All good things come to an end..some sooner than others.
Contractjob.net was registered on 24/11/2000. At the time my family laughed at my email address yul68... so I bought a domain name just to have a clever email address 'me'@contractjob.net.
Then I was sent an offer to have sharepoint on my domain - so I thought that would be a clever idea for contractors to share information about companies, projects etc. That idea lasted a few years.
[There's a bit missing here about developing adsbringcustomers.com but it's a story in itself]
Then one day I saw Jobberbase. It was a real revelation. I wanted it to be on my site. I contacted the developer and got in touch with another one he recommended. So contractjob.net was formed, paid for - cost less than £x,000. I quickly realized without jobs you wouldn't get advertisers, without advertisers you wouldn't get site visits. So I asked the developer to integrate Google Jobs which at the time was a job database. So the site would be full with jobs.
Early on the site brought 1 advertiser - unfortunately at the time my laptop crashed. I lost everything - contacts, emails - everything. So I was so busy fixing my laptop that I didn't notice I had an advertiser. I was also starting a contract myself so the site moved down to second or third place for a while after a lot of family events good and bad.
After contracting for a while I remembered I hadn't moved contractjob.net on. So I asked companies like Indeed.com and a few other for a job data feed. Broadbean wanted £x000s which I didn't have. then I came across Jobg8. It was ideal. It provided a low cost solution for my site and the potential to make £x000s each month. I thought a fantastic retirement solution. I wouldn't have to contract work myself anymore. So the site was set up as a job aggregator. Along the way I contacted a few advertisers who provided ads on the site - again these ideas seemed highly lucrative.
Again while contract working in Manchester I started the site binreminded.com to solve a problem of remembering which bin to put out for refuse collection. In my home town the new refuse calendar was extremely complex and I thought it if it was a problem for me it would be for others. So again my attention was diverted from contractjob.net.
Again another contract, another family dilemma and another web site idea accidentbook.org. Also I wanted to change binreminded.com to become a tweet scheduler, then a paypal payment scheduler. So once again I was diverted from contractjob.net.
Along the way the site had a severe outage problem and I lost 50% of site visitors. So I was back to square one I felt.
Anyway I used the rss job feed to push the jobs out to Twitter/Linkedin etc. Progressively site visits switched from organic to Tweet led. But confusingly the organic visits brought job applicants not the Twitter visits.
Recently I realized that Hootsuite rss feed to Google+ so I've added that as well.
In terms of Google Analytics the UK has been the biggest area of interest for contract jobs -and obviously London. But there are some highly loyal users outside London.
When I started I imagined I would easily be No 1 on Google for 'contractjob'. But it took years for Google to let it move up to page 1. This held back the site in terms of visitors. There was only one day in the Spring this year that the site seemed to work in terms of applicants - why - who knows? Possibly Google let it rise up on other search terms even though I wasn't advertising with them. But the next day this was stopped.
Anyway, this month could be the last. It needs someone to take it on who could move it forward. I imagined a bunch of students pooling resources to buy it for £5,000 or a new recruiter wanting to start a web site.
Otherwise the site shuts down.
THE END.
