The essay bank of Proakatemia is a powerful platform.

Each of the teampreneurs studying in the Entrepreneurship and Team Leadership programme is expected to show their learning in the form of a creative piece uploaded to a platform that is publically available and accessible.

The main type of content uploaded to and published on the platform are essays, which can range from relatively informal and low threshold blog texts and feedbacks to formal, extensive researches and discussions on a certain topic. In addition to this, the teampreneurs are encouraged to think outside the box and utilise a wider range of creative outputs.

The essay bank provides multiple strong outcomes:
Firstly, the content produced can help the writers with summarizing their learnings from training sessions, practical experiences and seminars while also providing a moment of discussion and reflection. The published content also works as a tool to enhance their knowledge from books and encourage the writers to add their own thoughts in the form of a discussion or create new knowledge. Additionally, the process of content creation allows us to not only develop our research skills but also form arguments regarding the topics.

Secondly, the published content is excellent for the community – and the visitors of the website – as they can benefit and enjoy inspirational podcasts, graphics, games and more to learn and expand their knowledge on various topics.

The aim of this essay is to add a third strong outcome to the aforementioned list in the form of talent found and collaborations formed as a result of content production.

During the spring semester, the author of this essay wrote (surprise!) an essay reflecting and sharing the knowledge obtained at a virtual seminar by a company focused on marketing. At the time, the primary goal of the essay was to showcase the learnings in hopes of others learning from them and to publish the essay before the deadline given by Proakatemia.

However, about a week later, the creator of the company reached out via LinkedIn with a thank you message for attending the seminar and writing an essay about it.

What had happened? A classic case of search engine optimized content.
With the years of essay bank building, the platform has gained a good rating in the (mechanical) eyes of search engines. A constant and healthy flow of users producing content that has graphics, cross-referenced links and a great amount of repeating keywords combined with most of the content posted straight onto the website with no external PDFs means that the essay bank can be considered to be a quality good.

When you look up their company name on Google now, 7 months after publishing the original essay, Proakatemia’s essay bank and the author’s review is on the first page and the tenth link after the company’s own websites.

This can also be supported by the essay bank analysis of Proakatemia’s data team in September 2023 published in Proakatemia’s Teams channel, where it was mentioned that the essays read most by the visitors of the website are written by team Motive, whose content focused on providing information explaining and aiding health issues. The data team’s logical deduction was that the visitor of the essay bank could have Googled the health concern they had and found the essay bank to be a reliable source of information.

With its seemingly good ratings in search engine optimization and constant flow of produced content by teampreneurs, a question should be raised: Could teampreneurs offer a service of promotional blog posts to smaller companies, which includes the essays to also be published in Proakatemia’s essay bank as a valid way of boosting the company’s SEO ratings on multiple platforms? Alternatively, could business networks be grown with the content we produce?

Regardless of whether you or your team now begins to contact companies with a service idea, it could be an exciting exercise to review your posted essays and try it out for yourself: in the event that you have focused on a certain company in one of your published texts, try Googling the company or a ‘topic name + essay’ to see if any of your content appears in the first pages.
The results may surprise you.

Sources:

Blog post. Adzo, K. What are the benefits of writing an essay? 9.6.2022. https://fontsarena.com/blog/what-are-the-benefits-of-writing-an-essay/

Blog post. Coleman, B. Blog SEO: How To Search Engine Optimize Your Blog Content. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/blog-search-engine-optimization

Data team analysis, 1.9.23 via Teams