My question is this: where do you find your consulting gigs? Do they come to you entirely word of mouth, or do you actively pursue postings online and in papers and such?
The big ones all come through "anonymous" recruiters. It started with Jobserve and Gulp, but now so many recruiters seem to have me on file that I don't have to do anything. That is maybe also a problem: I don't really know how to actively look for interesting projects. Even my personal homepage has been offline for three years now. I think I'll to relaunch it, start a blog about things that interest me, and try to find some more interesting contracts.
Smaller projects also come through recommendations, but not the big fish - most of them also have a policy to not work with individuals.
I started by working through the temp services. Usually they have some general-purpose programming gigs. Once I got a few projects under my belt (and did some freelance programming work in the area) I went online and started spamming all the resume sites. Then the gigs come to you. Ideally you want to move into a word-of-mouth situation, but sometimes it takes a bit to work up to that.
Special ones for freelancing. I had good results with Jobserve, but I am not sure how popular they are in the US? I did not upload my resume on Jobserve, only contacted a few agents who were searching. They took me on file and that was it. I uploaded my CV on Gulp.de, and got one contract from there, but it took a while.
the current consulting job i have, was via word of mouth, and it was because i was instramental in getting our local barcamps going.
i have always found bennifit in having a lot of things going on, especially in community building. people tend to want to help those that are generally fairly selfless.
