Tiling lives or dies on the finish — and the finish is something people can actually see. A run of sharp before-and-afters and a name known for dead-straight grout will bring in more work than any clever marketing ever could. The whole trick is getting that proof in front of someone while they’re planning the room, and making it easy to ask you round. Here’s how I’d go about it, in plain English.
Shoot the detail, not just the room
Most tilers snap the finished bathroom from the doorway and call it done. A wide shot is fine, but it isn’t what proves you’re any good. The proof is in the close-ups — grout lines running arrow-straight, a mitred external corner where a lesser tiler would slap on a chunky plastic trim, cuts around the pan and the pipework so neat they look effortless, a pattern carried clean across a whole wall. Those are the things a good tiler sweats over and a bodger simply can’t fake, and they’re exactly what a nervous homeowner is squinting at when they’re deciding who to trust with their bathroom. So get down close, get the light skimming across the tiles so the level shows, and take the detail shot on every job. Do that for a few months across different rooms and you’ve built a portfolio that quietly makes your case day and night.
Photograph the whole job, rip-out included
The finished room is the payoff, but it’s the story that puts people at ease. A tiling job means days in someone’s home — dust, noise, a bathroom out of use, an old floor coming up — the bit customers quietly dread. So shoot the job as a sequence: the tired, cracked, dated room as you found it; the prep and the tanking that nobody else bothers to photograph; then the clean, level, beautifully finished result you hand back. That before-and-after does more than any sales pitch, because it shows the exact transformation they’re paying for — and showing the messy middle handled properly tells them you’ll leave their home watertight and tidy, not wrecked.
Get in with the people who hand out tiling work
A fair chunk of the best tiling never reaches a Google search at all — it comes through the people already standing in the customer’s kitchen or bathroom. Tile and bathroom showrooms, kitchen fitters, bathroom installers, builders and developers all need a reliable tiler they can pass a job to, and being the name in their phone is worth a steady drip of work. Land one solid relationship like that and it can outweigh a dozen one-off jobs — they come back again and again, and don’t nickel-and-dime every quote. It’s worth some deliberate effort — introducing yourself, doing one job so cleanly they never look elsewhere, leaving them a few photos they can show their own customers. This is the work that fills the gaps between the domestic jobs.
Be specific about the jobs you want more of
“Tiler” is a broad word, and a broad word drags in a bit of everything — including the fiddly, low-paid jobs you’d rather leave. The money sits in being specific. Wet room installs, large-format porcelain, natural stone like marble and travertine, patterned and herringbone floors, proper kitchen splashbacks — these get searched for by name, by people with a healthier budget and a clearer picture of what they want. The more plainly you spell out the jobs you’re actually chasing, the more you get found for them and picked for them, instead of fielding call-outs to regrout a leaky shower. Getting you visible for those specific searches, across the areas you cover, is the slow-and-steady bit I handle for tilers — here’s how I get you found.
Give the finish somewhere to live
A Google listing and a set of good photos will bring people to the door, but they need a proper place to land once they’re interested — and a Facebook page with a scattering of pictures doesn’t really do it. A simple, phone-first site that shows your galleries big, splits the work by room and by material, says a few honest words about how you work, and turns “ask for a quote” into one easy step will convert a browser into a real message. And unlike a rented feed that buries your best job in a week, it’s a patch of the internet that’s wholly yours, built to look like your finish rather than a template half the trade is using. That’s the part I build — here’s what it looks like for tilers.
Answer while the iron’s hot
This is where plenty of capable tilers leak work without noticing: the reply comes too late. Tiling isn’t urgent, so people line up two or three quotes and sit on them — and the tiler who gets back the same day, with a friendly note and an offer to come and measure up, grabs the head start, even if the earliest they could start is a month off. You don’t have to live on your phone. A quick reply — “thanks, I could pop round Thursday to take a look” — puts you ahead of the tiler who takes four days to surface. And with the sort of customer who cares about a proper finish, prompt and pleasant beats slow and cheap more often than you’d think.
None of this is rocket science, but it all wants doing properly — and keeping up with, which is the hard part when you’re on your knees laying a floor all week. Nail the detail shots, tell the story of each job, look after the trades who feed you work, and give people a simple way to find you — and you’ll spend far less time wondering where the next bathroom’s coming from. If you’d rather be on the tools than wrestling with any of this, tilers are exactly who I do this for.