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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkwGY1SwkDU

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brettfarmiloe_the-biggest-challenge-our-customers-face-activity-7363610014176968706-QbwdBrett 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.