Just my 2 cents- for whatever it is worth- In defense of being featured.
Bob Stewart wrote a post about why some posts get featured. It is a really good post about how some of the featuring is done and that it is subjective which I believe is a good thing. Read the comment thread there. 
The illusive mystery as to how to get featured is one of the most talked about subjects on Active Rain.
Bob gives some examples as to what he likes to feature. Each staff member of Active Rain has different tastes and will feature different posts for different reasons. That also means that members of Active Rain, the bloggers, also have different tastes. What one person thinks is great for a feature another person can not figure out why. This is life. This is people.
It never fails that when one of these posts is written about being featured there are members that comment that they don't understand why some of the same people get featured over and over again.
While I can not speak for Lenn Harley and Broker Bryant and Sally Cheeseman and Patricia Kennedy- who all get featured often, I can speak for myself and maybe Richard Weisser ( who seconds my comment).
We are the top blog on Active Rain when it comes to subscribers second only to Active Rain's official blog and Brad Andersohn as a past Active Rain staff team member. We have almost 2,000 subscribers just from Active Rain members. That does not count those who subscribe via email or through social media and it does not include all the consumers who read us regularly.
Now there are those who love us and those that hate me or can not stand me. There are agents on Active Rain who say they will never ever refer a client to us or hire us as their coach. That is fine with us. We can not please all the people all the time, nor do we care to.
I have had my share of complaints from members crying out why is Katerina's post being featured again!?! Just as people scream and whine to Active Rain that Lenn is being featured too much or Todd Clark or Broker Bryant or Sally... they also do this to me.
I did not just wake up one morning to be a top blogger. We did not just suddenly have hundreds and thousands of subscribers. Yes, the more subscribers you have the more you will get featured. That is part of how things work in the blogging world, not just on Active Rain but also on other blogging communities.
Why would you get more features because you have more subscribers? Because more people read you and then click on the suggest button. You also get noticed by the Active Rain staff. I wrote tutorials for the Active Rain FAQ and for the Active Rain Community Guide.
Let me write the same thing I wrote on Bob's post about this in the comment thread:
We worked hard to be here where we are. When I started blogging on Active Rain in 2007 there were only about 17,000 members! Now we have over 200,000 members.
Do you know that those with staying power and those that added value to this community when it first started do get featured more often than others? That is called paying it forward, that is called rewarding the loyalty of those that paved the road for the rest that come on board later.
It was not a walk in the park to get to where we are today. I bust my butt to write good content that is engaging, debatable, helpful, tutorial in nature, beneficial, interesting, etc. There has been many a night throughout the years I have been blogging on Active Rain when I did not sleep in order to reach out to others, to blog, to comment, to return comments, to reach out, to touch, to connect, etc, etc and all of that hard work gets rewarded with followers and that results in featured posts. I started with Active Rain to get links to our website and in return to add value to the lives of others.
The best teacher is the one who sets the example and I have strived to do that for each member here in Active Rain. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.
You know, you don't just wake one day and have subscribers. You have to earn them. How did I earn them before I ever had a featured post? I went to their blogs and made comments, lots of them. I called members on the phone, connected with them on Twitter and Facebook. And I made sure that when they did come to our blog, that it was worthy of their visit.
So what better way to say thank you to those of us who do this than to feature our posts? I like to see the veterans featured. I don't have a problem with the same people being featured often maybe because I am one of them or maybe because I appreciate the reward.
I will never get why people have a problem with this because we earned this place, we did not game the system, we did not buy it with money, we worked hard to be where we are. Getting featured in our minds is like telling us Thank You for providing all of this content, in our case, over 1700 posts, for answering the emails at all hours of the day and night from members needing help, from taking the calls, etc, etc.
All of us who fit this category and many have been here since the beginning of Active Rain- that in and of itself deserves kudos, not being thrown under the bus. Because AR would not be the AR it is today without the veterans.
Copyright © By Katerina Gasset 2011*Active Rain Featured Posts-View From A Top Blogger- Just My 2 Cents*
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