College Pro Painters vs WebDiggin

Apr 09

Sometimes in our journey through the blogosphere, we find contests that put up websites that go head-to-head against each other in a popularity contest. Just for fun, we thought we’d put up WebDiggin against College Pro Painters Painting Contractor.

College Pro Painters was founded by a college student in Thunder Bay, Canada over 30 years ago. It is North America’s original and most successful student painting company. They paint homes in the summer months and all of their managers (who are franchisees) and grunts (who are paid by the hour) are full time college students. Each year they paint an average of 30,000 homes in communities throughout North America.

In contrast, WebDiggin is just about to hit our 1 year anniversary. We are one of millions of blogs in the blogosphere on the journey of trying to make money online. Although at the end of Feb 2008, we were the 8,911,366th best blog in the world, today we are at the 605,911th best blog in the world. (We even have 578 backlinks pointing to us according to Yahoo)

College Pro Painters (http://www.collegepro.com/) has a neat site that serve both as an advertisement to potential home owners who want their homes painted, to entrepreneurial students who want to run a franchise, to a recruitment board for student grunts who do the dirty work. They have your typical testimonials and product shots, but as they’re not in the cliche world of money-making-online blogs, the webdesign and the testimonials are quite nice. (No long one-page sales pages here. The target audience is regular websurfers, not internet marketers like us.

They do have a blog component to their site, but it’s not their centerpiece, nor is it a well used portion of the website. (The recruitment blog has 1 post and serves more of a role as question / answer, as oppose to job postings. This makes sense since individual franchise owners would do their own hiring.)

WebDiggin is powered by WordPress, and has the look and feel of a blog. The frustrating part of using a 3 column template is that sometimes one of the columns is too wide and a web browser will throw a column down to the bottom of the page. Sadly, we don’t have the expertise to be able to tweak that problem.

Obviously, we’re comparing apples to oranges here. College pro painters is a professional outfit. They have a nice site with the goal of building a relationship with potential house clients and employees to presell people into getting their house painted (or working for the company). WebDiggin is run as a hobby with the goal of trying to develop a business to make money online.

What College Pro Painters does well is to presell their product. They are a company of students who paint houses. By openly showing both both the sales and the backend franchise side of their business, they are trying to show that they are a people driven company - on both fronts.

We also are trying to presell our product. By being honest with the amount of money we’ve made and the effort it takes to make it, we’re trying to build relationships with our readers. If they use our recommended products to start their money-making adventure, then great.

Bottom Line: College Pro Painters must be doing something right to stay in business for over 30 years.

Question: How do you build relationships with your visitors to presell your product?