When we first started we did one hell off a lot of canvassing, we mainly leaflet dropped without knocking. This has the benefit of covering wide areas quickly, however we found we got far better responses if people actually saw you and could "judge" your appearance. There are so many fliers coming thru the doors that unless people know who are you are or that you are trustworthy as a worker that they will often not give you a second thought.
We were new to our area, and to window cleaning (after quite a few years break), we covered an area that was about 25-30 miles square. In certain areas we found we simply could not get a decent price on the houses, yet not too far down the road we could charge alot more for the same type of house/people. So get to know your local areas too.
also would you reccomend buying rounds as that is one option I am considering
When we started we bought about 3 days of work off someone we sort of "knew" for 2.5 times monthly value. His work was extremely compact, the reason for this being that he couldnt drive, so undercut and went very cheap on 80% of his work to get it al in one patch. After 8 years it is now an extremely good round, but it took a heck of a long time to get the prices anywhere near right. So be careful, it can be a very good boost to get your face known in an area and get immediate income if you can afford the purchase price, but customers will not necessarily stick with you (tho all of ours did, despite a 20% increase after 6 months cleaning). Incidentally, we sold off one of the villages within 3 years which had doubled in value, and the second village has about 70% of our monthly work, we by far clean more windows that anyone else here now.
As mentioned persistence pays off, we canvassed one large estate, door knocking, and got 4 customers, with lots of dont call us, we will call you. Within 6 months of people seeing us regularly doing a good job we had 20 people. 8 years later we now have about 45 in this one estate. You will get there, just price sensibly (if you start of cheap it will take ages to get those customers back up to a proper price), be regular, do a good job, and IMO a few minutes talking to customers and being a friend goes a long way.