So they get coupon site love, and we end up in the free-site bucket. (Though our site totally kicks their butt, not that I'm biased:-)
And this leads me to my question: WWHND?
say "hey, our free version is just as good as those guys' paid version. plus, if you want even better stuff, you can pay $X/mo and get some even more super awesome features that those guys don't even have at all! here's a coupon."
Just having a paid version might help convince customers that you're a reliable company.
That'd no doubt be highly diggable and gather hits from all over the place. Then page rank goes up. then hits come in.
I've leaned against doing a blog for two reasons: 1) There are many other experts in this field who praise us & eclipse my knowledge (like http://jobsearch.about.com/)
2) Other job search engine blogs have been miserable failures, based on number of comments & attention they've failed to attract (like http://blog.indeed.com/, http://blog.simplyhired.com/, http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog/ and http://monster.typepad.com/)
Looking at the examples you gave, and tearing them down one by one:
http://blog.indeed.com/ - fairly basic design, and all the articles seem to be about themselves.
http://blog.simplyhired.com/ - again, mostly self-serving and/or random articles... "2009 Simply Hired Nugget Bowl"?? Who cares.
http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog - better content, but terrible design. It's painful to even look at, let alone read.
http://monster.typepad.com/ - better content again, but mostly ultra-short articles.
None of those are blogs that anyone sensible would read regularly, because they mostly regurgitate fairly boring or self-serving points without any new, useful ideas, and they're badly designed.
By "doing a blog" I don't mean doing a blog about you or about your business. I mean doing a blog about the topic that your business is related to, and making a genuine effort to write thoughtful articles that will influence the industry positively and/or be of interest to your target market.
I'd like to give our blog (http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/) as an example, but it's a little bit shambolic at the moment. Yet even so, the "thought leadership" articles we posted there generate some good hits and have generated some very good leads for us. Importantly, they've also massively upped our pagerank (because we run it on the same domain rather than a subdomain), which means, for example, that woobius comes up on the first page of results already for, for example, "construction collaboration".
So there's multiple benefits to creating a good blog. Of course, creating a good blog is hard, but if you can, imho, it's worth it. Whether you can is a function of whether you have interesting ideas about your industry (you probably do) and whether you have a good writer on your team who can write those in a clear, blog-friendly shape.
If it has anything to do with "exclusivity" or "privilege" or "be the first to do blah", you must charge. You can give "special" customers a free or heavily discounted pass, but you must make it seem like it's only them getting something exclusive for an exclusive price. Think country club or night club style business.
The service charges employers for sponsored listings, like Google's AdWords. Another paid service is for more frequent indexing, and another is for direct access to customized company-specific job feeds, which is useful to recruiters, affiliates & competitors.