Guest Blog: Andy Crichton

This is a new feature to our blog, where we will have both tradesmen and trade companies as guest bloggers.

They will range from advice, hints and tips to anecdotes about customers. So if you’d like to be involved and write for us email emma@yourtradebase.com, and you can be our next guest blogger!

To kick off the very first guest blog is Andy Crichton, a specialist painter and decorator who runs his traditional painter website. Andy and fellow Traditional Painters offer their services around the UK, hand-painting kitchens and furniture, wallpapering, emulsioning, specifying materials, offering tuition, and even painting wooden boats. They have seen it all.

Here is Andy’s contribution –

There are several themes that keep coming up from disgruntled decorators:

• Don’t share your secrets else everyone will do it and you will lose out.
  Blogs on construction based websites are for solving problems, telling people something they may not know, or showing case studies of work. I had a few things to share, spent hours every night for weeks and months on the site and eventually the content was read in sufficient numbers by people in my area and work came in.It is sad how many really good tradesmen and women are sat at home because they won’t give their knowledge away and embrace smarter and more in depth presentation ideas, unlike the tradesman who has all that “basic” information ready for potential clients, for free.

• Websites can say anything, so people don’t believe what they read.
  I have read a lot of articles and visited sites of tradespeople I know. I know them and their work, and some aren’t always being truthful. I was always brought up to under promise and over deliver, and so I could deliver what I promoted on my site.Being able to practice what you preach is sometimes overlooked, and online marketers often fabricate to impress. But when it comes to the crunch, if you say you know what you are doing online, but in real life you are clueless, your credibility will be out the window – because the downside of the internet is that dissatisfied customers can express their disappointment to a LOT of people quickly.

• Almost no decorators have a solid web presence that brings in work.
  Most who are online have been ripped off and are paying monthly fees for sites that are glorified brochures, not sales generators. Tradesmen who see the value of a good website, and use a blog to help potential clients to understand what is involved, will have a lot more calls coming in, than if they just relied on the old ways of marketing. And if they do it themselves, the internet marketing path is much more affordable than the printer and magazine ad days.This is the sort of approach I took, and now encourage my kitchen painter colleagues to do too.

Andy Crichton

Thanks Andy for your contribution!

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