The following article was created by the manager of alicante.ipsojobs.com among other cities, who has been kind enough to send us his manual on how to promote ipsojobs in a city. We would like to thank that manager both for his detailed post and his great work as an administrator and dynamizer of ipsojobs.com.
The article:
Tips for promoting IPSOJOBS
Promoting a website like ipsojobs, especially when starting from scratch, is always difficult and so one must have plenty of patience and perseverance.
What comes first? The chicken or the egg?
It is clear that if employers enter in an ipsojobs city and see that it is empty, it is very probable that they won’t post their offer and they may never return again. The same thing occurs with job seekers, and therefore we must post offers ourselves, at least to begin with. In this way, employers will trust more in ipsojobs and job seekers will have offers to peruse.
Posting the offers
We can obtain the offers from many places (but be careful, they must be public offers). We can look for offers in other job banks, then find the email address, telephone and fax numbers of the human resources department and then we’ll have all the information we need to publish the offer in ipsojobs. In some job banks they already supply all this information and so it is not necessary to go looking in the employer’s website.
Other interesting places for obtaining offers are university job notice boards (there’s usually a department dedicated to them), the web pages of official colleges (architecture, information technology, pharmacy…), offers published in newspapers, or the web pages of big companies (they usually have a ‘work for us’ section).
In this manner we will be able to fill our ipsojobs city with offers. It is much more effective to post 3 or 4 offers every day than it is to post 20 in one go and then forget about it. Even if there are few offers, if visitors find something new each time they visit the site, they will return. What’s more, you shouldn’t forget that offers expire after 10 days, so if you go on adding little by little, the page will never be left empty.
And one thing to be aware of with the offers: to begin with you should have offers that generate interest. Experience has taught me that the most-read offers, in order, are: administrative, secretarial, sales, unqualified work, information technology… In other words, there are many administrative workers, secretaries and sales people who are searching for work.
Now we have some offers up, it is time to get in contact with companies (if we have friendly companies, even better) and employment agencies so that they start to post offers in ipsojobs, but without spamming. Speak to them about the possibilities that ipsojobs offers and about the public who will see their posts (later we will talk more about this, but it sells very well to tell them that the offers are seen by students and recently qualified people), but always in a personalized way.
Obtaining visits
It is clear that if a business posts an offer and receives no visits (remember it is public information), that business will not post any more offers. Therefore, once we have offers on the page it is the time to promote our city. You will soon realize that there are many people searching for employment on the internet, so it is not especially difficult to obtain first visits.
Remember that simply by having offers on the page - thanks to the agreements achieved by the ipsojobs team (trovit, buscocanguro) - these offers are then made visible in various websites, thus generating first visits.
When promoting our city, we should be aware that we are competing with huge internet employment agencies that spend a lot of money on publicity. For this reason, we should make known those characteristics of ipsojobs that differentiate it from the rest: its urgency (nobody is going to find out-of-date offers), the fact that it is free to both businesses and job seekers, the lack of a need for registration (we all know how long it takes to fill out forms with your personal information, experience, studies etc in other web pages), and the fact that you can use your regular CV, without having to modify it to fit the site…
The first step to obtaining visits would be to mention the page to friends and family members. They will be able to provide the first visits and might recommend the page to other friends. What’s more, you more than anyone, know their working status: if they are looking for work, what type of work they are looking for… You can use the option ‘Send to a friend’ to advise them of new offers that may interest them.
I think that the majority of those responsible for managing the cities, like me, work in IT, and many probably have blogs, personal web pages or web pages that we have created. We could put a link to our city, or to the main site, or, even better, add the UWA widget that has just been created, so that all our visitors can see the latest offers available.
Another way to gain visits is by using the job boards of universities or training colleges where they permit you to post adverts. In these job boards you could publish the latest job offers (without the contact information), with a link to the original offer where people could then obtain the contact information in case the offer is of interest. Aside from this, the same can be done in the pages of classified ads, always respecting the rules of each site. It is far more efficient to place a job offer with a link to the original offer in each of these sites than it is to put something like “Find work at xxx.ipsojobs.com”, although this can be done from time to time too.
And, finally, the classic “tricks”: put a link to ipsojobs at the bottom of your emails, or in forums, talk about the site in the forums you usually visit, add it to del.icio.us, register it in specialized directories…
Conclusion
We are all in agreement that promoting ipsojobs is hard and requires a good deal of effort, but you have to think that little by little, with the help of everyone, the site will grow more and more self-sufficient, and the amount of work you have to put in will decrease. And why not think that one day ipsojobs will become a website of worldwide reference, with hundreds of thousands of visits each day (remember that the site is in 6 languages and has cities all over the world) and a great capacity for generating income? And all this by investing nothing more than your effort; it’s worth the trouble to try it.
