What is the best way to promote an online business

Sorry Ralph, can't resist the temptation....  online?

There was a similar thread yesterday about promotion which could well be relevant for you as well: Best way to get exposure for my new venture?

Also think about the reasons why you started a job board. You acknowledge it's already a crowded market, so why would anyone come to yours versus an established one? What makes you stand out? 

I mentioned in your intro thread that we had a brief foray into a job board. For us, it turned into a bit of an expensive mis-adventure, as we didn't know or understand the sector. Our hook was a free CV generator, and industry experts acknowledged it was good and that was what drew traffic in for us. We optimised it and went to the top of google for keywords such as "free cv". 

But even with some traffic, and a few partnership deals in place, we couldn't get it to make a decent return, so it eventually got culled.

Lessons learned for us was not understanding that particular market. 

So I'm hoping you do know something about this sector, and the best thing to do is to find your hook and establish what sets you apart from all the other job boards.

Think long and hard about your model though, if you are at using advertising as your key to generate revenue, then you first need to demonstrate that you can generate traffic, and particularly targeted traffic.

Few advertisers will part with any cash for a site with no traffic. Likewise things like adsense units make a site ugly, and only make money for high volume sites. So unless they are making good money, don't use them. Plus we are now in an age of ad blocker, with more and more users running ad blocker software as browser extensions, so don't rely purely on any 3rd party online advertising system for revenue.

Don't want to be negative, just realistic. We got stung when the project flopped, It was a bitter pill and hard earned lesson in online business! Don't make the same mistakes as us