So, you may have heard of job boards sprouting like weeds across the blogosphere:

• GigaOm Jobs — $200/listing per month
• Crunchboard Job Board — $200/listing per month
• 37Signals’ Job Board — $250/listing per month
• ProBlogger.net’s Job Board — $50/listing per month (until the end of sept — then $100)

While it may represent more opportunities for bloggers to find work professionally (on some of these boards), the proliferation of job boards poses an interesting conceptual issue for smaller, non-A-List bloggers and marketers a like.

For example, should we expect a proliferation of Job Boards around the blogosphere now? Ought YOU to open up a Job Board, for example?

Well, as a monetization tool, Job Boards are a great alternative to “just ads” — they foster another aspect of your readers involvement and can provide a useful service to them and the blogosphere at large. They also provide another stream of income in addition to other things you may have going on. They do not require a great deal of sophisticated code either — many “job board” or classified scripts can be found inexpensively on the web as it is.

However, for them to work, they need traffic. And not just any traffic — *good* traffic. Responsive traffic. I suppose another word for this is a real community.

And I think this is the Real Lesson behind the Job Board proliferation of late — and its not that YOU should necessarily think of adding “Job Board” to your own monetization scheme.

Rather, that Job Boards, like other aspects of monetization, really work when you have a lot of traffic running through your blog. The best traffic is that which is responsive to you and your site. They actually click on your recommendations, both intentional (such as an affiliate program), or unintentional (Adsense), but also to other mechanisms, both non-commercial (participating in the comments section) and commercial (such as Job Boards where people both post hires and HIRE those hires!).

The Real Lesson is that Traffic is King … because with enough traffic all monetary mechanisms are possible.

• Almost any sort of ad scheme will be profitable.
• Affiliate Programs will begin selling on their own.
• Job Boards can capitalize on the amount of people looking for work and looking to solve HR problem.
• Voluntary donation-campaigns will be on autopilot
• Any of your own products or services you offer will also, literally, take off.

If the goal of your website is to achieve any amount feduciary success then your focus should be in creating as much inbound traffic as possible — then retaining as much of that traffic in terms of regular visitors, and eventually fostering a responsible and responsive community of regular faithful visitors.

And perhaps, that is the biggest lesson of all: these larger “A-list” bloggers are only able to establish montary tools such as job boards only becauase they have so much traffic funneling through them. But its more than just traffic … its a community that’s swelled around them.

If you don’t have a community of faithful readers, don’t bother with a Job Board.

Focus on creating that community first.

While its mercenary to think so, doing all the sort of organic things to grow your own blog will pay dividends when it does grow. And these are things that you should be doing anything.

• Therefore, the race for creating worthwhile posts, “link baiting” and creating inbound links.
• Therefore, participating in comments section of your favourite blogs.
• Therefore, the posting to social content sites.
• Therefore, the purchasing of text-link-ads on other sites.
• Therefore, the participation in blog networks.
• … and so on and so on.

I’m of the firm belief that if you’re consistent in your those efforts, it will pay off — literally. You’ll command a large share of traffic through the blogosphere and in turn, will have fostered a real community under your stewardship. The yard stick of your success will ultimately be in that community your able to foster and cultivate.

So what are you waiting for?

Start start planting those seeds today!