One thing I’ve learned during my internship is to acknowledge when you are not as good at things as you thought. I started my internship in September at the blog and SEO content agency “Content Jungle”. What started as a regular internship turned out to be a big lesson and a clear indication for what master I’d like to do next.
I started in the copy writers team with the intention to learn more about copy writing and SEO techniques. I was excited to pursue the interest I have had for writing essays and see if blog writing was something I’d like to do. However, after just 3 weeks I was certain that it wasn’t for me. I had difficulties with finding the right words and getting my message across in the most engaging way possible. We had an agreement that after some ghost writing, which is like being a co-author, I’d start writing my own blogs. However, when I had the first performance meeting with my supervisor, we both agreed that it wouldn’t be the best decision. I am very happy that my internship company was willing to listen to me and find a solution to the mismatch.
Soon we started talking about my interests and what other skills I was eager to learn more about. As I had mentioned during the job interview, I also study Information Science. Therefore, I am quite tech savvy. In effect I was able to work together on a project that had been on the company’s interests list for some time. This is programmatic SEO where you target less frequently searched key words with ‘cheap’ (programmatically written) content. In this way you have a few visitors each month per page but because of the creation ease you can make thousands of pages very quickly. So together with the company and its copy writers we were able to launch a blog that answers questions about how to store food items. With this process the company learned how to create such programmatic blogs which in effect could be useful for (future) clients and I feel like I really contributed to the company knowledge during the short period I was there.
I am very happy that early in the internship I was able to communicate with my company supervisor about how things were going and how we could make the internship as useful for both parties as possible. I can recommend to anyone to also be frank about what your strengths are and what is not really working. In this way I was able to learn a lot about more technical solutions surrounding communication science, ultimately pursuing both my interests.