In 1997 when I launched my first job board, you could put a handful of jobs online, call yourself a job board and attract attention. A lot of things were easier back then - Goto.com traffic cost just pennies and eventually when Google AdWords surfaced, it was dirt cheap also. No longer.

As monster.com and careerbuilder.com grew,  important things began to change. The price of cost per click advertising rose quickly and the shine came off a niche job board if it did not overwhelmingly dominate its category. 

In a chat today, my DiversityJobs.com lead developer showed me this great blog post to make a point:

Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive

Given the rapid advance of Moore's Law, when does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem? As a general rule, I'd say almost always.

Consider the average programmer salary here in the US:

Ouch, do we really need to see graphs?

"I CAN'T FAIL. I CAN'T GO BACK TO WORKING IN..." says the job board entrepreneur I talked to yesterday.

This determination reminded me strongly of my own attitude 11 years ago. I quit two jobs in a row after working in them only six months each. I told everyone I knew that I was starting a business and assumed that I was unemployable after that. I felt like failure was not an option.

1. Offer unique value

Choose a niche that is poorly served that you can dominate very quickly.  Bells and whistles do not qualify on their own unless you are planning to spend tens of millions of dollars at a very minimum. 

2.  The right domain

Does it contain your keywords? Is it short, easy to pronounce, spell and remember? The right domain puts the wind at your back where you want it.

3.  Create more value than you capture

What do you struggle the most with?  Let me know over at OnlineRecruitingNews.com and I will try to answer if I can be helpful or commiserate with you.

This is also where you can reach me easily if you cannot find my e-mail address or you are having trouble getting me on the phone. 

Some say the domain name isn't important...  just look at Google with its gibberish name! In my experience, the name is important. So, if you are starting a job board, I think this list of job board domain types will be useful for you. 

These are all the prefixes, postfixes and conjunctions I came across in my research for the top 100 niche boards report. The '_' in this list represents the name of the niche or profession as in "marketing" or "marketers".

I have not set foot in the LatPro office for over a year. Living 2,000 miles away in Colorado came as quite a shock considering the perfect nine minute commute I previously enjoyed. Furthermore, LatPro moved to a new office in Plantation, Florida last week which I have not seen at all. And yet, despite the recession and level revenue, I see the company growing stronger.

How is this possible? Telecommuting from 2,000 miles away (for health reasons) is challenging, but it has had its silver lining. Our team has always been far flung geographically with key people in Delaware, Florida and Guatemala. But when I could no longer walk into the office and roam around at will, I felt significantly disadvantaged, disconnected and out of touch... at first.

Job board experts agree that running a job board is getting more difficult as time goes by -- but launching a board is easier than ever. In a couple of hours, without even pulling out your credit card you can create a reasonably functional and good-looking website with today's social networking tools or blog software.

How times have changed... To start LatPro in 1997, I learned to program in Visual Basic and wrote all the code myself for a little more than two years. That code was all replaced in 2000 and today comprises 162,000 lines of java code, 310,000 lines of PHP code and 43,000 lines of html. Much of it will get replaced again. At LatPro, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on our software and infrastructure.

Experience has taught me to launch first and fix later. Today Jason Calacanis' blog has a great explanation for this strategy.