It doesn't matter whether you are selling odds and ends on eBay from your living room or something larger and more complex,

Business plans are excellent and necessary. Far too few of us self-employed and freelance people use them.

They force us to spell out our objectives. We have to assign numbers to our expectations and assign a time-line to our goals. They become our roadmap keeping us on track.

But I suggest that you can't make a business plan that is worth anything until you've done your homework.

And that means knowing what you want to do and how you want to do it. And determining that there is sufficient demand for your product to generate enough income to cover your costs and allow a profit.

In other words, before business plan comes research.

If a body of knowledge already exists, it makes sense to tap into it and save yourself some work. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics and other such sources, for example, publish a great deal of demographic information. Some of it is very useful.

But it is also likely that as a creative sole-proprietor, meaningful statistics don't exist about your specialty.

Many micro-businesses target a very specialized niche. And many owned by creative types exist to sell a product or service that don't follow well-worn prototypes.

It is particularly difficult for such people to find meaningful published data.

If you fall into these categories, you'll have to generate your own information.

There is more to your research than just purely business information. You are building a life as well as a business.

Are demands and conditions of your proposed business compatible with life you want to create?

Mystery shopping, also known as secret shopping, is method by which a store or a company evaluates its employees' performance. In this a person in disguise pretends to be a shopper, visits store, interacts with employees and assesses their ability to build a rapport with customer in order to sell their products. That person is actually hired by store owner or company proprietor to, assess performance of employees and in end submit report to proprietor. The person hired is called mystery shopper.

Apart from evaluation of performances, mystery shoppers analyze other commercial aspects of retail stores. These aspects could be price, availability, and quality of product; customer service via websites, telephones and in person; and house keeping. The freelance professionals called secret shoppers then hand over their assessment to company head who actually hired them.

There are no essential requirements to be a secret shopper, as shoppers don't have specific appearance or qualification. Those who have a flair and passion to enhance customer service and quality of product can plunge into secret shopping. It would be interesting to learn that secret shoppers are paid for their job. It is a profession just like any other profession.

Although job entails shopping which is fun, mystery shopping is a serious business and should be carefully dealt with. There must be certain innate traits within a person that would be helpful in being a secret shopper. These traits are ability to act or pretend, being trustworthy, reliable and professional. Apart from all these, secret shoppers should have a better mode of transportation, good writing skills and a clear perspective of actual reporting and their personal opinion so that truth is not tampered.