Cleaning Services and Affiliate Marketing.

So you've exhausted all other avenues of plugging your cleaning services and you seem to be hitting a sales or enquiries peak. You've saturated the cleaning section in news papers, suburb based flyers, you have your website up and running--it's bringing in a decent amount of calls and emails. What's left? Well, consider for a moment having a sales team bringing in new clients every day. Sounds good? Now consider employing the use of the average street surfing Joe to bring in contracts that you would never get otherwise. Worth mentioning is that they obviously can't really compare to dedicated sales reps, but it is a far site better than dishing out cash to employees who can't guarantee a sale--here you have an army of worker drones doing your job for you.

What's the catch? Nothing in life is free, as they say. Most cleaning companies a have large costs involving scrubber dryers, ride on vacuums, cleaning chemicals etc, so advertising bills are sometimes the last thing on your mind. Affiliate schemes offer incentives to bring in sales. In this case I would advise offering a fraction of net profits earned per landed enquiry. The bigger the slice, the bigger the incentive for your worker bees to go out there and get those cleaning jobs. My suggested amount would be something like 15% to 20%--this may seem a lot for when you're trying to make ends meet, but if you're headed for the fast lane to millions, you want less faster! Remember this is money you would not have had in the first place, so you could consider it cream on top of your steady profit flow. You will soon find that that 80% of that $100 job you did is going to be $80*NumberOfLeads, which can add up to a lot money.

One other thing you have to keep in mind is leads that involve yearly contracts. In this case your guys are going to be earning a percentage EVERY MONTH. This has huge appeal since they could theoretically bring in those contracts for your company and literally live the easy life. Keep in mind that if the contract is for one year, you aren't loosing 15%*12 profits, you're gaining 85%*12. If the contract is for longer than a year or if your customers wishes to renew, I suggest you keep your affiliate's incentives to first 12 months, since you will then gain that extra 15% the following year. After all, the above aside, it is your company and it's your hard work; if your affiliate want another 12 months of financial freedom, all s/he needs to do is go out there and find some more contracts.

Here's the major flaw: If you own a cleaning service where you get personally involved in the cleaning (i.e. supervision and the like), this microprofiteering is going to burn you out, as you will find yourself re-thinking the whole affiliate plan and why you are working so hard for so little. The solution is simple: Automate it. Get other people to do the manual labour, the supervising (none of which should you be doing in the first place) and the on-site quotations. Yes, this will eat into your profits but, as I mentioned before, you want less faster. Automation + Scalability = Big Bucks.

John Smith is an entrepreneur and well seasoned guru at All Round Property Solutions (ARPS Cleaning Services).