Mystery shopping has become a very lucrative home business for some. With good reason - reasonable hourly pay, free products/services and gas reimbursement! For those that are serious about mystery shopping, there is good money to be made.

As with all things though, some jobs are better than others. Not all companies will pay you for everything I've outlined above. However, you get to choose which jobs you'd like to do and which ones you'd rather pass on. It's entirely in your hands how much or how little you make.

What is Mystery Shopping?

Well, it's quite simple, really. Companies use mystery shoppers to help them rate their customer service, overall appearance and product placement. You are simply informing company as to whether they are meeting their customer's expectations.

Mystery shoppers apply to different companies and when a placement is available for you area, you are contacted via email, generally. Upon receiving details of job, you decide whether or not to accept it.

Upon accepting a job, you print out instructions for that job. Generally, those instructions will pertain to store's overall appearance and cleanliness, level of customer service, speed in which is required to make a purchase, whether specific product displays are available, etc. All instructions are provided to you ahead of time. You simply make mental notes while inside store and afterwards fill out appropriate online reports.

Can I be a Mystery Shopper?

Different companies have different age requirements. However, if you are over age of 21 with a good grasp of English language, you can be a mystery shopper. With that said, you must also be reliable, detail oriented, and dependable. Schedulers (people that offer you jobs) are much more likely to continually provide you with choice assignments if you are someone they can rely on and someone who provides them with good quality written reports in a timely manner.

I Thought Mystery Shopping is a Scam?

No, it isn't. You hear that from people who were not committed, reliable, detail oriented or were otherwise just plain lazy. The fact is that if you do not produce what is required of you - you don't get paid. It's really that simple. Everything is laid out for you ahead of time. You choose whether to commit to what is required or not. If you work at a typical 9-5 job and don't produce work you know is required of you, you'll get fired. Mystery shopping is no different.

In order for any site to attract quality visitors, there are some things that need to be done. In this article, I will give you a small list of objectives, along with brief hints on how to go about meeting them. If you follow through, your site will advance in search engine rankings, and before you know it visitors will be showing up faster than you can count them.

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Involve yourself in an ongoing process of collecting and/or producing articles for inclusion on your site. There are many sources of articles on Internet. Some of them charge a small fee, while others are free. Look for articles that are relevant to subject of your site, and add them. If these articles are rich with keywords that you wish to target, so much better.

You can also write your own articles. This allows you to concentrate on keywords that you wish to target, and establishes you as an expert in your field.

By adding your resource box, with your URL, to end of your articles and then submitting them to other sites and Ezines, you can generate additional traffic to your site. More about this later.

Invite your visitors to submit articles to your site for publication. This helps to build visitor loyalty, because eveybody likes to see their name in print;)

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