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Brett Farmiloe talks with Jason Barnard about scaling trust.
Scaling Trust! Brett Farmiloe—CEO of Featured.com & Help a Reporter Out (HARO)—Reveals How to Build Authority Through Strategic Media Placement in the AI Era
Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured (connecting 50,000+ experts with 1,000+ media outlets) and the strategic mind behind HARO’s 2025 revival, shares the systematic approach that transforms entrepreneurs into trusted industry authorities. Drawing from his decade of scaling and selling Markitors digital agency plus his current mission of democratizing media access, Brett breaks down the “expert economy” blueprint for building credible influence that scales beyond traditional marketing.
Get ready for a deep dive on:
- The 5-minute authority hack: Why expert contributions (400 characters or less) to major publications deliver better ROI than hours-long article writing—and how to leverage platforms like Featured for instant media placement
- AI visibility revolution: How ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI mode are citing real-time interviews and expert insights—and why timely content now outranks evergreen in search algorithms
- Quality vs. quantity framework: The strategic balance between high-impact placements and volume-based visibility in an uncertain digital landscape where “the smartest marketers have no idea what’s gonna work”
- The three-pillar media strategy: Expert contributions vs. full articles vs. interview profiles—and how to choose based on time investment and expected outcomes
- Reverse-engineering competitor success: Using AI tracking platforms to audit what’s working for industry leaders and identifying citation gaps in your media strategy
- Network-first approach: Why relationship building with journalists and direct outreach (“Hey, I came across this article…”) beats generic pitching in 2025’s fragmented media landscape
This episode delivers battle-tested strategies for entrepreneurs, consultants, and business leaders ready to build systematic authority and trust through strategic media placement in the age of AI-powered information discovery.
#ScalingTrust #MediaStrategy #ExpertEconomy #AIVisibility #AuthorityBuilding #FastlaneFounders #BrettFarmiloe #Featured #HARO #MediaPlacement #ThoughtLeadership #BusinessGrowth #DigitalAuthority #ContentStrategy #MediaOutreach #PRStrategy #EntrepreneurBranding #BusinessInfluence #ExpertPositioning #TrustBuilding
What you’ll learn from Brett Farmiloe
This episode was recorded live on video September 23rd 2025
Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brettfarmiloe_the-biggest-challenge-our-customers-face-activity-7363610014176968706-Qbwd
Brett Farmiloe
Transcript from Brett Farmiloe with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Scaling Trust
[00:00:00] Brett Farmiloe: How and where people wanna be featured is changing in 2025 and beyond. So I think that traditionally, it’s always been digital publications and in authoritative places. I think that’s evolving into a more fragmented way, podcasts like this, newsletters, things of that nature. And then ultimately, how the AI visibility space is exploding in terms of all these AI visibility platforms that are merging. You’re watching venture capital flow into these platforms, and so people wanna be featured in AI as well.
When your customers are going to ChatGPT and asking for relevant products and services related to a problem, how do you get these LLMs to cite your business as the go-to source?
[00:00:44] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs, and executives, and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world.
How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy? A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.
[00:01:13] Jason Barnard: Hi, everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy with me, Jason Barnard. And a quick hello and we’re good to go.
Welcome to the show, Brett Farmiloe.
[00:01:24] Brett Farmiloe: Quite an intro. Thanks, Jason.
[00:01:27] Jason Barnard: Did I say Farmiloe all right?
[00:01:30] Brett Farmiloe: Yes, you nailed it.
[00:01:31] Jason Barnard: Yeah, almost. I run outta breath just when I got to the end, so it’s lovely to meet you. We’re gonna be talking about scaling trust, and this is very much as an entrepreneur contributing to other media sites as contributions, as articles, as interviews. And where it’s valuable, why I should spend my time doing this.
[00:01:52] Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. I’m happy to dive in and give some context about what we’re building with both Featured and Help A Reporter Out.
[00:01:59] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Okay. And before we start that, I’m looking at search results for your name. This is what we do at Kalicube®. The search result for your name is fairly vanilla, which is unfortunate. It would be lovely to have a Knowledge Panel, but I’m beginning to think now that you won’t need one because this kind of result is where we’re going with Google AI mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, where they summarize the search results.
And this looks really, really good. So congratulations to you.
[00:02:26] Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, this is pretty cool. Thanks for showing me that. It’s cool to see the featured.com profile ranked number one.
[00:02:33] Jason Barnard: Yeah, it means that Google and AI, ChatGPT probably has understood that featured.com is your Entity Home. It’s where the information about you, from you, comes from and they trust you enough to cite you directly, which is brilliant.
[00:02:47] Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, we actually see that pretty much across a lot of the expert pages that we’ve created on Featured. It’s like the number one result for their name. Sometimes outranks LinkedIn, so it’s pretty cool.
[00:02:58] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Okay, so now let’s talk about actually contributing to articles. Now, the big question I had was writing articles for third party media sites, contributing to articles for third party media sites, and trying to get interviews.
Those are the three big things that I see entrepreneurs trying to do. Can we go through them one by one and explain the value and the meaning of them?
[00:03:21] Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, absolutely. Where you wanna start?
[00:03:23] Jason Barnard: Interviews. I like interviews.
[00:03:25] Brett Farmiloe: Okay. So getting interviewed by a media member to inform stories. I think that there’s a couple interviews.
So one on Featured, there’s a interview profiles product that you could actually say, here’s what I wanna be interviewed on, and then AI will create some interview questions for you based off of a publisher. And then you answer those questions and get a Featured interview profile on that site.
So that, that’s a cool way to shortcut the line and get the actual end result. But then oftentimes through Help A Reporter Out, we’ll see that journalists want to connect for an interview to better inform their stories. And so for that, oftentimes that’s just part of the process where you’ll respond to a publisher or a journalist and then get connected with the Zoom. And then dive into an interview, and then they use the stuff that you probably regret saying, and it’ll be in the article.
[00:04:13] Jason Barnard: So the traditional way of approaching it is the second way. And you’ve just created a new way.
[00:04:18] Brett Farmiloe: Yep. Yeah, and trying to offer both ways to support both sides.
[00:04:23] Jason Barnard: Okay. For me, as an entrepreneur, what’s the value of an interview on a third party media website?
[00:04:28] Brett Farmiloe: So I think that what you just showed me is pretty indicative of AI mode and that the fact that a lot of these AIs are using external sources.
We’re looking at this here. I see a picture of myself and Ana O’Neill, who’s on our team, and we recently did an interview with Authority Magazine. And you could see that that image and a lot of the information from that interview is being cited, and we did that interview like last week. So I think that that’s pretty indicative because a lot of these AIs are looking for timely and relevant information.
So anything that you’re doing to put your interviews out there is interesting because you’re a real time human being and a real time business. So sharing that in a meaningful way is good.
[00:05:14] Jason Barnard: Does that mean I can never stop? You said timely, so I have to keep doing this week in, week out, week after week.
[00:05:20] Brett Farmiloe: I think so. I think that it depends on how much your business is changing. Like for us, we’re in a startup mode. We’re three and a half years in, so there’s week by week, there’s a new product launch or new something that’s happening. So it’s useful to communicate that information. But for more established firms, I think that it’s a little more timely in terms of coordinating that around a product release and things like that.
[00:05:43] Jason Barnard: Right. And which do you prioritize, the interviews, guest posting articles or contributions?
[00:05:52] Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, I think that the contributions is actually really, really interesting. And just to define what contributions is on Featured, a publisher will ask a question. We’ll invite vetted experts to answer that question, and then we will take those best insights, put them into an article, and it’s essentially like an expert roundup where there’s 10 different perspectives in an article. So that’s pretty easy to do because you’re sharing a four to eight sentence insight and it takes just a couple minutes to do.
And that’s a great way to get featured in more than 2,500 different publications who use our platforms. So if we’re weighing the value of time versus the expected output, the contributions is a really low time lift that has a good upside.
[00:06:34] Jason Barnard: No, it’s a great point because it’s saying where you’re gonna take five minutes to write a contribution of 400 characters or less.
I mean, I’m thinking about Forbes or Rolling Stone or Fast Company. They all offer the same thing. It’s saying contribute 400 characters or less. You get listed in an article where you get to say what you want to say. It’s a five-minute investment, whereas an article is gonna take several hours.
[00:06:59] Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. An article is gonna be a bigger lift. And I do think that that has probably a bigger ROI. There’s probably a semblance between how much time you’re looking to spend and then what that end output is. But like, I think that at the end of the day, platforms like ours are supposed to make that really easy to reduce the time that’s spent, because most of the time that’s spent identifying a journalist, trying to figure out what you’re gonna pitch them, pitching and getting rejected a lot, and it kind of just makes that connection much, much easier between journalists and an expert source. Because if you have the expertise and knowledge that that journalist is looking for, then that door is gonna be open for you.
[00:07:38] Jason Barnard: Right. Now, i’m gonna ask a question where obviously you are very biased. It’s what are the pros and cons of having a PR agency do this for you and going through self-service in Featured?
[00:07:51] Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, I mean, fortunately I ran an agency for 10 years, so I know what it’s like on that side as well. And I think that it just comes back to time, like a lot of businesses now have all the tools and opportunities to do it themselves, and yet there’s more marketing agencies than coffee shops in the US.
The reason for that is the time challenge. People just don’t have the time to, even if it takes four minutes, they don’t got four minutes to identify the opportunity, write an answer, do all of that in the midst of a pretty chaotic day.
[00:08:22] Jason Barnard: Okay, so your bet right now is contributions because it takes less time, but the return on investment of an article is gonna be bigger.
Now, what are the key points that I need to look out for, for where I’m submitting an article?
[00:08:37] Brett Farmiloe: I think that there’s a few different things. We also offer the opportunity to write a full length article. So the three main products on Featured are contributions, answering questions and getting featured, writing a full length article, and then doing the interview profiles.
So the things that you need to look out for are, number one, relevance. How relevant is the actual in placement and publication compared to what your expertise is? Because ultimately, like going back to that AI mode interview, like if I’m answering everything outta the sun, I’m gonna confuse AI about what my true expertise is and how to do that. So if I’m writing an article about real estate and I don’t know anything about real estate, that’s gonna mess everything up and confuse things. So you gotta look at relevance, you gotta look at the domain authority of the actual publication. Is this gonna be an authoritative place that AI is ultimately going to cite and is gonna appear in search engines?
And then, I think that those are probably the top two things that you really gotta be aware of.
[00:09:37] Jason Barnard: Okay, brilliant. And taking it beyond an automated platform like Featured, where would I, as an entrepreneur, want to be featured?
[00:09:48] Brett Farmiloe: I think that how and where people wanna be featured is changing in 2025 and beyond.
[00:09:52] Jason Barnard: Oh, brilliant.
[00:09:52] Brett Farmiloe: So I think that traditionally, it’s always been digital publications and in authoritative places. I think that’s evolving into a more fragmented way. Podcasts like this, newsletters, things of that nature. And then ultimately, the AI visibility space is exploding in terms of all these AI visibility platforms that are merging. You’re watching venture capital flow into these platforms, and so people wanna be featured in AI as well.
When your customers are going to ChatGPT and asking for relevant products and services related to a problem, how do you get these LLMs to cite your business as the go-to source? And so I think that the definition of that is being defined in where we’re at today. I don’t think that anyone has a definitive answer of how to go get featured in LLMs, but that’s not stopping people from trying different things and seeing what works.
[00:10:48] Jason Barnard: Well, leading in your industry must be hugely, hugely helpful. And the idea of saying, well, I’m gonna be on a podcast. You mentioned newsletters, how would you leverage podcasts in newsletters in a similar vein?
[00:11:00] Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, I think that no matter what the channel, it’s doing it, measuring it, and seeing what works and doubling down on the stuff that does work.
[00:11:09] Jason Barnard: Right. So how do you measure it? That’s my question then.
[00:11:12] Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. I think that you could do it in a quantitative and qualitative fashion, so just like what we just did with that AI mode. Hey, I got interviewed in Authority Magazine and it appeared instantly. Okay, great. Are there more opportunities in related to Authority Magazine that I could take advantage of or adjacent publications that are similar to that?
So that would be an example of something that works. And I’d say that we do this podcast and it’s just totally invisible. And I’m like, okay, well, you know, that podcast didn’t work. Did any other podcast work? And if so, are podcast a viable channel for me as a platform? So I think that it’s just taking a look at the qualitative aspect. Did anyone reach out to me on LinkedIn? Did anyone get into my inbox based off of what I was saying? Did I see any kind of uptick in web traffic? Things like that from a Google Analytics perspective. And then, just using your gut to see where you should spend your time.
[00:12:05] Jason Barnard: Right. Because we have the situation where SEO, measuring Google, measuring rankings in Google, measuring traffic from Google is incredibly easy. And we’re now in a kind of opaque world where we don’t see what’s going on. And you were saying, well, did it feel right, I suppose is what I’m hearing.
[00:12:24] Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. Because today, all these AI visibility platforms are starting to emerge. And from what I’ve seen, like I’ve demoed every single one, taken a look at the AI visibility score percentage, and looking at all the citations that my competitors have. And I think that that’s like starting to emerge as a good quantifiable thing where if I see that my competitors have a certain percentage of visibility and it’s because of these placements that I’m not featured in, what are those placements like?
Are they podcasts? Are they newsletters? Are they articles? What is being cited in AI and how do I reverse engineer that?
[00:13:04] Jason Barnard: How do you choose the questions that you push into AI?
[00:13:09] Brett Farmiloe: In regards to our platform?
[00:13:12] Jason Barnard: No, no, no. As an entrepreneur, so the problem with these platforms, of course, is that you could ask any question you want, and the difficulty with these platforms is that they’re having conversations with people that you have no visibility into. So you don’t actually know what questions there are. Whereas with Google, you had Google Ads, which would give you search volume. So how do you know what questions to ask these machines to understand?
Number one, are you visible? And number two, what are the citation sources?
[00:13:40] Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, I think that that’s a really interesting question. And quite honestly, I think the answer might be a little boring in the sense that it’s just a longer tail. There’s now more queries that are going out that are just longer tail queries.
So if you look at the traditional SEO graphs of the short tail type of keywords, digital marketing firm and then digital marketing firm in Phoenix, digital marketing firm in Phoenix that specializes in retail. The prompting aspect just increases the size of the query.
That’s really hard to target. So in terms of the questions and targeting, the boring answer is I think a lot of what was previously being done is still the path to get there. So we’ll see how it evolves in the next couple years. But I think that’s where we’re at today.
[00:14:35] Jason Barnard: Okay, brilliant. And can you give me a process for defining where I need to appear based on these results from the AI trackers?
I’m looking at it and thinking, okay, I need to dominate my industry. I can use an AI tracker with questions that I define, find the citations, what’s my process?
[00:14:57] Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, I think that it starts with an audit. So going back to traditional SEO and now this new emerging AI visibility area. I think that it starts with an audit.
What’s working for your competitors? What’s working for your business? And then it’s reverse engineering how to take advantage of those opportunities that exist. And then how do you create your own opportunities? So audit, define what opportunities exist and act on those opportunities and then create your own opportunities.
And within that second bucket of the opportunities that are in front of you, a lot of that’s proactive outreach to existing media. So it’s finding the person who wrote the publication or wrote the article, it’s educating them with not, Hey, include me in the article. It’s, Hey, I’ve came across this article.
Here’s what we’re doing. If there’s ever opportunity to connect and dive deeper into it, I’d appreciate the opportunity. And most times, these people are smart. They’re getting pitched a bunch. And they could see through it. And in our experience, it’s been great just doing direct outreach and getting conversations going.
[00:16:03] Jason Barnard: Okay. So, absolutely. And it has a lot to do with networking and personal relationships, but now if we look at this and look at it as pure volume versus quality, how would you advise me?
[00:16:16] Brett Farmiloe: Quality over quantity? I would say, it’s probably the immediate jump and answer. But the quantity aspect, I wouldn’t sleep on that either and that’s why it’s confusing in 2025. If I were to choose one, I would choose quality.
But from what I’m hearing and what I’m seeing, the quantity aspect also has a pretty significant lift because A, you don’t know what’s working, so you try a bunch of things that works and hopefully one of them is gonna land. And I think that’s unfortunately the state of digital marketing today, I’m talking with some of the smartest marketers that I know and they have no idea what’s gonna work.
And that’s not much different from previous marketing that’s still kind of like we’ll see what works and what doesn’t. But there was a little more certainty with that. Now it’s a lot of uncertainty. So the quantity aspect is important, but if you have confidence that that one quality opportunity is going to pay dividends, and I would focus on the quality first.
[00:17:14] Jason Barnard: You’re on my podcast. So podcasting is obviously a really important avenue to pursue. How would you go about that?
[00:17:22] Brett Farmiloe: There’s a lot of different ways that you can easily land on podcasts today. I’ve looked into a lot of different matchmaking type of platforms with podcasts and some are better than others, but I think that that’s where I would start if I were an entrepreneur, is take a look at some of these podcast matching platforms. See how that goes and then there’s always the aspect of why would you ever hire someone to do this?
Because you don’t have the knowledge or you don’t have the time. And so there’s a lot of emerging freelancers, PR agencies, podcast agencies that are available for that. So that could be a viable method as well.
[00:18:01] Jason Barnard: Okay. And then to kind of finish all this off is self-publishing a press release. How useful is that today?
[00:18:11] Brett Farmiloe: That’s a good question. Again, I think it goes back to trying it, measuring it, and seeing if it does. So we’ve released a couple press releases this year, where we acquired and revived Help A Reporter Out. So that was a big initiative where we put a bunch of press releases out.
And did that pay in terms of landing press coverage? Actually no. But did that pay in terms of having one or two of our investors being like, wow, that really gained traction because we landed in Bloomberg and others that posted the press release. Yeah. And so if you extend that lens out a little bit more, we generated hundreds of different mentions of that acquisition. Did that help with AI? Did that help with LLMs? Is a press release the source of that success? It’s a confusing time. So I think that press releases may actually have an emergence in terms of success because maybe that is how you can start to get cited in some of these different publications.
[00:19:16] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. I love the fact that you’re saying it’s confusing time, and a lot of this is, we’re trying things out. We want to see what works. At Kalicube®, we’ve got a data set of a million entrepreneurs and their digital footprint, and we analyze 9.4 billion data points to figure out this stuff. So I think we’re in a pretty good position from that.
But I’ve actually been using Featured and had a few articles featured on it. It’s been hugely valuable and helpful to me. And it’s part of our strategy. And as you say, I don’t know quite where it’s gonna go, but I certainly have found it very useful and interesting.
[00:19:52] Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, that’s good to hear.
[00:19:53] Jason Barnard: So thank you so much. Absolutely brilliant talking to you. Thank you for your help. Thank you everyone for watching. I’m gonna give you the outro song. A quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Brett.
[00:20:06] Brett Farmiloe: Thanks, Jason. Appreciate it.
[00:20:08] Jason Barnard: Brilliant.
[00:20:08] Narrator: Your corporate and personal brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control. Kalicube®.
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