Kudzu.com’s Rating System vs ToFixIt!

Kudzu.com has done a very good job marketing their referral service .com company for the past 1 1/2 years in San Diego. One of the reasons it has worked well for them is because they have a big marketing budget and a big name company keeping them on the top. Cox Communications owns Kudzu, if that tells you anything! They must have known that the yellow pages were suffering in recent years so they came up with supposedly a "non yellow page" way of advertising. However, as we have started to realize, it is still just another yellow page directory with the added bonus of leaving comments/reviews. The only real way to get listed on Kudzu is if you pay a lot of money. If you don't pay enough money, you won't get good listings and visibility. It is rather frustrating, because it appears there are only two paid painting advertisers on Kudzu. We have a very small advertising budget for Kudzu, but we do pay for our spot. We did a search for our company with our zip code, and we showed up as number 11 on the page. There were about 9 other companies ahead of us that got prominent spots but did not even do painting. Why? Because they paid more money. One of our biggest competitors around town, "King of the Painters" has committed a rather large amount of marketing dollars to Kudzu and gets the number one placement on the entire site including advertising on our landing PAGE! We went on to our paid advertising spot today, and there was the King's advertisement spot on our page: advertising that they were the best! They do have a great reputation, but we thought it was funny that they were allowed to have a listing on our own advertising page. 

So, Kudzu's tagline is "The way to find San Diego's Best Services" is not quite accurate. If you are looking for the company that really does recommend the best and only the best, go to http://www.tofixit.com. They do a thorough background check on all service companies that are involved to make sure they provide the best service and are great companies to recommend. If they are not, they toss them out of the program even if they have a big marketing budget!