I've said it on many other similar threads: Avoid freelancer.com, odesk.com, elance.com, etc. like the plague. You will not make the kind of money you need to s

I've said it on many other similar threads: Avoid freelancer.com, odesk.com, elance.com, etc. like the plague. You will not make the kind of money you need to sustain a successful freelance consultancy on any of those platforms. I suggest the following (roughly in order of precedence): * Local networking groups for new businesses (new businesses need new websites. Easy sell.) * Give talks at local tech meetups (and in the about me section of the talk, mention that you're a freelance web developer. Make sure to follow with a really amazing presentation, and you'll probably get a couple leads after your talk) * Have an online portfolio where you list your past work with as many details about the work as possible (don't break your NDAs or anything, of course). * Join gun.io and look for work there. It looks very similar to freelancer.com and similar, but the clients on Gun know that they have to pay for quality work, and in my experience, they're willing to do so. * Contribute to an open source project related to the kind of freelancing that you want to do. For instance, I'm a PHP developer and I do a ton of work with Drupal. I've gotten almost every job through the Drupal community. The contribution to open source bullet point is last, despite it being the most successful for me, because it's not always possible to give an open source project the level of involvement that is needed. It's also not as much of a sure-fire thing, whereas the other ones are.