs.

Then, it’s just a matter of filling out your personal details to create your account, and your default widget is pretty much set to go.

If you leave your widget as it is, it’ll show up on your site completely blank, with a link for employers to click on to post ads on your site. If you’d like to populate your widget with existing jobs from the JobCoin job network, the next step in the setup process lets you do that. Target the job listings toward what your readers are interested in by searching on the keywords that apply to your blog or website.

Select the jobs that apply to your site content, and then click to preview the job listings. On the preview page you have the option to include each (or all) job listings on your particular widget. When you are in your JobCoin account, you can click on the “Manage Jobs” tab to see all of the jobs you’ve allowed on your job board.

As you can see, you have full control over what ads are listed on your site. It isn’t like Google Adsense where the ads that show up are pretty random, and from a list that someone else puts together based on your content. You get to choose the specific job ads that really apply to the jobs that you believe your readers are looking for.

When you’re done configuring your widget you can just highlight the embed code and paste it in your site. In the case of Wordpress, if you’re pasting it into the sidebar, you can simply add a text/HTML widget and paste in the code.

Once you copy and past the embed code into your website, the job listings will show up immediately. Here is what the job ads look like in the sidebar of my blog.

If you don’t want to apply any free job ads to your site, then you can leave the selected jobs unselected and just wait for employers to purchase job ad space on your site. If you do this, your widget will start out looking like this.

When a potential employer clicks on your link, showing a desire to purchase job ad space on your website, they are whisked off to a personalized job posting form that applies exclusively to your website and your website alone.

Currently, the revenue sharing system that JobCoin offers is very fair considering that they do all of the hosting and management of all job ads. Once an employer purchases ad space  on your site, JobCoin processes the submitted and ad and payment and lists the ad on your site. You receive 70 percent of the revenue for offering up your web space, while JobCoin takes 30 percent for their efforts.

All-in-all, it’s a very fair and hands off approach where you can make some decent cash simply by offering your readers a useful job hunting resource.

The cool thing about this setup is that you’re completely in control of everything. You can alter the pricing (anything over a minimum of $99), as well as the period that the job posting will apply. If you have lower traffic, you should maintain appropriately low pricing, but if you have significant traffic – obviously employers will understand that they need to pay more for the wider audience. You can even offer occasional discounts to entice potential employers to post ads on your job board.

In your JobCoin account, when you click on the “Status” tab, you’ll see your earnings from month to month, so you can see how well your job board is doing and whether it’s generating any income for you.

Hosting a job board on your blog or website doesn’t have to be a complicated programming job. By taking advantage of JobCoin’s job board hosting offer, you can have a valuable job hunting resource for your readers, and you can also enjoy a tidy stream of income from all of the employers who post their ads on your board. It’s a perfect match and a great use of your web space.

Have you ever used JobCoin? Do you know of any other job board hosting services like it? Share your experiences and opinions in the comments section below.