Hi Jenni,

Depending on your budget, and assuming you're like me, where shoestring budgets are the norm, there are several places where you can advertise and get leads for your home cleaning business. Here are a few suggestions to get you going, but whenbusiness.com is going to be doing a full series of posts on Advertising and Marketing for small businesses such as yours.

Some of the more simple items to do are not traditional advertising related, but just work.

If you're not already leveraging some of the online tools available to you, let's start there.

1) Add your business to Google Local http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter?gl=us&hl=en-US When people search for "Cleaning Service, 75123" or "Maid Service 75213", then you will automatically show up in a map along with your phone number. This is crucial for people who are more willing to give immediate local business their jobs because people are known to help out their immediate community. The same goes for the other top 3 search engines: a) Bing https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx b) Yahoo http://listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php

2) One of the first places I'd recommend using some advertising dollars is via Google Adwords.

This service allows you to specify a budget of the amount that you are willing to use for advertising. You can specify a series of keywords that you want to use when advertise, and after running typical search terms via a tool I have, we have found that most people search for the following terms when looking for house cleaning. And you can then use these keyword terms when setting up ads in google. These words look funny together, but will give you The best part is that you can specify that you only want your ads to show up within your city, since you're likely not going to travel to do cleaning. This keeps your overall costs down.

• average house cleaning costs
• average house cleaning prices
• best house cleaning
• bonded house cleaning
• bonded house cleaning services
• clean house
• cleaning your house
• commercial house cleaning
• complete house cleaning
• cost of house cleaning
• detailed house cleaning
• elite house cleaning
• exceptional house cleaning
• general house cleaning
• good house cleaning
• house cleaning
• house cleaning lady
• house cleaning maid service
• house cleaning price
• house cleaning prices
• house cleaning pricing
• house cleaning rate
• house cleaning rate per hour
• house cleaning rates
• house cleaning review
• house cleaning service
• house cleaning services
• housekeeper cleaning
• light house cleaning
• maid house cleaning
• need house cleaning
• total house cleaning

3) If you're a bonded maid service, I would also suggest adding listings to craigslist.com under their service providers for your city or area, and ensuring when creating the listing to put on there that you are bonded. It makes a big difference knowing that we as people can call on you knowing that our stuff is protected against any major damage that might happen.

It really is a lot easier than you think, but you have any difficulty, we're here for you. Again, we'll be doing detailed walkthrough and how-to's on these subjects so please come back for those.

Good luck to you.