Loxon® Self-Cleaning Acrylic Coating

NEW SELF-CLEANING EXTERIOR COATING FROM SHERWIN-WILLIAMS EASILY SHEDS DIRT TO KEEP PROPERTIES LOOKING FRESH

CLEVELAND (April 2, 2018) — Sherwin-Williams is announcing the launch of Loxon^® Self-Cleaning Acrylic Coating, a product specifically engineered for exterior, above-grade masonry to provide a clean and attractive look with high-performance protection. The self-cleaning formula easily sheds dirt with rain or water contact and provides advanced durability, water shedding, wind driven rain and dirt pickup resistance.

“This new masonry coating is great for pros getting ready for the upcoming construction season, when updating or creating new outdoor spaces are top of mind,” said Steve Revnew, senior vice president of product innovation, Sherwin-Williams. “Sherwin-Williams developed Loxon Self-Cleaning Acrylic Coating to help contractors and property managers avoid costly repaints and extensive cleaning, resulting in improved efficiencies and high satisfaction levels.” 

In addition to stucco, masonry and cement board, Loxon Self-Cleaning Acrylic Coating can be applied directly to bare or previously coated concrete that is at least seven days old, has a pH of 6-13 and in temperatures down to 35 degrees Fahrenheit. Meeting the most stringent VOC regulations, the new product will be available in a flat sheen in a wide range of colors at Sherwin-Williams stores nationwide this spring.

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COLORSNAP MATCH FROM SHERWIN-WILLIAMS

TAKE THE GUESSWORK OUT OF COLOR MATCHING WITH COLORSNAP MATCH FROM SHERWIN-WILLIAMS

New portable matching tool connects to app, streamlines color-matching experience

CLEVELAND (Jan. 29, 2018) — Sherwin-Williams unveiled ColorsSnap Match, its new handheld color-matching tool aimed at helping everyone from painting contractors to designers, remodelers and homeowners with quick and confident color-matching. The new device connects to Sherwin-Williams free ColorSnap Match app via Bluetooth^® to deliver a streamlined experience and make it effortless to scan any surface or fabric to find corresponding Sherwin-Williams colors.

“We’re excited to get this product in the hands of professionals and consumers to give them an easy and affordable color-matching experience. This tool is lightweight and portable, making it convenient for on-the-go color matching,”
 Jeff Winter, vice president of residential marketing at Sherwin-Williams

The new device enables users to scan colors from any item or texture, including paint, textiles, carpet, tile, apparel, accessories and more, then instantly find the closest Sherwin-Williams paint color. ColorSnap Match will also save scans, and match and show Sherwin-Williams color palettes, making color selection portable and convenient.

The ColorSnap Match paint-scanning device is available in Sherwin-Williams stores nationwide for $69.99, and the ColorSnap Match app is available for both iOS and Android devices. For more information, please visit colorsnap.com/match or speak to your local Sherwin-Williams store representative.

Ask Sherwin-Williams^TM

For more than 150 years, Sherwin-Williams has been an industry leader in the development of technologically advanced paint and coatings. As the nation’s largest specialty retailer of paint and painting supplies, Sherwin-Williams is dedicated to supporting both do-it-yourselfers and painting professionals with exceptional and exclusive products, resources to make confident color selections and expert, personalized service at its more than 4,200 neighborhood stores across North America. For more information, visit sherwin-williams.com. Join Sherwin-Williams on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram.

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Zipper Rollers

 

McCauley Tools had modest beginnings. In 2005, while painting their house for the market, Garth and Kim Getchell were pulled into an intriguing conversation with seasoned painting contractor Pat McCauley who demonstrated a rough prototype of a unique painting tool that, at first, simply sparked the interest of the Getchell’s: then, their excitement.

Veterans of 25 years of commercial contracting with their own 30 member painting crew, Garth and Kim immediately recognized the potential of this creative device and acquired the company. After an exhaustive research and development period, this exciting time culminated in the first patented flexible extension arm painting tools – The Brush Flex and Mini Roller Flex.

Over the years Garth and Kim Getchell have worked hard to make McCauley Tools a solid, reliable, cutting edge company. Dedicated to their work, they put the needs of professional and DIY painters first and foremost.

Thanks to Garth for providing the Zipper Rollers to our Product Feedback Team. The have been using them out in the field and will report back soon. If you have used the revolver, feel free to fill out the review form below and let us know what you think!

If you would like to learn more or order, head over to their site, McCauley Tools

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The Revolver

Marketing 101: Ideas for Promotions in the Painting Industry

Every business needs marketing in order to get well-known and effectively stand out in the crowd. Without eye-catching marketing strategies and campaigns, there’s no chance that any business will reach success anytime soon. The same goes for the painting industry. The fact of the matter is that every house or condo owner will need an exterior or interior paint job sooner or later. Sure, young people and new couples may try to do it themselves, but when their DIY paint job doesn’t turn out like they wanted it, they’ll call for professionals to fix the mess they’ve made.

That’s why you need to market your painting business and let people know that you have the best services available at their disposal. Mix a bit of traditional and digital marketing to let people know you’re the leading business in the painting industry. Here are a few promotion ideas that will boost your marketing efforts.

Good Old Advertising

Traditional advertisements are still a powerful way of promoting your business, especially for less digital industries, such as painting businesses. In addition, you don’t have a niche-specific target audience. Instead, every homeowner is your desired customer and that’s why local advertisements can prove much more effective in promoting your business than other marketing strategies. Based on your budget, you can advertise in the local newspaper, billboards, TV stations, radio and Yellow Pages.

You can also print out leaflets and brochures that you’ll hand out to people on the street. It’s a good idea to target neighborhoods with older building and homes – 10 years old or older, because they’re most likely in need of a new paint job. Improving awareness and visibility in your local area will give your painting business the necessary push to help it grow and expand further.

Use Direct Mail

Direct mail is another traditional marketing method where you design and tailor your message specifically for your potential customers. The main reason this marketing method is so effective is because it avoids all the noise in the digital world and goes straight to the consumers. However, this method is a bit costly, since you need to print out and mail material, but once it hits the mark, your business will get the desired attention. There is the risk of people oftentimes throwing direct mail into the garbage because they consider it spam.

Still, it won’t hurt to try out direct mail, especially since it holds great potential. You can design a catalogue of your previous work and include discounts and personalized offers. Also, make sure you create a message that will describe your work and your offer in the best and most convincing way possible, so that it has better chances of getting people interested.

Check out SendOut Cards here for follow up ideas!

Try Partnering with other Businesses

There are plenty of other businesses in the vicinity that are trying to stay on top of their game. These non-competitive businesses may be the key to mutual growth and prosperity. You can partner up with other business and combine resources, as well as marketing efforts to promote each other more effectively. For instance, local carpet cleaners, plumbers and electricians can add you to their advertisements and word-of mouth recommendations, and in return you can do the same for them.

Maintain an Online Presence

As beneficial as traditional marketing can be for less digital industries, there’s also a benefit in taking a digital approach. Creating an online presence can help expand your reach, as well as your influence. A good way to do so is to leverage social media platforms and build your presence on networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

That way you can showcase your work and promote your business to online audiences. This will help grow your customer base and may even help grow your business outside the local area you’re currently operating in.

 

The painting industry requires good marketing like any other industry. Without good marketing, there’s no valid way to promote your business or to attract customers. However, if you’re creative and innovative, you’ll be able to develop an effective promotional campaign that will not just make your painting business well-known, but successful and profitable as well.

My name is Alex Williams, born and raised in beautiful Sydney. I am a journalism graduate, and a rookie blogger trying to find my luck. Blogs are the perfect opportunity for presenting yourself to wider audience, getting the chance to showcase my expertise and receiving recognition. I am a regular contributor at BizzMark Blog.

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5 Ways Auditing your Blog will increase Organic Traffic

If you are looking for ways to strengthen your blog’s web presence, a full-fledged SEO audit can do wonders. SEO stands for search engine optimization and helps to send relevant and contextual signals to search engines that allow increased visibility of your blog through keywords.

But the world of SEO is quite complex and before deciding to implement any strategy, you should have clear goals. This is when an SEO audit can help you immensely. It not only updates you about your competitors, but also provides you a way to overtake them in search results. SEO auditing is an excellent benchmarking tool that can add a lot of valuable followers to your blog.

Once you have decided to run an SEO audit, choose a reliable SEO audit tool that can help you figure out strategies to increase the organic traffic of your blog. There are many available in the market such as Growth Robotics, SEO Auditor, Seomator and others. An SEO audit covers the current rankings, competitor comparison, keywords, meta data, formatting, coding, content and links of your blog.

Let us take a detailed look on the ways in which an SEO audit can increase organic traffic for your blog:

1- Increased conversion rates

If you are running an e-commerce business through your blog, increasing conversion rates might be one of the biggest challenges that you face. An audit can help you restructure your website design, landing pages, calls-to-action and content so that you can maximize conversions.

An SEO audit can help simplify the process of restructuring your website through proper planning, testing and analysis of the current SEO rankings of your blog. These changes can help you reach maximum organic traffic, consequently increasing the overall conversion rates of your blog.

2- Better SEO

SEO is one department that you can’t ignore, if you aim to run a successful blog. If you follow an organized content marketing strategy, you can see up to 2,000% increase in blog traffic and upto 40% increase in revenue, according to a research by Marketing Sherpa.

But the secret behind a successful content strategy depends on good SEO. With Google making more than 500 changes to its algorithm per year, it is difficult to stay on top of the game. This is why, an SEO audit will evaluate your SEO and give relevant suggestions to improve content quality. High quality content can help you provide a better user experience, hence, increasing bounce rates and repeat visits on your blog.

3- Enhanced functionality

There is nothing more off putting than a poorly designed website. If you fail to provide a user-friendly interface on your website, you can lose a lot of traffic. And, according to a recent research, it takes even less than two-tenths of a second for a customer to form his first impression of your website. This is why, it is important to convey reliability and professionalism through your website’s design. A website audit can pinpoint areas of improvement so that you can redesign the structure and content to increase your blog’s functionality and organic traffic.

4- Relevant content

Click here to get yours!

Technical terms such as bounce rates, time on site, page views, etc. are extremely important but at the end of the day people will re-visit your blog only because of high quality content. If you have relevant and unique content to offer, nothing can stop the traffic from coming towards your blog.

A website audit will help you identify the most trending topics so that you can design your content accordingly. It can also help you come up with content presentation ideas like words, images, video, channels, etc. Your content strategy will be much more focused after the audit and you can produce content that your followers want to see. A happy user will increase overall organic rankings in search engines automatically.

 

5- Better organic search visibility

If you want to increase your blog’s SEO rankings, you have to decide some criteria in which you want to rank it. A good way to make this happen is by maintaining a strong keyword strategy. Once you have understood the competing market in detail, you can redefine your SEO strategies that incorporate targeted keywords within all the content of your blog.

Google analytics can help you decide what your website should rank for, based on your blog’s current content and on-page optimization. A website audit can help you include better keywords and will provide a strong SEO research. Use this information to amplify traffic towards your website and also include it in your offsite blog marketing channels.

Conclusion

With so many benefits, it has become necessary to invest time and money in a website audit, so that you can increase organic traffic towards your blog. The everchanging search environment needs an expert approach, and even small changes can create a strong impact on your blog’s SEO performance and conversions.

So, start thinking about performing a website audit soon!

Audrey Throne is a mother of a 2-year old and a professional blogger by choice. Throne is passionate about health, technology and management and blogs frequently on these topics.

Find her on Twitter: @audrey_throne.

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20 REASONS 20 YEAR OLDS MIGHT CONSIDER STARTING A PAINTING BUSINESS

 

1. You will learn how to work. Developing a good work ethic – a willingness to work hard, to work with your hands – are abilities that will serve you for the rest of your life.
   
2. You will learn a skill. Learning a skill is developing an asset. You are that asset. You can leverage your skills to make money over the course of your life. It is an investment in yourself. Mastering a skill is key to enjoying a high level of job satisfaction.
3. You will learn the importance of creating value. This is a critical life lesson many self-absorbed people never get a chance to learn. Cold hard truth: For most of us, no one is awaiting our arrival. Our success depends on our ability to create value in other people’s lives. Leave your sense of entitlement behind and shift into the entrepreneurial mindset. It will help to stop waiting for permission and acceptance, get out there and make things happen. A valuable attitude that will benefit you in whatever you pursue later in life.
4. You will learn to problem solve. You will come to see problems as opportunities. Challenges will present as solutions. You will learn to solve your own problems and create your own opportunities. You will learn to solve other people’s problems, while creating opportunities for yourself.
5. You will learn to prioritize amidst overwhelm. What is essential here, now?
6. You will learn to manage stress. Your ability to handle stress will increase and you will develop strategies for minimizing stress. You will learn to handle problems with less emotion. You will learn how to limit your exposure to unnecessary stress, setting boundaries for yourself  and others.
7. You will learn that complaining and feeling sorry for yourself adds zero value to your life. As a good friend once told me: ‘Don’t complain unless you are willing to change.’
8. You will learn that learning never ends and is a lifelong pursuit, not an objective or a destination. ‘Getting an education’ is not the goal. Constantly learning, building new skills and adapting will be normal. And you will learn a lot, everyday.
   
   
9. There is plenty of work out there. The industry is not threatened. There is a skilled labour shortage. Baby Boomers are the wealthiest generation in the history of mankind and they are retiring. Often, their most prized asset is their home. The knowledge based economy is snatching up a lot of industrious young people. This all adds up to high demand for painters, and low supply.
10. Soft skills you acquire are transferrable to so many other jobs. You will benefit from these skills for the rest of your working life: social intelligence, self-management, team management, value creation, problem solving, sales, organization, intentionality, willingness to get the job done, integrity, attention to detail, money management, communication, self motivated learning, etc.
    
    
11. Hard skills are transportable to any location you may choose to move to. Want to move to a more prosperous area where opportunities abound? Want to move for family reasons? Want to help with disaster relief work? Want to move somewhere so you can transition into another career? If you run your own business and have the skills to start up again, where you live is largely in your control.
12. Minimal barrier to entry. Compared to other trades, the start up costs are lower. There are less certification and permits required. You don’t require a lot of expensive tools.
13. You will learn accountability. Not just to others. When you have a job you are accountable to your superiors for certain results and procedures, as you are to your clients when self employed. However, becoming accountable to ourselves is a more powerful concept that few learn. Depending on others for direction, acceptance and reward can be a difficult cycle to break. As a business owner, you are primarily accountable to yourself for results. No excuses. No permission. No barriers. That is the so-called ‘freedom’ so many seek in starting a business – the autonomy to make decisions and actualize your intentions, own your results both in business and in your personal life. Own your days. Own your business. Own your results. Own your home. Think like an owner. Freedom = Accountability.
14. You will learn to let go of perfectionism. Perfectionism is a bad thing. It sucks the joy out of life and profit out of business. Reasonable clients don’t expect it. Craftsmanship and attention to detail are very important, but you will learn to balance that with letting go of perfectionism.
    
    
15. You will enjoy the deep satisfaction of seeing the results of your hard work on a daily basis. This is profoundly important to our well being and self respect. You will see tangible, visible results each work day. You will see the impact your work has on your clients as they marvel at the results of your skills and efforts. You will see the good results of providing for yourself and your family. And in a larger sense you have the opportunity to contribute positively to your community.
16. Novelty. Can you imagine the soul crushing experience of working in a cubicle farm under the artificial lighting all day, day in day out? Whereas getting to work on unique projects, in different places and for a variety of people is rewarding in itself. We all need new challenges, need to meet new people, have new experiences.
    
    
17. You get to listen to music, or podcasts while you work. Certain types of music are proven to enhance your mental well being. Podcasts cast help you learn something new everyday. You can even take university courses via podcast. Get smart, be happy, make money. Not a bad way to spend the day.
18. Tax write offs. Lower your taxable income by being able to right off more expenses against your employment income. Fuel to and from work, cell phone, internet, etc.
    
    
19. The cash flow is pretty good. There is no ceiling on your income. There will be more money flowing through your hands than if you worked a part time retail job. You will learn to manage money quickly.
20. You will stand out from the competition. There are not a lot of younger painters with the initiative to be in business. Potential customers will notice, and many will want to support you. If you are a young woman, the opportunity is even greater as some people may be more comfortable with a woman working in their home, and it is even more unique – different in a legitimate way, not contrived. Different is good.
21. Imagine getting paid to learn all this and grow as a person? That is the opportunity awaiting a young person willing to work hard. You will get paid to learn all of these real world skills, versus paying to learn theories in school.

None of this is easy. In fact, it is all difficult. It can be very difficult – dangerous working conditions, toxic substances, heights, heat, financial risk, potential for conflict, complicated steps to getting started, accounting and taxes – it can be overwhelming, especially at the outset. But life is difficult and the sooner you learn the skills required to thrive, the better off you will be.

You may want to eventually transition into work that is less physically demanding or dangerous, work that creates exponential value, work that is more sustainable as you get older. But the value of learning a skill and running a business when you are young is a wise investment in yourself. If you like to work hard, are a quick learner and have some motivation, I believe in you – you can do it! Now get out there and make it happen! There is nothing that can stop you.

Simon Kuhl is a professional painter working on beautiful Vancouver Island, BC. He owns Sombrio Painting Co. and specializes in custom painting, staining and plastering solutions. He also operates Micro Contractor Blog in support of other small independent painting contractors. Beyond business, painting and writing, Simon loves spending time with his family exploring outdoors, reading and portrait photography.

 

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