Advice On Breaking Into Mystery Shopping

Priscilla: “What advice do you give to people wanting to break into the mystery shopping field?”

Coach Melanie: “Since I was a marketing professional in Corporate America for over 15 years, I tend to have a different point of view than many people out there, but it works.

First, don't waste time applying to any and every mystery shopping company you can find, unless you want to be an underemployed mystery shopper with very sore fingers. For a job search in the regular business world, the shot gun approach of applying en masse to companies when you don't even know if there are job openings, rarely works. It's the same thing with mystery shopping. Just like any other freelancers, mystery shoppers need to learn to generate work for themselves on a regular basis. This is effectively done through networking and marketing of their services through the various job lead boards on Yahoo and Topica, and the middlemen and women of the industry known as schedulers.

Second, do a great job when you are given an assignment, so you'll get asked to do another one. Eventually, you'll become a "go-to" person for many companies and schedulers, and then you'll likely be in the enviable position of having more work than you can handle!”

The above Q & A was from a recent interview by reporter Priscilla Nordyke Roden for my second mystery shopping piece in “The San Bernadino Sun”. The published article called “Ah Sweet Mystery Of Shopping” which appeared on 9/2 had many quotes with yours truly and can be found in the articles section of my web site at http://www.mysteryshoppercoach.com/Articles.html.

Look for Part Four in the next post:

Have a great day and happy shopping!

“Taking the mystery out of professional mystery shopping”—Melanie Jordan
http://www.mysteryshoppercoach.com

Copyright 2004-5 Melanie R. Jordan E-Publishing