Striking out on your own as a work from home professional or freelancer can be difficult and stressful, to say the least. Taking complete ownership of your own career and success is something that few will ever venture to do, and of those that try, most will fail. Why? There are plenty of reasons, but the inability to accurately market themselves is one of the most prevalent ones. So, how can you avoid the same fate? Have a website. Every work from home professional and freelancer should have one in order to reach their target market and highlight their skills and services.

Create or purchase?

If you aren’t tech savvy, don’t worry. Gone are the days when you had to be an IT genius or coding aficionado in order to have a nice website. With free sites like Blogger.com and WordPress.org. You can have a website or blog up in minutes. But, if you want all the bells and whistles and the ability to migrate your site in the future, you should look to self-host (which will cost you a low to moderate monthly or yearly fee) with companies like Hostgator, GoDaddy or BlueHost.

What will I put on my site?

Creating the content that you need on your website is a great way to explore your skill set and tap into your creativity. You can upload your pictures, artwork, writing, or anything else you like- whenever you like. However, if this seems like an overwhelming endeavor, there are plenty of places where you can find individuals who will do the work for you. Websites like Elance, Guru, Craigslist, and other open markets allow you to create job proposals or ads in order to find individuals who are interested in working for you on your site’s content.

How to get traffic?

Well, you’ve built the site and you’ve gotten your content, but where’s the traffic going to come from? Good question! There are plenty of great ways to get traffic to your website including: submitting your website to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, creating a Twitter account, making a Facebook Fan Page, creating a Squidoo page, article marketing, and good old-fashioned word-of-mouth.

While having a website isn’t the end-all, be-all  to work from home success, it is a great foundation and an essential flagship to your online success.