"Find something you love to do and you will never
have to work a day in your life"
G'Day,
I am back in the United States after four week hiatus from the blogging world. While I will get into all those travels in the coming weeks, I want to focus on the reason for me going to Australia. That reason was the internship opportunity.
Amazingly enough I had never previously thought of studying abroad, but when I heard there was an opportunity to do an internship I was sold. As the process went I filled out my three areas of interest on a form (1. Marketing 2. Sports Marketing 3. Advertising) and CAPA was going to place me in one of those areas. The hardest part was committing to the program without knowing where you will be working until two weeks prior to the start.
I got my placement about a week before leaving for Australia. I was doing marketing for a company called GOLF Link. While it was sports related but very business driven I was more than excited for this opportunity.
Essentially GOLF Link started in 1999 as the universal handicapping system for golfers in Australia. GOLF Link is used by roughly 1,100 golf courses and over 400,000 members across Australia. There wasn't much money to made in this business however, so about a year ago the company hired a new CEO to turn the GOLF Link name into a money making business.
This money is made via their website. The GOLF Link website now offers golfers the chance to buy discounted tee times, vouchers, and travel. This site also includes something called GOLF Link Mates which is essentially a Facebook network for Australian golfers. You can keep track of where your friends have played and how they played. They have also ventured out with a wine club and a new iphone application that includes a handicap predictor.
The GOLF Link website is the number one golf website in the country and one of the top ten in sports according to number of visitors. This allows great opportunities for revenue from advertisers.
I spent most of my time on two big projects during my three months. The first was doing the weekly newsletter called THE LINK. I used a program called CMS to design the newsletter. The newsletter went out to over 50,000 golfers across the country. It featured special offers on tee times, vouchers, open days, and an Australian Golf Digest article. I also worked with companies that were paying for ads on what they wanted to feature in the newsletter.
Click here to view full newsletter:
The job didn't end with just creating the newsletter. I used a program called campaign monitor to send it out but also to monitor the progress of the newsletter. At the end of the week I would take the statistics of the newsletter from campaign monitor and present them to the CEO.
The thing that was interesting about the newsletter was that we only had 50,000 subscribers, yet we had over 400,000 members of GOLF Link. So the company decided to do a promotion to increase subscribers. The promotion was a seven night Whitsunday Golf Cruise for two people. I fortunate enough to promote the giveaway for a while. The promotion was off to a great start, but I left before the end of it.
The next big project of mine was something very important for the company. I had to reach out to most of the clubs in Australia and gather information about their course. Then I took that information and built a course profile for the course. GOLF Link is changing the whole layout of the website in the near future to accommodate my work. Their goal is to have a course profile for all 1,100 courses and get them to list tee times on their site. This would make GOLF Link the one place to go to information about any course in Australia.
Doing the course profiles was pretty repetitive and redundant. Doing a whole seven hours a day of calling courses was not very much fun, it is definitely intern work. I gutted it out for the rest of the time I was there.
This internship like every other internship is only beneficially to you in the terms that you get out of it what you put into it. While only working 20 hours a week, I was not able to be as active as I had hoped I would be, I was proud of the work I had done. The company felt the same way.
This was my first time working in an office and I made sure each day to observe what was going on around the office. Having a desk right across from the CEO made things a lot more interesting. My thing I will ultimately take away from this internship is to find that one thing I love doing and pursue that to the fullest.
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