Recruiters are one way, not necessarily the best in the long run but a good short-term stopgap approach if you need to quickly find clients. In my opinion the

Recruiters are one way, not necessarily the best in the long run but a good short-term stopgap approach if you need to quickly find clients. In my opinion the preferable long-term sustainable path is pretty much like in most businesses: Become useful and become noticeable. Create solutions and talk about it. A company website, blog, conference talks, networking events testimonials for instance are useful components of a marketing plan for a consultant. As for the second question I'm not sure this is the right attitude. For example analysing a company's software creation process and pointing out ways to improve it is serious engineering but it doesn't involve writing a single line of code and often is more about human communication than hard engineering facts. Value creation starts when you first talk to a prospective client not just when you write the first line of code.