Many small business owners may not be convinced that hiring interns would be able to help their business. These small business owners are missing out on an important resource because interns can literally do almost anything for a business. To get your mind focused on hiring interns, we made a short list of some of the different things interns can do for your small business:

·         Build a blog for your business: Interns can quickly set up a blog to help establish your brand and manage your customer relationships

·         Get your business set up on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube: If you are still resisting the ongoing trend for companies to leverage social media, then you are missing out on one of the most popular mediums to communicate with your customers.

·         Install analytics on your website: Interns can install analytics and review and analyze the data. We all know we should be testing our websites but it’s something that always gets put to the back of the list. Hiring an intern to analyze your sites can make a huge difference.

·         Automating, Documenting, or Streamlining an existing process in your business

·         Drive traffic to your website

·         Build a new lead generation website

·         Launch a new marketing campaign: Marketing interns love being able to create their own campaigns. Let the intern spend the time on creating the campaign and all you need to do is review it.

·         Research your competitors and look for new ways to gain market share

·         Recruit strategic partners

·         Read and implement some of the home study courses you never got around to completing

This is a short, non exhaustive list of just some of the things that an intern can do for your small business. The possibilities for growing and expanding your business are endless when it comes to hiring interns!

When it comes to creating an internship program, there are so many misconceptions out there about what an intern actually does. If you think that an intern is supposed to be making coffee, picking up your dry cleaning, or making photo copies, then you are completely missing the boat. When it comes down to it, interns are some of the best and brightest young minds out there on the job market. Interns are known for injecting new ideas, passion, and energy into businesses that may be stuck in their ways. This is because they are still new and haven’t been sucked into the status quo way of doing things in the business world.

If you are using your interns to do menial tasks like making photo copies or filing, then you are leaving a major resource untapped. Think about it, interns can do almost anything that you can imagine. They are highly intelligent and used to adapting and learning new things on a continuous basis. Can you say college? All they require is a little guidance and training and you can put them to work on projects that you have never been able to finish. They can also help you develop and expand on your ideas from a fresh new point of view.

You have probably heard it a million times before, but the current generation of college students are internet experts! Today’s interns are so much more tech savvy than the older generations because they grew up with the internet. You will be absolutely amazed by the awesome ideas and new techniques that your interns can come up with using the internet.

So please, when you are creating your internship program, don’t make your interns do grunt work and menial tasks. Instead, give them projects of real value to work on that can directly benefit your business. All it takes is a little guidance and you will get something back phenomenal in return.