People can always start their own online businesses and work from home/garage, when they have a good idea and some products in demand to sell. But often when work-from-home entrepreneurs may quickly run into many issues that they can solve by themselves or they must get someone with the right experience to resolve.
Technical issues
To keep startup cost low and affordable, they tend to do most things by themselves. The first project they must overcome before they can start selling products online is to create and launch a new website. One very common issue is most work-from-home entrepreneurs have is not knowing how to install WordPress. To most of them, words like FTP and cpanel may sound like foreign languages, and properly setting up a simple database seems rocket science. Due to technology barriers, many potential entrepreneurs would have never started their websites.
To add to the uncertainty, the WordPress site is not done yet. For the site to keep up with competitions, some important plugins have to be installed and set up, such as plugins for search engine optimization (e.g. All In One SEO, Google Sitemap, etc), plugins for comment management (e.g. Akismet, Show Top Commentators, etc), plugins for speed up the website (e.g. W3 Total Cache, etc), and plugins for web analytics (e.g. WordPress.com Stats). Actually the plugins are simple to install and properly set up.
The next tech issues on their website may hinder the site’s abilities: Certain functions may not have worked according to your initial plans, such as:
- The search function does not return the search results that is of any usefulness to the site visitors.
- The checkout process does not display a certain important information about the purchase of their customers.
- The redirect function or the URL rewrite does not work. This would usually hinder the ability of their website to rank well on the search engines.
Design issues
They may be lucky enough to get past the WordPress website installation/setup phase. Then it comes the website design that gives them further issues. They will need to find someone with proper graphic design and/or web design experience who can tweak the HTML/CSS codes of their WordPress site. They may be lucky to find someone experienced on Upwork or some freelancer networks.
Marketing issues
One type of powerful tool is email marketing. Users would have visited a website for the first time or second, but would not have purchased any items right away. Websites may offer newsletters with discount or new product reminders. Not all entrepreneurs have the full knowledge to enable them properly setting up an email campaign. The email programs that they may use include: Mailchimp, Aweber, Klaviyo, ConvertKit, Getresponse, etc.
Time management issues
The last problem is most work-from-home entrepreneurs tend not to set themselves with project deadlines or mini task deadlines right from the beginning. Distractions can be everywhere in your lives, especially when freelancers usually work from home. When you work from home, at one stage you would start working around the clock, and may lose track of time if you do not have good habits in time management.
