A BrightEdger

M Posted 10 years 11 months ago

t 9 min read

Drove BrightEdge to an international content marketing juggernaut in 8 years

We’re proud to announce that BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu achieved semifinalist status in the 2015 E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year award program for the Northern California region. The program recognizes entrepreneurs who demonstrate excellence and extraordinary success in areas such as innovation, financial performance and have a personal commitment to their businesses and communities.

Despite this year’s fierce competition, Jim was recognized by a panel of independent judges for BrightEdge’s standout performance and leadership in the market. This year, the awards program received 100 nominations. The program is now in its 29th year and has expanded to recognize business leaders in over 145 cities across 60 countries worldwide.

Jim, alongside co-founder Lemuel Park, recognized 8 years ago the industry-wide need for technology that optimizes content and increases its visibility. At that time, the notion of earned traffic was a relatively new one, but BrightEdge was ahead of the curve in recognizing the major shift from traditional advertising to brands becoming their own content publishers. Predicting the rise of content marketing led Jim and Lem to bootstrap BrightEdge from the ground up with only a few servers from Jim’s kitchen table in 2007.

Today, that vision has become a reality. The market is more competitive than ever before and continues to change, posing constantly shifting challenges for marketers. Content marketers today are up against millions of posts, tweets and search queries every single day, and brands face a content battleground in which they must fight for consumer attention.

Jim’s vision and entrepreneurial spirit has allowed BrightEdge to lead marketers to “victory” with technology that intelligently informs every piece of content created and published. Jim has been behind all of BrightEdge’s most useful innovations, including Page Reporting, Data Cube, Secure Search, and the complete Mobile Solution. With a keen focus on customer success and optimizing performance, BrightEdge has helped thousands of brands tie their content strategies back to their companies’ bottom lines and drive measurable business results.

Bill Fergusson

M Posted 10 years 11 months ago

t 9 min read

At BrightEdge, we take employee onboarding and our employee training program very seriously. We’ve found the faster new hires get “on board” through intensive training and immersion in our corporate culture, the more productive they are in contributing to our performance.

Our findings are based on the lessons we’ve learned since our founding as a Silicon Valley startup in 2007. And there’s no teacher more valuable than experience.

In this post, we’ll share the key elements of our innovative, employee training program that has made all the difference in fueling our growth by accelerating the integration of new employees.

BrightEdge Onboarding: The Challenges Faced

Our onboarding program involves training new hires in SEO industry best practices and how our SaaS platform helps clients achieve their SEO and content marketing goals.

We now employ approximately 300 people globally; this means we’ve had to meet the challenge of creating an employee training program that speaks to all of the diverse professionals across teams.

And because an increasing number of our new hires are from outside the U.S., we needed an employee training program that integrates people from different countries as well.

Our Onboarding Process: The Challenges Met

Last year, we successfully held 20 classes that trained approximately 150 new hires. Our week-long employee training program included speakers and instructors who represented our different departments, and also included relevant learning exercises. This program continues on in 2015.

Throughout the training week, new hires are given a series of 15 quizzes to test their retention of key concepts. The quizzes are open book and low stakes with employees grading their own performance. At the end of the week, our new employees take three SEO certification tests to gauge their knowledge of the SEO industry as well as our company and SaaS platforms.

We assign one full-time instructor to our employee training program. We’ve found the best candidate for this position to be an evangelist staff member who has expertise in SEO and our software platform and is able to instill enthusiasm for our company amongst new hires.

We’ve also found the ideal instructor possesses the qualities of a good teacher, specifically, patience and the communication skills needed to explain complex topics in a way that is easily grasped.

Given that we’re expanding on a global scale, we’ve selected an instructor who is also adept at teaching people from other countries and cultures.

3 Steps to Optimize Your Employee Training Program

There are several practical requirements for a successful employee training program. Following are a few ways you can optimize yours:

1. Secure Buy-In from Management

An effective employee training program process costs money, so your management team may lean towards a “sink or swim” approach to new hires. In the long run, this runs counter to your company’s overall success because of the opportunity cost of hiring and training excessive replacement people. Your task is to convince managers of the efficiency and effectiveness of a thorough onboarding process.

2. Recruit the Best Instructor

A candidate for taking on the task of training should not only be highly knowledgeable about your company but also able to impart enthusiasm for its mission. He or she should also be willing to take on the administrative details involved as well as stay current with your industry to keep the subjects relevant.

3. Designate Space and Materials

Ideally, there should be a designated room on site with the necessary audio-visual equipment for holding classes. In our experience, it can be quite pricey to rent such accommodations off-site.

As a rapidly growing company that stays a step ahead of the curve, we’ve come to value employee onboarding as an investment in our future that will keep providing dividends with optimal productivity and continued growth.

If you’re looking to optimize your employee training process, take some tips from our experience here to start. While the initial investment may seem steep, the ongoing payoff is well worth it.