Hi, thanks for stopping by...

My name is John Devlin.

Firstly I am not a tradie; I am a marketer.

But I learned how to market trades businesses working fifteen years in home improvement businesses. I understand both sides.

I sold my business and transitioned into online marketing, where I have worked with countless trades based companies, helping them generate more leads online. I’ve been online coming up for ten years.

This is my blog, I am going to try and share everything that has worked (and not worked) for me, establishing not just my own businesses online, but many friends and clients I’ve worked alongside.

We are also hopefully going to have some fun with it too!

Be sure to reach out to me if you have any specific marketing challenges your facing, I enjoy helping out, and I’ve most likely come across whatever issue your facing.

I believe the future for successful tradespeople and large home service companies is online.

Below is a little about my journey so far.

How I started

At 15

I left school and starting door canvassing for my father’s home improvement company.

At 22

I eventually made it off the doors & into telesales! A big promotion at the time no more rainy days and a £50 a week pay rise!

At 25

I became the sales manager and started to take control of the advertising budgets.

It was at this point that I knew 100%.

That in this industry, the calls and leads are the be-all and end-all of the whole business.

It was a daily realisation that without enough leads every week, there could easily be no more business.

During the next five years, I invested, tested and tried every form of marketing for a tradesmen style or home improvement business.

You name it, and I will personally give you the upside, downside and profitability of that home improvement advertising.

From leaflets to newspapers, road signage to sign wrapped vans.

I’ve had shopping centre displays to Yell sponsored adverts.

I’ve seen and done them all, and I wrote about about it quite extensively here.

I spent the next five years of studying. Learning, reading everything I could to find out how companies like Yell could rank on the first page of Google, collect leads & sell them on to me.

There must hundreds of companies at it now creaming leads that should be going to contractors and selling you membership packages to get access to them along with your competitors!

I am not going to BS you and say digital marketing is easy, it’s not. It has taken me a degree level amount of time to get where I am today.

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What I'm up to now (nearly 40!)

Well, from starting just hoping to get more leads online for my landscaping company.

I’ve managed to use the skills I was learning along the way not only to transform that business but build several huge online websites that get thousands of visitors a week, and some per day!

Here are some of the projects I've built.

Here is one of my most significant achievements, from a £10 domain name to over 100,000 visitors a month from search engines.

Local company for 0 to 1200 visits in 3 months

Or remember the little landscaping company?

Yeah not so little any more!

That is now an award-winning artificial grass company doing massive projects like this.

Update: This business was sold in early 2020

I now have a clear understanding of online marketing in most industries. For the local home improvement industry, which is all about the local lead generation, this is where I have the most expertise.

So how does this help me?

I will be sharing easy and simple to understand tips and guides on how you can do SEO and digital marketing and build your businesses online.

It’s my real fear that local trades businesses who rely on leads are being left behind online, so many colossal membership websites out there now in every country that the little guy has no choice to pay to play.

But that’s no true

You can build a great website, yourself and it can generate exclusive leads, and you can be in control. I did it, I am doing it and so can you.

It takes time, no doubt and the tutorials and guides created here will help for sure, I never had a mentor or place to get any help when I started.

YouTube and buying courses was my avenue.

That’s the real reason I started this blog; I want to create something that wasn’t there when I started.

A hub of content, not created to sell but to teach the latest tactics and strategies for tradespeople to compete online.

Trust me; I’ve been where you are.

I was staring at a quote from YELL for £13,000 to try and get some damn leads.

But I chose to do it myself and landed a pretty new useful career into the bargain.

And your business can be a success online too.

Any question or advice you need you can reach me here