{"id":358,"date":"2011-07-01T11:50:08","date_gmt":"2011-07-01T18:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/?p=358"},"modified":"2011-07-17T16:45:35","modified_gmt":"2011-07-17T23:45:35","slug":"how-do-i-pick-a-job-search-niche-use-bls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/2011\/07\/how-do-i-pick-a-job-search-niche-use-bls\/","title":{"rendered":"How do I pick a job search niche? Use BLS."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most common pre-sales questions I receive for the <a href=\"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/300K-job-search-in-a-box.php\">300K Page Job Search In-a-Box<\/a> is:\u00a0 How do I pick a job search niche? (That question&#8217;s followed with: how do I pick a domain name?)<\/p>\n<p>Like with any site, picking a niche requires research.\u00a0 In the case of job search, your research should focus on employment data.\u00a0 And, what better source for that than the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)?<\/p>\n<p>A couple years ago, BLS published their projections of employment by major industry sector.\u00a0 Check it here: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bls.gov\/news.release\/ecopro.t02.htm\">http:\/\/www.bls.gov\/news.release\/ecopro.t02.htm<\/a><\/p>\n<p>For each industry\/vertical, BLS captured the employment numbers for 1998, 2008, and 2018; and then the average annual growth rates between 1998-2008 and 2008-2018.\u00a0 We want to focus on the 2008 and 2018 numbers.\u00a0 In honing in on an attractive vertical, there are 2 things to look for:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Large employment value<\/strong> &#8211; A large employment base means there&#8217;s a large target market for our job search site.\u00a0 I&#8217;d say anything greater than 10 million is a winner, which leaves us with:\n<ul>\n<li>Manufacturing<\/li>\n<li>Retail<\/li>\n<li>Professional services<\/li>\n<li>Healthcare \/ social assistance<\/li>\n<li>Leisure \/ hospitality<\/li>\n<li>State and local government<\/li>\n<li>Financial services <em>(this comes in close at 8.7MM employees)<!--more--><\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Growth rate <\/strong>&#8211; A positive growth rate means this vertical is a growing area.\u00a0 More and more people are looking to switch into it&#8211;and therefore will be searching for jobs in it.\u00a0 A growing area usually also indicates higher ad CPC rates (for both Indeed and AdSense).\u00a0\u00a0 This is because a growing industry is fueled by fast growing companies that are willing to pay more for the top talent and also have more cash to spend.\u00a0 I&#8217;d say anything above a 1.5% annual growth is fantastic, which include:\n<ul>\n<li>Construction<\/li>\n<li>Professional services<\/li>\n<li>Educational services<\/li>\n<li>Healthcare \/ social assistance<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Once you have a vertical picked out, you should drill down a bit further for your job niche.\u00a0 For instance, if you pick &#8220;professional services&#8221; as your vertical, which has both high employment size and growth rate, your actual niche may be something like &#8220;management consulting.&#8221;\u00a0 For your job categories, they can be &#8220;strategy consulting,&#8221; &#8220;marketing consulting,&#8221; &#8220;business process consulting,&#8221; &#8220;supply chain consulting,&#8221; &#8220;operations consulting,&#8221; &#8220;change management consulting,&#8221; &#8220;HR consulting,&#8221; etc.<\/p>\n<p>BLS also provides some additional tools to dissect and analyze employment data at a more granular level.\u00a0 These include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/data.bls.gov\/pdq\/querytool.jsp?survey=ce\">Employment Statistics Survey<\/a><\/strong> &#8211; This allows you to see employment data at a lower level than the verticals (in the 2018 projections).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/data.bls.gov\/pdq\/querytool.jsp?survey=jt\">Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey<\/a><\/strong> &#8211; By vertical, this allows you to see statistics for additional metrics, like job openings, new hires, quits, layoffs, and more.\u00a0 Looking at these values gives you a sense of the vertical&#8217;s <strong>turnover rate<\/strong>, which is another great indicator of the attractiveness of this area for a niche job search site.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>These 3 links should be enough to get your gears turning!<\/p>\n<p>Now, for the follow-up question: how do I choose a domain name?\u00a0 For a site like this that will be primarily driven by organic traffic, I always recommend choosing a domain name that includes your niche keywords.\u00a0 For instance, if your niche is &#8220;management consulting,&#8221; domain names like managementconsultingjobs.com, managing-consulting-jobs.com, or find-management-consulting-jobs.com would all work.\u00a0 Don&#8217;t go for the brandable, buzz-word domains like Google, Yelp, or Zynga.<\/p>\n<p>Good luck!<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>dave<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most common pre-sales questions I receive for the 300K Page Job Search In-a-Box is:\u00a0 How do I pick a job search niche? (That question&#8217;s followed with: how do I pick a domain name?) Like with any site, picking a niche requires research.\u00a0 In the case of job search, your research should focus [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-300k-page-job-search-in-a-box","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":390,"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions\/390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/themanwhosoldtheweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}