If you were asked for examples of company-backed volunteer work, you’d most likely talk in terms of blood drives, perhaps an annual donation drive, but this is simply no longer true. The staff members of Adaptive Marketing have been given the chance to take part in a full range of community initiatives. Once all the pertinent information – date, location, time, details, et cetera – had been prominently posted it has become very simple for employees to set aside the time for volunteering and how they’d be using it. It’s hardly volunteering if there’s no opportunity to select activities. Staff members from Adaptive Marketing choose from among a selection of initiatives. You’ll find there’s so much to be done, after all; working with children and young adults, lending a hand to green programs, or improving the area’s aesthetic through performance art to list a few that have already been tried. The result is that Adaptive Marketing volunteers are presented with the opportunity to use their time as efficiently as they can and love their time volunteering.

A regularly scheduled day or a big one-off event – these are the most common ways for a company to arrange this kind of volunteer initiative, possibly at a nearby homeless shelter or the local school. Regardless of how little time you have, we’d expect you can still find some program to suit, so time is no obstacle to volunteering.

It is hardly an unusual practice for companies to assist the people living around their premises. A sense of community goodwill is generated by the projects undertaken by Adaptive Marketing’s staffers over the course of these company-supported projects. Volunteering to help others leaves you feeling like a better person – just the sort of thing to motivate staffers both in their volunteer work and back behind their desks.

2) Help others as well as yourself to solve a ‘how to’ problem whenever it crops up. This applies to the universal law of “Give before you can receive”. Zig Ziglar once said, “To get what you want, help enough people to get what they want.” The long-term implication is when you can show yourself as a consistent expert by continually contributing good answers whenever you can, people will remember you sooner or later. In fact, that is all some forum participants would only do as their focus.

3) Promote your product or other products with your affiliate links when you recommend solutions.

4) Create a sense of trust and bonding among fellow marketers in which real friendship can be establish over time (a sense of belonging).

5) Share and learn from others through a mutual exchange of experience.

6) Get a word-of-mouth recommendation to a proven product or service from people who have tried it instead of spending time to analyze various products on the Internet.

7) Give and receive encouragement and motivation to/from fellow marketers.

Participate in Joint Ventures to expand your business.

9) Give special offers (discounts, giveaways etc.) that are only available in the forum.

10) Give free products only to members of the forum.

Justin Koh & Nelson Tan are the architects behind Internet Mastery Center (http://www.internetmasterycenter.com) and Fresh Resources (http://www.freshresources.com).

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