linking text to a hotkey

I've done a bit of piddling with VB .NET, but this is my first attempt in trying to write a true macro. Basically what I'm trying to do is to link a user inputted string value to a hot key in word. So while this macro was running, anytime alt-1 was pushed, whatever string had been assigned to alt-1 would be inserted into the word document. I can handle writing the form for the user input of the hotkeys, just not sure how to actually send it to word using a specified hotkey. Any advice would be most appreciated.