There’s more than 1,000+ publishing websites who look to Featured to receive content that features expert insights.
In addition to the 1,000+ publishers we partner with, Featured currently owns and operates 367 websites. And we plan to build more.
This is an unorthodox strategy that deserves transparency for the experts who use Featured to build visibility for themselves and their business. In this post, we’ll share some context as to why we own and operate websites.
What inspired the decision to own and operate websites?
We decided that the best way to attract and onboard other publishers was to become a publisher ourselves.
The reason? For years the most common question we received from publishers we’ve pitched was, “Why don’t you publish your own content?”
In other words, what publishers really are asking is, “Does this content drive results? Does this work?”
So, we looked at what we’re best at (“creating high quality Q&A articles”) and decided to create websites aimed at underserved areas and industries within our community of experts. Not only will these sites provide more opportunities for experts to share their expertise, but we believe it will ultimately help us onboard more publishers (by showing them our own results).
And perhaps most importantly, it forces Featured to think like a publisher. What is good for our sites will likely be good for other publishing websites, and we’ve stumbled across some of our best product innovations by developing solutions to our biggest publishing problems.
Are the sites a PBN (Private Blog Network)?
If you look at media companies like Dotdash Meredith and others who own multiple brands, there’s not much of a difference between a media company and a PBN other than their overarching objective and their transparency. PBN stands for “private blog network.” A media company operates in public and is fully transparent about what they do and why they do it.
We’re very public about Featured owning and operating these websites through press releases, social accounts, about pages, footers, terms, this blog post, and more because we view ourselves as a media company.
We also follow Google’s Spam Policies closely, including:
- We do not sell links
- We do not exchange goods or services for links
- We don’t do link exchanges
- We steer clear of anything else that might conflict with Google’s Spam Policy
How do you protect people who don’t want to be featured on an owned and operated site?
We believe that “self selection” is the best way to operate within Featured, where any expert can choose to not answer a question. In addition, we develop features that can best equip people with more information about a website along with the ability to customize their dashboards.
For example, when a question appears on Featured, you can click the website to pull up a Publisher profile that provides the website and previously published articles. You can also “skip” questions / sources to remove certain sites from a dashboard, forever.
That way, if you don’t want to be featured on a website, then you can pass on the opportunity. Or, if you have a client in the home and garden space, then perhaps one of our home and garden sites would be a great fit.
What else?
With that said, this strategy isn’t perfect and these sites are new. But, we’re confident in our long-term abilities to generate traffic and make these sites successful for ourselves and the people who wish to be featured on them.
If you have any additional questions or comments, I’d love to hear them. This is a new initiative for us, and I know that our community will help guide us as we look to improve and evolve.
Best,
Brett Farmiloe
Founder, Featured.com