How to define certain posts as featured posts in WordPress?

I need to make a four posts featured content slider but not with the latest 4 posts. Instead I wanna define certain posts as featured, now I know I can make a new category as Featured and add it as a multiple category to the posts I wanna define as featured and something similar could also be done using a tag as well.

But I was thinking someone here might have a different approach without requiring me to make a featured c开发者_C百科ategory or tag, which would be great.

If anyone has a solution, please lemme know.

Thanks.

All help is greatly appreciated.

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Make these posts sticky.