The Internship - Week One

And thus ends the onslaught of week one of my new internship at All Star Directories. The Desk at the End of the Hall was busy this week. What did I do you ask? Well, let me tell you.

On Monday, I had a small orientation and got all of those pesky tax and government forms out of the way. My boss and I discussed what it is I will actually be doing here, among other things, building out keywords to help Google find the site better, as well as creating an ever-important online presence for All Star in the online social communies such as MySpace and Facebook. My responsibilities are limited only to two sites currently under All Star Directories, AllArtSchools.com as well as AllCulinarySchools.com. Both sites generate quite a bit of money for All Star and I'm here to help generate a bunch more.

On Tuesday I was given a short demonstration on how to generate keywords using Excel and then told to go at it, goal being that I could generate at least 20,000 keywords using a basic formula that we have established. I compiled words, phrases, and everything surrounding all that is art, art related, art education related, etc. Needless to say I came up with quite a bit. For the next three days I combined, copied, pasted, and morphed every possible keyword combination together, eventually coming up with close to 200,000, roughly ten times what I should have had. Great. I wasn't trying to get that many, it's just the way it worked out. My process seems to have be a little too thorough, but 200,000 in a total of 3 days? Thats like 8,333 an hour, or 138 a minute! Pretty cool if you ask me.

Now it's Friday and I'm working on more MySpace stuff, finishing up this blog and thinking of ideas for what I'm going to do with Facebook. I've had a great week so far, it's a lot different than I thought it was going to be. Everyone here is really laid back, yet surprisingly devoted to their work. Being my first office job, this was quite a surprise and yet I wasn't quite sure what to expect either. Most of my expectations were derived from either movies or tv, but then again, this is the Northwest and everyone works differently up here. Suits? Who needs 'em? Cars? Who needs 'em? Very cool.