How to get more work as a tradesperson: 12 ways ranked by cost and payoff

I build websites for UK tradespeople for a living, so you'd expect me to tell you the answer to "how do I get more work?" is a website. It isn't, or at least not first. There are about twelve channels that reliably bring work to a small trade business, most of them are free, and some of the paid ones are a worse deal than the people selling them admit.

So here's the honest version: all twelve, ranked roughly from free to expensive, with a real cost, how fast each one pays off, how much effort it takes, and a plain verdict. The free ones come first because that's the order you should actually do them in.

01Word of mouth, systematised

Word of mouth is still king. Every tradesperson knows this, which is why so many stop there. The problem isn't that referrals don't work, it's that they're fragile on their own. One big client finishes, a developer pauses a project, you move area, and the phone goes quiet for a month with nothing behind it.

The fix isn't to replace word of mouth, it's to stop leaving it to luck. Three habits turn it from something that happens to you into something you run:

• Actually ask. At the end of every job that went well: "If you know anyone who needs a [trade], I'd really appreciate the recommendation." Most customers are happy to, almost none think of it unprompted.
• Leave cards behind. Two or three cards with every finished job, one taped inside the boiler cupboard, fuse board or under the sink. Future-you gets the callback in five years.
• Thank referrers properly. A text, a bottle, a tenner off their next job. People who get thanked refer again.

Cost: a box of business cards. Pays off: weeks to months, then forever. Effort: a sentence per job. Verdict: non-negotiable, but never let it be your only channel.

02Google Business Profile + reviews

If I could only recommend one thing on this list, it's this. A Google Business Profile is the free listing that appears in the map results when someone searches "electrician near me" or "plumber Wallingford", and for local trades it's where a huge share of new enquiries actually start. Setting one up costs nothing and takes an evening: verify it, fill in every field, add real photos of real jobs, keep your hours and service areas accurate. I've written a full walkthrough in my Google Business Profile guide.

Then the part most tradespeople skip: reviews, collected weekly. Google largely decides who appears in that map box based on review count, review recency and how complete the profile is. Ten reviews trickling in over ten weeks beats thirty in one burst then silence. Text every happy customer a direct review link on the day you finish, while they're still pleased with you. There's a whole method in how to get more Google reviews.

Cost: free. Pays off: often within weeks. Effort: one evening of setup, then one text per finished job. Verdict: the highest return-per-effort marketing a tradesperson can do in 2026. Do this before you spend a penny anywhere else.

03The before/after photo habit

Nothing sells trade work like the work. A muddy garden becoming a patio, a tired bathroom becoming a nice one. Get in the habit of taking a before photo when you arrive and an after photo when you leave, every job, phone in pocket, ten seconds each.

Those photos then feed everything else on this list: your Google Business Profile (active profiles with fresh photos do better), your Facebook page, your WhatsApp status, your website's gallery. One habit, four channels fed. The tradespeople with the best marketing I know aren't doing anything clever, they just have two years of before-and-afters and their competitors have a blurry logo.

Cost: free. Pays off: compounds over months. Effort: twenty seconds a job. Verdict: the cheapest marketing asset you'll ever own. Start today, thank yourself in a year.

04WhatsApp status and broadcast lists

Quietly effective and almost nobody talks about it. Most of your past customers have your number saved, which means they see your WhatsApp status. Post a before-and-after there once or twice a week and you're doing free advertising to the exact people most likely to hire you again or recommend you, without the awkwardness of a sales message.

A broadcast list goes one step further: a message sent individually to a list of past customers. Used once or twice a year ("Booking up spring exterior work now, reply if you want a date") it fills diaries. Used monthly it gets you muted. Be honest with yourself about which side of that line you're on.

Cost: free. Pays off: days, when you have an audience of past customers. Effort: minutes a week. Verdict: excellent for anyone two or more years into trading. Near useless in year one, because the audience doesn't exist yet.

05Facebook page and local groups

Local Facebook groups ("Spotted in Didcot", village noticeboards) are where a lot of "can anyone recommend a plumber?" posts happen every single day. You mostly can't advertise in them, but you don't need to: when you're recommended, people click your name, and a Facebook page with recent job photos and reviews closes the deal. An empty page, or a personal profile full of politics, loses it.

So the play is: keep a tidy business page, post your before-and-afters there weekly, and encourage happy customers to name you in those threads. A Facebook page is genuinely enough for some one-person businesses in year one, though it has real limits as your main web presence, which I've covered honestly in Facebook page vs a website.

Cost: free. Pays off: weeks. Effort: an hour a week. Verdict: worth doing properly in almost every town, and the recommendation threads alone justify it.

06Nextdoor

Nextdoor is the neighbourhood app, skewing towards exactly the homeowners who hire trades: older, settled, house-proud. A free business page there gets you into local recommendation threads, and in the areas where Nextdoor is active, tradespeople report a steady trickle of decent enquiries. The catch is that activity varies wildly by postcode: buzzing in some commuter towns and villages, a ghost town elsewhere.

Cost: free (paid ads exist, but try free first). Pays off: weeks to months. Effort: low, mostly responding when mentioned. Verdict: claim the free page, test it for three months, keep it if your area's active. Don't pay for ads until the free listing has proven your patch is alive.

07Reactivating past customers

The cheapest new job is one from an old customer. Anyone trading a few years is sitting on a list of people who already trust them, and most trades never contact that list again. A simple text or email twice a year works: boiler service reminders, gutter clears before autumn, "we're booking decking work for spring". Frame it as a useful reminder, not a plea for work, because for the customer it genuinely is one.

You don't need software. A spreadsheet of names, numbers and what you did for them, plus an hour with your phone, is the whole system. If you take one number from this article: getting a repeat customer costs you a text; getting a stranger via a lead platform costs £7 to £40 or more per lead. Same job, wildly different price.

Cost: free. Pays off: days to weeks. Effort: a couple of hours, twice a year. Verdict: the most underused channel in the trades. Embarrassingly effective for how little it takes.

08Van signage and yard boards

The first paid item on the list, and it's a one-off. A sign-written van is a moving advert parked outside every job you do, which is precisely where your next customers live: neighbours see the van, see the work happening, and half the battle's won. Basic vinyl lettering can run from roughly £100 to £300, a proper part-wrap more like £500 to £1,000 or so depending on the van and design. Add site boards ("Another bathroom by...") for a few pounds each and every job advertises itself for the duration.

One detail that matters more than the design: the van should point somewhere. A phone number and a website address people can actually remember. "SmithsPlumbing.co.uk" on the van, and a site that looks as good as the van when they type it in.

Cost: roughly £100 to £1,000 one-off. Pays off: slowly and permanently. Effort: none after day one. Verdict: excellent value over the life of the van. Just don't let a smart van point at no website, or a bad one.

09A proper website + local SEO

My trade, so weigh my bias accordingly, and let me be straight about when you don't need one: if you're booked solid for a year from referrals and you want to stay a one-person band, a website won't change your life, and I'd rather tell you that than take your money. I've written the honest case both ways in do tradespeople actually need a website?

For everyone else, the website does two jobs. First, it closes the leads other channels create: when someone's recommended in a Facebook thread, most people look them up before calling, and no website (or a dated one) quietly kills a share of those referrals. Second, with local SEO done properly, pages targeting your town and trade, it generates its own enquiries from people searching "roofer Abingdon" who've never heard of you. That second part takes weeks to months to build, but unlike every paid channel here, a ranking you earn keeps sending work without a per-lead bill.

It's also the only channel on this list you own. Facebook can change its algorithm, Checkatrade can raise its prices, Google can suspend a profile. Your own site and domain are yours.

Cost: varies hugely; my builds start at £100 plus £20/month, agencies charge thousands. Pays off: immediately as a referral-closer, months for search rankings. Effort: low if someone runs it for you. Verdict: the foundation everything else feeds into, second only to your Google profile, and the two work best as a pair.

10Local sponsorships

Sponsoring the village fete, the kids' football kit, the cricket club scoreboard. Typical costs run from about £100 to £500 a year for grassroots stuff, and the honest truth is you'll rarely trace a specific job back to it. What it buys is familiarity: your name on twenty kids' shirts for two seasons means that when your leaflet or Facebook post appears, you're already "the local one". As a bonus, a link from the club's website to yours is a genuinely good local SEO signal.

Cost: roughly £100 to £500 a year. Pays off: slowly, over a year or more. Effort: none. Verdict: a nice amplifier once the fundamentals are done, and a decent thing to do besides. Never the first pound you spend on marketing.

11Checkatrade, MyBuilder and the lead platforms

The channel that generates the most arguments in any trade WhatsApp group. Quick version of the real costs in 2026: Checkatrade membership typically lands somewhere around £50 to £120+ a month depending on trade and area. MyBuilder has no subscription but charges a shortlist fee when a homeowner picks you to quote, scaled to job size, and you pay whether or not you win the work. Bark sells credits at roughly £1.20+ each, with a single lead usually costing somewhere in the £7 to £40 range depending on trade and job size.

The structural problem is the same on all of them: the lead is shared. You and several other trades pay for or chase the same enquiry, and the homeowner's comparing quotes, which drags prices down. You're also building a reputation on rented ground: your reviews live on their platform, boosting their domain, not yours.

And yet, honestly: there are times they're the right call. New to an area with no reputation and no reviews? A platform can keep the van moving while the free channels build. Quiet first winter? Same. The mistake isn't using them, it's treating a per-lead tax as a permanent business model instead of scaffolding you eventually take down. Full breakdown with the sums in are Checkatrade, MyBuilder and Bark worth it?

Cost: realistically £600 to £1,500+ a year in fees for active use. Pays off: days. Effort: quoting fast, repeatedly, against competition. Verdict: useful scaffolding early on or in a quiet patch. An expensive habit as a forever plan.

12Google Ads and Local Services Ads

The fastest tap on the list, and the most expensive to leave running. With Google Ads, UK trades typically pay somewhere in the low pounds per click, often £1.50 to £3 or more for local trade searches, and a click is not a customer: without a decent landing page you can burn a week's budget on people who bounce. Local Services Ads, where you appear at the very top with a "Google Guaranteed" badge and pay per lead rather than per click, have been rolling out to UK trades and are worth a look if they're live for your trade and area, because you pay for enquiries rather than clicks.

The honest case for ads: nothing else on this list can put you in front of someone searching "emergency plumber near me" tonight. If you need work this week, ads and lead platforms are the only levers that pull that fast. The honest case against: the moment you stop paying, you vanish, which is the opposite of how reviews, rankings and reputation behave. My rule of thumb is ads make sense as a temporary boost or for high-value emergency trades, and rarely as the foundation. Longer version in Google Ads vs SEO for a small business.

Cost: realistically £200 to £500+ a month to matter. Pays off: days. Effort: moderate, and easy to waste money without help. Verdict: a powerful tap, not a foundation. Turn it on when the diary's thin, off when it's full.

13The ranking, side by side

Notice the pattern: the channels that pay off forever are mostly free or cheap, and slow. The channels that pay off this week are expensive, and stop dead when the money does. A sane plan uses the fast ones as a bridge while the slow ones compound, not as the whole strategy.

Common questions I get

"What's the fastest way to get work when the diary's empty right now?"

Paid, honestly. Lead platforms and Google Ads produce enquiries in days; nothing free moves that fast except texting past customers, which you should do first because it's free. Just go in knowing the paid tap is a bridge, and use the breathing room it buys to build the channels that don't bill you per job.

"I get all my work from word of mouth. Why change anything?"

If it's genuinely keeping you booked, don't change it, add a safety net under it. The referral pipelines that feel unshakeable are usually two or three relationships deep, and one retirement or house move away from a quiet spring. The free items above are the net.

"How much should all this cost me a month?"

The foundations, profile, reviews, photos, reactivation, are free. A decent website for a small trade business shouldn't need to cost more than a modest fixed monthly amount, and I've broken down real numbers in what a small business website costs in the UK. Everything beyond that, platforms, ads, sponsorship, is optional and should earn its keep or get cut.