A friend of mine was doing a video shoot for some church organization. They needed a new web host and some changes on their website, so he referred them to me.

A friend of mine was doing a video shoot for some church organization. They needed a new web host and some changes on their website, so he referred them to me. Through them, I picked up another client or two with which they were associated. From there, someone familiar with that church group learned about me via them and asked me to help with a project he was doing. From my work there, that client ended up funneling several clients to me. As far as money goes, I think I started at around $20/hr and began raising my rates to $30, $50, and now $75-$100/hr depending on the project. For a while there, I had too many smaller paying clients coming to me but no real way to scale it other than just funneling them off to someone else and losing out on the potential income. Raising rates helped with that filter that out. Now if I get overwhelmed, I can actually afford to subcontract out to other folks that I trust without taking a big hit. I have collected a small list of people that I trust (a programmer or two and a graphic designer guy) that I use when I need them. I still work a full time job, so I just try to balance my freelance gigs as best I can. My hope with raising my rates is that I can plan an eventual transition into full time freelancing. I had a previous venture into freelancing many years ago, but only had one or two clients. I had worked out a residual payment sort of deal with them based on the amount of users they had paying each month. This was my full time job for a year or two until they lost their main source of users. This ended up being much more of a rambling session that I intended. I guess my main point is, "by talking to people." Talk to your friends. Talk to colleagues. Talk to folks at your social gathering place of choice. It seems that someone always knows someone who needs some sort of work done. They may not be willing to pay top dollar, but to get your foot in the door I think that's okay.