Why Isn't Self-Promotion Enough?
You can write the best LinkedIn post in the world and it will only ever be you talking about yourself. That's not a knock on LinkedIn, it's a structural limitation. Self-promotion, no matter how good, signals nothing about external validation. A reader can tell the difference between a claim you made about yourself and a claim someone else made about you, even when the wording is nearly identical.
A feature article on MSN.com is different. Someone outside your organization, an editor, a journalist, a platform with 500 million monthly visitors, decided your story was worth publishing. That implicit endorsement is something you cannot buy on social media, no amount of ad spend replicates an editor deciding your story was worth running.
What Do Prospects See When They Search Your Name?
Before any significant business conversation, someone is Googling you. An investor before a pitch. An enterprise buyer before signing. A potential partner before agreeing to a call. What they find shapes how they show up in that conversation, often before you've had a chance to make a first impression in person.
If what they find is only your own content, you've handed them no signal beyond what you chose to say about yourself. If they find an MSN.com feature, you've given them third-party validation before you've said a word. Picture two founders pitching the same idea: one shows up as a name with a LinkedIn profile, the other shows up as someone a national platform already decided was worth covering. The room treats them differently before either says a word.
Does an MSN Feature Keep Working Over Time?
A press placement doesn't expire. A link to an MSN article in your email signature, LinkedIn bio, investor deck, or pitch materials keeps working indefinitely. It raises the perceived floor of who you are before a conversation starts, and it keeps doing that work without you having to remember to bring it up.
The first placement also makes the next one easier. Editors and journalists look at existing coverage when evaluating whether to cover someone. One strong placement on a high-authority site seeds future opportunities, a pattern that compounds the way any track record does, each new mention becomes easier to earn than the last.
Why MSN.com Specifically?
MSN.com reaches over 500 million people monthly and syndicates content from established publishers. A feature there carries the domain authority of a major platform, which means it ranks well in search and stays indexed, showing up in results long after most fresh content has scrolled off the front page of anything else you've published.
It's also fast relative to other high-authority placements, a written feature can often go live within days rather than the weeks a broadcast segment might take to book and air. That makes it a practical starting point when you need a credible result showing up soon, not months from now.
What Does This Look Like in Practice?
Say you're six weeks from closing a funding round. Your name currently returns a LinkedIn profile, a company page, and not much else. An MSN feature published this week means that by the time term sheets are being discussed, the search results have changed, an investor doing basic diligence finds a third party's account of your work instead of just your own.
For most executives, the calculus is simple: the cost of not having this coverage is the conversations where you had less credibility than you deserved, and you rarely find out which conversations those were.
But What If You Already Have Some Press Coverage?
Having one old article from years ago isn't the same as having a current, findable presence. Search results skew toward recency, so a single mention from three years back can quietly slip past the second or third page while newer, less relevant content about someone else with a similar name takes the top spot.
Treat existing coverage as a foundation to build on, not a box already checked. Adding a fresh MSN feature on top of an older placement reinforces both, the newer piece often links back to or references the story the first one started telling. Over time this turns into a small but real archive, the kind of thing a diligence team notices when it spans years rather than a single moment.
Third-party proof on MSN.com
MSN Feature Package
A guaranteed MSN.com feature article with no interview required, the fastest way to get a searchable citation from a recognized outlet.
