How to Use Featured.com to Earn High Quality Backlinks

One of the best things you can do to build up the traffic, reputation, and SEO value of a site you're growing – other than consistently publishing new, great content, of course – is building backlinks. Backlinks need to be reputable, from valuable sources somehow related to your brand, and not user-generated or paid content.

There are a lot of different ways to build those backlinks. You can pursue guest blogging, you can foster relationships and simply put compelling link bait content in front of other content creators, and more. One good strategy that I've written about before is to use a site like HARO.

HARO, formerly known as Help A Reporter Out, was initially created as a platform to connect "industry experts" to reporters who were looking to get quotes from those industry experts. If a journalist was writing a report on the state of finances within the softball manufacturing industry, they could post their pitch, and various business owners who manufacture softballs could step in and say, "Hey, I'm an expert, I'll lend you a quote." The business owners get their name and site quotes, the reporter gets content, and everyone walks away happy.

HARO, by the way, rebranded as Connectively, but the platform is functionally identical and all user and customer accounts were ported over.

One of the biggest problems with Connectively right now is that shady and scummy "blog" owners, who spun up spammy blogs using generative AI with no real value to them, have been flooding the site with low-value AI-generated pitches. Reporters used to post their pitches and get anywhere from a few dozen to a couple hundred answers. Now, they're getting thousands, most of which are nearly identical garbage (because most of these spammers simply copy the pitch and ask ChatGPT to generate an answer.)

There are ways to get around this issue – like my tips in this guide – but there's an alternative: use a different platform.

Connectively/HARO's idea of connecting experts with the people who need their expertise isn't something they can hold a monopoly on, so it should be no surprise that other platforms have developed to do the same thing with their own twists.

One of those alternatives is Featured.com. How does Featured differ from Connectively, and how do you use it to get backlinks for your site? Let's talk about it.

What is Featured.com?

Featured.com is the current name for the platform formerly known as Terkel, which was created by a marketing company named Markitors.

They launched the platform back in 2020 and eventually rebranded it to a more generic name. Like Connectively, it's split into two platforms: Featured for Experts and Featured for Publishers.

When you're trying to promote your site and earn high-quality backlinks, the site you'll want to use is the Experts side. On the other hand, if you want to boost your blog's content with expert quotes and valuable insights or data, you can use the publishers side. The publishers side is the equivalent of Connectively's reporter side.

Featured for Experts has three tiers of plans you can buy into, as well as a pay-as-you-go credits option.

The first tier, the free tier, gives you the baseline access to the site and not much else. You can set three keywords and get email alerts when publisher questions using those keywords appear, you can submit up to three answers per month, and you can track the progress of those answers from submission to, if they're accepted, placement and publication. Unfortunately, that's it; you don't get any of the advanced features or filtering.

The second tier is the Pro tier, which costs $50 per seat per month (with a 20% discount if you pay annually.) This plan gets you unlimited answer submissions. You can set up keyword alerts for up to 25 keywords, and you get the same answer status tracking as the free plan. You're also given more ability to filter and sort through the questions you might want to answer, including being able to sort by the type of attribution and even the domain authority of the site.

Before you start to worry that Featured is full of low-value blogs and the like, it's actually surprisingly good. They have writers and contributors operating on the publisher side for sites including Entrepreneur, Fortune, Inc., Fast Company, and more. And yeah, there are mediocre sites in there, too, but you're not obligated to submit your answers to them. You can, if you want, since there are no limits on the paid plans, so if you think even those mediocre backlinks will help you out, there's no reason not to go for it.

The third plan, the Business plan, is $100 per seat per month. It adds three features, of varying usefulness.

• AI augmentation. You can use Featured.com's AI integration to improve your answers by using their recommendations. I haven't tried this out, so I can't vouch for its quality, but I personally put a lot of time into the pitches I submit (for myself and for you), so I don't think having an AI tell me to add a keyword or something is going to be helpful. If you're less experienced with link outreach, though, it might be useful.
• Interview profiles. You can conduct a full-size Q&A interview and submit it to your profile. It can be used by publications to take quotes from it or used as-is as a full interview for a publication. It's also a good way to a) prove that you're invested in the site so publishers are more likely to go with you and b) build more awareness of who you are and why you're an expert.
• Bylined articles. You can create and submit a full-length article and submit it to one of the publications on the publisher side of Featured.com. They can decide whether or not to publish it, and if they do, you get a full byline rather than just a single in-article mention.

Finally, the pay-as-you-go option is simply a credit system where one credit equals one submission. Since both of the paid plans give you unlimited submissions, this is basically just a way for free users to submit a few more answers if they want. One credit is $7, a bundle of five credits is $6, and a bundle of 25 credits is $5.

It's worth mentioning that the features that are limited per profile, like interviews and bylines, are per seat; so if you buy the Business plan at three seats, you get three interview profiles and three bylined article submissions.

Is Featured.com Worth Using?

I think so. The fact that they have some very good publications on there who actively use Featured answers in their posts (as opposed to having used it once but are no longer active, like is often the case with these kinds of sites) is a huge selling point.

There's obviously a lot of competition for those publications, but if you can stand out, you have a pretty good shot of getting those bylines.

I'll give you some tips on how to do that later.

One of the biggest benefits of Featured is the paywall. Connectively's free plan is less limited, and their lower-tier paid plans are cheaper, which means it's easier for GPT spammers to submit bulk answers and saturate the inboxes of the reporters on their platform.

Featured's higher cost and the limit on the free plan help keep out the worst of the spam. I'm not saying it doesn't happen – obviously, anyone who thinks they can use ChatGPT to do their job for them is going to try – but it's less saturated.

There's also an editorial layer in there. Featured hires a roster of editors who help filter out the garbage, fact-check the submissions, and make sure publishers get the best possible answers to their questions. This also helps publishers be able to spend more time looking at pitches; if they only have 50-100 submissions to comb through, they can pay more attention than if they have thousands.

Are There Drawbacks to Featured.com?

A couple.

The first is that even when your answers are published, you're not guaranteed anything more than an in-text mention. While implied links/brand mentions aren't completely valueless (they're good for helping boost EEAT over time), they aren't backlinks, so they don't have as much immediate value to you. Publishers are fully allowed to decide if they want to link to you at all and whether or not those links are nofollowed.

The second is the pricing. It's not the worst pricing in the link-building space, but it's steep enough that you really need to make full use of the platform to get value out of it. On the plus side, you generally only need to buy one seat initially until you're sure you can get use out of the platform and expand later if you find it worthwhile.

How to Succeed on Featured.com

Now let's talk about my tips on how to make the most of Featured for link building.

Pay for an account.

First and foremost, I highly recommend that you pay for an account (unless you're using my submission service, but more on that in a moment.) because otherwise, you're simply too limited to succeed.

The unlimited submissions part alone is worth the price of admission, and the other features can help a lot. If you can swing it, pay for the top-tier version and fill out the profiles.

Make full use of the platform.

A lot of people will sign up for a platform like Featured, spend a week or two poking at it, and then do nothing more if it's not an immediate success. I say, expect to spend at least three months on the platform, sending out at least a couple of answers per week if you want, to see real returns.

Sure, landing one high-profile link would be great, but you really want to use Featured to spread your name around and treat the links as a bonus when you get them.

Scope out the competition with a publisher account.

I highly recommend registering a publisher account and submitting a few varied questions about different elements of your expertise.

It's entirely free to do (and you can use the resulting answers on your site if you want), and, most importantly, it shows you what kinds of answers people are submitting. If your answers are at least as good as the ones already coming in, you don't stand a chance, so learn first-hand what's circulating.

Get to know their editorial preferences.

This ties into the previous tip. Featured has a layer of editorial review between answer submission and publisher review.

They don't give you a ton of information about what they look for, but it's a check you need to pass, so get to know their standards before you submit.

Make sure your submissions pass AI Checks.

I can't say one way or the other whether or not part of the Featured editorial review is blocking AI submissions, but I wouldn't rule it out.

I don't mind using ChatGPT or other systems for menial tasks, but with something like this, you need to make sure you're not registering as AI content on the various AI checkers. If you can't be bothered to write your own expertise, why should anyone be bothered to trust or publish it?

Demonstrate clear expertise in your answers.

I know I haven't said much about the actual answers, but that's because there's not a lot to say.

Read the questions carefully, figure out how your expertise can be leveraged to answer them in a unique way, and demonstrate that value up-front in the answers.

Use my submission service.

Combing through questions, crafting answers, submitting them, tracking results, and analyzing the value you get from them is a ton of work! That's why I developed my own service to do it for you.

I initially designed it for HARO/Connectivley, but I'm more than happy to leverage the same skills for Featured.com as well.

Check out the benefits here, or give me a call to discuss it!