IT Milk: entry

Even though I’ve been interning at Pepperjam for a week now, my intern orientation is the following Monday. So I don’t know anything about the company policies except for the common sense basics, and I’m going to stay on the safe side and avoid disclosing any specific Pepperjam clients. But, if you are curious, the answers are obvious on the sizable Pepperjam client list.

By the way, when you first visit www.pepperjamsearch.com, Kris Jones immediately overwhelms you with his charismatic voice. What better way to communicate his company’s mission statement than to stream a loud video at your face when you load up the Pepperjam company website? But after the first 3 times of hearing that auto-play movie, “THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR VISITING PEPPERJAM…” it can get quite annoying.

Going forward, there are 2 factions within the Pepperjam Search department, and these are Paid Search (pay-per-click) and Organic Search (search engine optimization). The latter allows for much more stimulation of the mind and creativity. But the former is where all the excitement of Pepperjam seems to be at, since there are walloping amounts of cash being dumped into pay-per-click campaigns by companies that have the reputation and the money to do so. Again, check out Pepperjam’s portfolio.

My past 2 days of work has consisted of generating massive lists of keywords for clients’ pay-per-click campaigns. My task was to go through the category pages and the product pages and make ad groups with associated keywords for each.

This can be an exciting yet equally arduous task when you don’t know the first thing about women’s clothing. I entertained myself by referring to UrbanDictionary.com for possible related keywords to female urban fashion. Did you know that hoop earrings can also be called “hoochie hoops”? (Obviously I didn’t find much useful information on the mentioned website.) If it weren’t for moments like this, this keyword generation work would be the equivalent of systemized factory work for the mind, and that could get monotonous pretty fast.

The easy way to do it would be to use a tool such as Keyword Discovery, and let it algorithmically spit out a list of relevant keywords that have potential for search traffic. However, what the Pepperjam employees suggested that I do was to manually think of the keywords. You know, like use my brain. One employee’s advice was that I should use Thesaurus.com, but I think there is a limit to how much a thesaurus can help you for keyword generation for products.

Personally, I’ve never had to do enough work on Microsoft Excel for me to have to scroll down one page. But by the end of the 8-hour workday today, I was staring blankly at a bloated Excel file consisting of over 20,000 rows of individual keywords. Of course, I religiously mashed the save button and backed up the file, because losing this file to corruption would be the worst data loss that I would have ever experienced. I would rather re-write a stack of history papers than re-generate this sprawling list of Adwords keywords.