I spent this past summer interning full-time in the Lucky Breaks department of Lucky Magazine. Unlike my previous internships, it wasn’t writing-intensive; instead, the focus was on the many other day-to-day tasks my editors had to do.

1. Collecting feedback from daily deals

Lucky Breaks was like a perpetual testing ground of what works for readers and what doesn’t, in terms of everything from items being sold to AB testing for newsletter headlines. I collected much of this information on spreadsheets for easy digestion. I also learned to calculate open rates, click-through rates, sales conversion rates.

2. Researching potential brands for future deals

This task seems easy and fun but can become very draining and time-consuming when you end up clicking through hundreds of e-commerce websites that all start looking the same after a while. It also requires discerning which brands will fit the overall magazine identity. Three brands that I found that will be featured in upcoming deals are Cold Picnic, Julie Park and Shawn Burke.

3. Building blog posts and uploading photos in Adobe CQ5

This CMS isn’t quite as exhaustive as Hearst’s Magnus, and with the foundation I had from my internship at Redbook, I was able to grasp CQ5 relatively quickly. I also helped proof the text, and my editors noted my eye for detail (and misspellings and missing hyphens).

4. Building newsletters in Silverpop

This was a bit more intensive than CQ5 — not only did it involve updating HTML code, I was also in charge of choosing the bottom two images to go with the main image, which sounds simple but took a week or two to get the hang of. (They all have to work together in terms of content, visuals, etc.) Eventually, I was able to submit the newsletter drafts to my editor with very few revisions. Success!

Bad newsletter:

Good newsletter: