WORK AT HOME NEWS

 


 News Article from Good Morning America:

Work-From-Home Questions Answered

Do You Have What It Takes?

By TORY JOHNSON March, 2010
We were inundated with responses from Wednesday's segment on home-based customer service agents.

Based on questions from viewers interested in learning more about how to pursue this line of work, we're providing more details for your consideration. This growing trend throughout the country is focused on agents handling incoming customer service inquiries from their homes while connected to a network via computer and phone. It's replacing the traditional bricks-and-mortar call centers and helping to keep jobs in the United States as opposed to outsourcing them offshore.

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For customer service agents, this offers the ultimate in flexibility. You can schedule your hours and determine how much or how little you're willing to work. In this case, working from home is not only a benefit, it's a requirement of the job. Companies also can tap into a diverse pool of sophisticated workers who wouldn't ordinarily want to work in a bricks-and-mortar call center, but who would be thrilled to handle this type of work from home. The result is improved customer service without the often-challenging cultural barriers, which is proving more important than ever for many of America's top companies, including banks, airlines, retailers and more. Do you have the basic requirements? To become a virtual customer service agent where you'd accept incoming phone calls from customers of large companies, you must have a computer, high speed Internet access, a landline telephone, and a quiet work space. You must provide all of that at your own expense. You will be not reimbursed. Are you a punctual self-starter? Are you entrepreneurial? Not everyone is cut out for this kind of work. You have to thrive on running your own show. If you work best in a more structured environment, this kind of home-based call center work probably isn't for you. Do you have a pleasant phone manner, common sense, and a desire to solve problems efficiently? Prior sales or customer service experience is a plus, but not a requirement. Bilingual skills are also an asset.


 

Effective Internet Marketing Strategies for Beginners

Posted on 04 February 2010

Every budding internet business person wants their website to be among the top results in search engines and their businesses to rake in huge profits. You need to cleverly use internet marketing ideas to make your site popular and to drive targeted traffic to your site. Effective Online Marketing Strategies for Beginners Here are simple some suggestions that can serve as a guide to internet marketing for beginners.

  1. Customers are More Important Than Search Engines: You may find a lot of advise out there to tweak your site for optimal search engine performance, but make sure that you don’t do it at the cost of your customer’s experience. A mindless site which is stuffed with random keywords would drive away any customers that may land there by clicking through the search engine results page. So always use relevant and useful content which can then be scientifically optimized for keyword density.
  2. Have a plan: Like everything in business, even internet marketing should be well planned out to be successful. You need to clearly define what you plan to achieve through your internet marketing efforts so that you can then measure how successful your attempts have been by using tracking software. You should have a definite budget on how much you are willing to spend for your internet marketing efforts
  3. Use all options: Today there are several ways to do internet marketing – email marketing, blogs, forums, social media sites and viral videos are some of the options you will have to include in your internet marketing. There are clear ways in which you can have success in each of these marketing techniques, so be sure you understand that before you venture to do it.

Internet marketing is a serious element in determining your business success and if you don’t have the time or the expertise to do it yourselves then it is best to hire a professional marketing firm to help you out.