Some of you will be curious to know more about me – so here we go!

I am Robert Bruce Anderson.

It is now the end of 2024 making me 64 years old. (No, I do not know how that happened).

What I do these days.

I do online marketing for myself and selected clients.

I own about 25 websites of which only a few are “active”

I do art and the occasional art show. I have promised to stop doing craft shows and so far I have managed to stick to this plan.

My workshop and craft room are – My Happy Place – and I try to spend time there every day.

I am reviving this website and am planning big things for it, and if you are here reading this, then it is working out just fine for both of us.

Combining my addiction to arts and crafts with my compulsive need to help people makes this website a perfect place for me to hang out.

My Early Crafting Years

I have always been creative and during the 80’s crafting was for learning and fun.

I had a kitchen unit business that through silly decisions went into liquidation and I went through a massive learning curve. I lost millions. It’s OK, everything turned out just fine.

But the good news is that it got me doing crafts as a full-time income. So, around 1989 I started doing jewellery on the craft markets.

Like everyone else, I started with a table and some jewellery stands and travelled to markets over the weekends.

Some of the things I did on the markets in those early years included making toy parachutes, doing a name on a grain of rice, lots of different jewellery things and temporary tattoos.

These different things kept my family alive and times were good, but I wanted to make furniture. I love designing furniture (I was doing it yesterday – as always an original piece that I suspect nobody has ever done before) and I finally caved in and started furniture designing and manufacturing.

Growing it back into a bigger business.

I started with hand tools and made hammock chairs. Over time the business grew to a point where I employed about 6 people and occasionally casual helpers.

I was making patio furniture, swing benches, benches, hammocks, hammock stands, dining room tables and more and did all this for many years.

When the political environment in South Africa got to the point where I realised that it was not going to ever improve I decided to close the business and search for a product that would earn me international currency.

I chose to do art. It took me 8 months before I was getting a lot of orders and the future looked very bright.

Sadly, the 2008 US financial crash happened and that affected the economies across the entire world. Art sales stopped overnight.

I was not worried as I saw that the internet was the future place to do marketing.

That is when I started doing online marketing.

My Craft Marketing Experience.

Marketing and sales have always been a passion of mine.

Back then I never knew I was ADHD in an extreme way and only thought I was lucky enough to be able to think about a lot of things all at the same time. Like having 10 or 15 tabs open in my head all the time.

This allowed me to think about marketing almost all the time. I would be watching a movie and run a side-discussion in my head about the business potential of random things that I noticed during the movie.

I would do this in the car while driving, and if I was ever awake at night.

It became far more intense when I was working at my stall on the markets. I would watch my neighbours at every market to see what they did well and what they did badly. I would apply those tricks and ideas to my stall to test all the time.

10 years of doing this almost full-time allowed me to learn an amazing amount of useful marketing things.

(damn! This spell check and grammar check thing is being really rude to my English writing skills. LOL)

As I became more experienced at marketing my crafts and growing my business, it pained me to see other crafters not trying to go past those 1 table levels and get more sales. I was always trying to help others and some loved it and gained from what I taught them, and others told me to leave them alone as “they knew what they were doing”.

That problem exists to this very day. Crafters pass a point – normally about a year in – when they think they are now experts and for some strange reason resist any advice for growth. It’s Ok, I will never stop trying to help others.

My Online Experience.

You need to know that I went online to sell my art.

But, within days of starting a brilliant online marketing course I had purchased I realised that I was at the end of the rainbow and was standing at that pot of gold we had been told about.

I was literally like a child with excitement at the possibilities. (Um, it was at this point that I started to get issues with my ADHD – but that is another story)

Over the next 11 years, I helped a lot of crafters start their online businesses and finally became more mainstream with the types of clients I had and was doing full websites and SEO. I have probably built 300 websites.

I went past the honeymoon phase and ended deep in the “jaded” section, and back again over time.