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The joys of spring. The leaves are reappearing on the trees, the flowers are blooming, bird song fills the air and all those membership subscriptions you thought were a great idea at the time are still pulling money from your bank and Paypal accounts on a regular basis.

Time to do a spring clean.

Seriously, how many membership programs have you signed up for as you try to make your way in Internet marketing? I ran a check today and discovered I’m subscribed to at least five services I hardly ever use and provide very little or no value to my business.

These repeat payments come in several flavours and some can be very hard to track down and cancel once you have signed up. Whilst the better vendors provide a clear route to cancelling agreements the less professional sellers make it deliberately difficult.

I’ll give you an example. In January I signed up to a WordPress plugin system that claimed it would automate my affiliate marketing and sales process. Yes, I know, I was a gullible fool back then. Anyway, today a notification of a Paypal charge popped into my email inbox informing me I’d just paid $47. That’s $47 in January, same again in February, March and now April. $188 for a system that doesn’t even work – my fault, no complaints, I’m an idiot. But it’s only by taking action immediately when you see these charges appear that you’ll put an end to the waste.

That’s what I decided to do, take action and cancel this subscription. So I scanned my old emails and eventually found the login details for my account. Once logged in I looked for an easy way to cancel my membership. Guess what, no chance, not a single mention of how I could cancel my agreement. Oh there’s plenty of highly visible ways to spend even more money, but nothing on how I could stop haemorrhaging cash on something I no longer want.

Try the support desk, I thought. So I clicked on the support link and it asked me to create a ticket. But first I had to login. I entered my account details, hit submit and was promptly told I needed to register a new account on the support system. Because, of course, the support was being handled by a third party who didn’t know who the hell I was.

So I registered and was told a confirmation email had been sent. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes later no email. Added to that, the “support” policy indicated even if I did manage to register, a response to any ticket I created might take up to 7 days! Seven days! What sort of support is that? It’s more of an afterthought, a “when we can be bothered” approach to after sales assistance. And fairly typical of our industry I’m afraid.

But wait! Hadn’t I signed up to this thing using Paypal? Thank heavens because Paypal lets you cancel an agreement without having to refer back to vendors who make themselves rather scarce after they take your money.

I logged in to Paypal and had a look at all my subscriptions and agreements. Several horrific minutes later I realised I was shelling out a small fortune every month on membership programs I could scarcely remember, never mind use on a regular basis. I went through each one and with a single mouse click cancelled each agreement.

End result? A saving of just over $3,000 per year. I kid you not!

But there are times when Paypal can’t help, such as when you’ve given your credit card details to the vendor and they re-apply for payment each month. Unfortunately you have to go through all the hoops to kill these ones off. So that’s my next job, going through my bank statements to discover who, when, why and how much and putting a stop to anything I find that isn’t absolutely essential to my business.

I urge you to do the same yourself. Make a list, check your Paypal notifications, reconcile your bank statements. Prune ruthlessly. If you’re like myself or any number of other Internet marketers I’ve spoken to you’ll end up amazed at how much garbage you are paying good money for month after month and how much loss you have potentially exposed yourself to.

Go on, do yourself a favour this spring. Clean out the old, save yourself a pile of cash and set yourself up for a profitable 2010.

Start applying all the things you have learned. Stop buying new products, stop signing up for monthly subscriptions. Reverse the cash flow and start putting money in YOUR bank account for a change.