How do you get a house cleaning side hustle going? The cleaning industry has always been foolproof. Now, house cleaners are looking for new ways to make money during COVID-19.
Maids can use their other skills to earn money from side projects. The gig economy is thriving, housekeepers now have the flexibility to work from home.
Are you taking photos to advertise your cleaning services? Do you use graphic design and video editing skills in your cleaning company? Get creative with your other skills and you’ll find more ways to earn money beyond house cleaning.
Listen: House Cleaning Side Hustle
Watch: House Cleaning Side Hustle
Hey there, I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. You can find this and 400 other answered questions in this series on our YouTube channel.
How Do You Earn Money During Quarantine?
How do you earn money during COVID-19 when all the house cleaners have gone home? Everyone is quarantined and no one will let you come over and clean houses. One house cleaner wrote in with this question.
“I live in Pennsylvania and my clients have put me on hold due to the virus. Everybody’s quarantining and I am not working right now because they all want to stay in the house and stay safe. What can I do about this? Is there a way to drum up business?”
These are Unprecedented Time
So, How do you earn money in a time when money is not coming in? These are unprecedented times. We’ve never seen this before in the house cleaning industry.
The house cleaning industry has always been pretty foolproof. which means, in the event somebody cancels, you still have other customers that have jobs. We are seeing everybody canceling all at once.
There are other things you can do. You did not get to be who you are in life without more than one set of skills. If house cleaning is all you knew how to do, you would be up a creek without a paddle. So think about the skills you have.
What Other Skills Do You Have?
So this is a time where right now you can sit down and take inventory of your skills. You are in the house cleaning business so think about that.
And in the house cleaning business, there are before and after pictures. In the before and after pictures, you take a picture of the before, here’s what the toilet looked like before. Here’s what the picture of the toilet looks like after. And you make sure that the lighting is right and it looks great because you’re going to use those for advertisements.
One of the ways you can make money during the COVID-19 downtime is you can offer those pictures that you have taken to stock photography libraries. For example, Shutterstock, and Bigstock photo
You Can Take Photos for Stock Photography
Now many people don’t have the time to run out with a camera and take pictures of the things they need for their business. And so, they may use a stock photography library.
And so they would do a search, for example, a clear glass measuring cup with water in it and then downloaded that picture. Whoever put that picture up there, made a commission off them downloading it. They may need a license and be allowed to download so many pictures per month.
So if you are at home right now and you have a library of these before and after pictures that you’ve been taking in your business. Sit down and you go through them one by one and you say, “Is this good enough for Angela’s video?” Use that as a barometer. People need lots of pictures that are not about house cleaning, but some people need pictures of all different areas of the business, like pictograms and safety data sheets or legal things like a gavel, for example. There are all different kinds of weird and odd, zany things that might come up in a conversation, and people will need a picture to help illustrate that.
You Can Take Pictures as a Side Hustle
So, if you did nothing else but take your high-end smartphone and go around your home and take pictures of items and upload them to the stock photography libraries. Then every time somebody downloads that you make a commission.
So that is something you could do today and then when the doors open again and you go out into the marketplace. Then you can still run your regular house cleaning business, but every evening when you come home, you could upload your photos.
You can have a second revenue stream while you are working your house cleaning business once the doors open again. That is one way you could make money.
What is the Gig Economy?
There are a whole lot of different ways and if you know about the gig economy, it is known as the gig economy. This is where people work from home and they’re doing virtual assistant projects where they’re not actually at your house.
And by that I mean I have a YouTube channel. The people that edit my YouTube channel are not working at my house. Right now they are working from their own homes because of the COVID-19 and what have you.
They’re working from their own homes and they’re editing my videos. And because we have the cloud, I can upload the information and they can download the stuff that they need from the stock photography libraries. They can patch it together and then they can upload the shows to YouTube.
Everybody can Work From Home
So, everybody can work from home. It’s awesome and it’s super nice, where you could do something similar. Maybe you have skills in video editing or you can do audio editing.
Or if you have visual imaging that you put together, like graphic designs. Every business is going to be running promotions to try to get their business back up and running again.
So if you can create ads or you can do graphics or any of these things, these are great services where you can set up your own little spot on Fiverr.
Use Fiverr as a Side Hustle
People can find you. They pay you on Fiverr. So they pay first for the project and then Fiverr holds it in an escrow account. And so you are guaranteed the money is waiting for you once you turn the project in. Once you turn the project in and the customer approves it, they release those funds and you get paid.
So you never even have to meet the customer. All the contact information goes back and forth through Fiverr. So I’ll leave links to Fiverr in the show notes as well. But there are so many different things that you can do. And as a house cleaner, it’s important you set up some side projects that you can do on the time that you’re not working.
As house cleaners, you only work a 40-hour week. And so, what happens on the other 128 hours of the week when you’re not working your house cleaning business. So you could be working in the evenings and the weekends on the side hustle. And then the beauty of it is as you get older in the business, there will come a day when everybody’s like, “I want to quit.” You’ll have this other revenue stream that you’ve already built up that is bringing in revenues on a regular basis. So you can do both at the same time.
Don’t Keep All Your Eggs in One Basket
And so, you’ve heard the saying, don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. Right now, all the eggs are in one basket if you’re a house cleaner and that’s the only business that you have. And so creating something else, as exciting as it is right now, is going to challenge you to come up with what is it that you know?
And if you don’t have the skills, if you’re not a photographer, right now you can take some online photography classes. There are lots of them and there are lots of YouTube videos. And so the smartphone that you have takes amazing pictures.
One of the nicest cameras that you own may be your smartphone. And so right now you can take amazing pictures with what you already have, with no new set up. It’s a very low barrier to entry. And to join it, there’s no requirement to join the stock photo labs. You don’t have to be a professional photographer. They’ll take photos from anybody. They look at the pictures and then there’s a criterion that they grade them on. And if it matches their criteria, then they agree to buy those pictures from you.
Resources
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Before You Leap: What a Lawyer Wants You to Know About Starting a Gig Economy Business – https://amzn.to/2zbCVWj
The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off – https://amzn.to/3bs031b
Gigged: The Gig Economy, the End of the Job and the Future of Work – https://amzn.to/2VnX8Rw
Gigonomics: A Field Guide for Freelancers in the Gig Economy – https://amzn.to/3augPLE
The Six-Figure Freelancer: Your Roadmap to Success in the Gig Economy – https://amzn.to/3bspWho
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