Should a local newsletter start a job board?

A local job board is highly dependent on your area. For mine, I think it could actually work, and I've now built one on WilCo Guide.

Why would a local media brand run jobs at all?

Because you have attention on both sides. We usually think local businesses want customers. They also want employees. And some local people want jobs. How do they find each other? A local media brand can be that middle layer.

Readers like it too. Most people don't know the restaurant down the street is hiring a bartender.

When does a local job board make sense?

When people want to stop commuting. I'm about 40 minutes from a big city. So many jobs are in the city, and a lot of people don't want to drive there every day. A board of jobs within about 15 minutes of home solves a real problem.

Employers have a problem too. On Indeed, you either sit at the bottom of the list where nobody finds you, or you pay a lot to be at the top and pay again every time someone clicks. If you've never advertised a job as a business owner, it's harder than it looks.

If your town is the city, or there's no commute to escape, the pitch is weaker.

Can jobs carry a whole newsletter?

In a big city, maybe. I've studied a business newsletter in another large metro that's basically a local newsletter crossed with Morning Brew, written for six-figure professionals. The owner publicly shared about 10,000 subscribers and a click rate around 24%. As I understand it, he charges about $200 per job and runs five or six jobs an issue, so roughly $1,000 to $1,200 a week from one small section, plus more for the top spot. My guess is the whole thing makes $200,000 or more. Those are his numbers and my estimates, not my results.

"Job board, this is where the gold is."

If you have local, wealthy, smart professionals on your list, employers will pay real money to reach them. That works in a big city. It wouldn't work the same way in the suburbs.

How do you get the jobs?

Harder than you'd think. My WilCo Guide board scrapes 5 to 15 jobs a day. A few problems showed up fast:

• The big job boards block you. Indeed doesn't want you scraping at scale, so you end up finding individual job boards instead.
• The data comes through thin. Some listings arrive as one sentence with no pay. Why would I want that on my page?
• Hyper-local filtering shrinks the pool. If I search jobs in my suburb, I get a ton of Austin jobs. So I told the system only Williamson County jobs are allowed. That's the value, and it also limits what it finds.

One untested idea: a custom browser agent that acts like one person and grabs 10 or 20 jobs a day. Doing it at scale breaks. One person in one place might go unnoticed. I don't know yet how well that works.

I hadn't run a jobs section before. Nobody was paying for it, good local jobs disappear in a day or two, and finding them by hand was too much work for no money. Automation is what changed that for me.

How do you launch one without it looking empty?

A newsletter operator on my show shared his playbook:

1. Seed it with 5 to 10 listings before launch so it doesn't look dead.
2. Tag the employer on Instagram when you post their job.
3. Promote it in the newsletter. He got a paid listing the first day he promoted the board in his email.

In my newsletters, a small card sits right above the jobs section and talks to both sides at once: "Hiring? Post a job for free. Looking? Browse hundreds of openings across Williamson County." Jobs run as the last main section, just above the sign-off.

Katie Myers of Localish told me on my podcast that a Facebook post asking who's hiring got about 75 comments in under 24 hours. The demand is there.

How do you charge for it?

My plan now is to make posting free, because free is easy to promote, then cross-sell those employers into paid. Ways I've priced it over time:

Option	Price I've used or floated
Job placed in the newsletter	About $50 each, my starting plan
Job board listing, or board plus newsletter	About $100, or $200 with a newsletter spot
Paid business profile with jobs on the page	About $50 a month
Job partner paying per tracked application	About $20 per applicant

The per-application model is interesting because it turns a jobs section into automated revenue. Five jobs, a one- or two-sentence description each, a tracked link. Drag the listing into ChatGPT (or software), format it in your style, drop it in.

The rule that matters most: at around $50 a month, the board only works if employers can self-serve inside the system. If you have to do a bunch of manual work for each one, it's not worth it. Save hands-on work for bigger accounts.

Selling it as a setup service is another path. I've floated about $500 to $1,000 to build a job board for someone plus around $75 a month, mostly to learn whether there's demand. A job board is easy to build, but it isn't valuable unless you have a media company feeding it traffic.

Where does it sit in the product ladder?

At the bottom. My local ladder is low ticket (directory listings and job posts), middle ticket (newsletter ads) and high ticket (agency work). Low ticket is for the small business that wants to get involved without a big ad commitment.

Does it fit with a directory?

Yes. Jobs, events and a business directory all run on the same idea: local businesses submit, the site organizes it, the newsletter promotes it. I'm building my local platform around exactly those three. More in how to monetize a local directory.