Here was my approach:

- Talk to a family member who is employed in a business.

- Find out a task they do that is repetitive, inefficient, automatable, and enhanceable. Spoiler alert: there will be a lot of these.

- Automate/improve/streamline said task.

- Get noticed by said family member's boss.

- Arrange to do more of same in exchange for 1099 compensation.

- Lather, rinse, repeat.

- Get referrals from said boss to other companies in same industry. To them, you are not an employee's family member, you are an experienced industry consultant. Raise your rates.

- Lather, rinse, repeat.

Since Odesk/Elance merger there's been a flood of freelancers who bid a low as $3 per hour and very little for fixed price jobs. Seems the avg dollar amount for work has been dropping. I could be wrong. Anyone else noticing a trend?

I have worked on the writer side rather than the tech side but I have noticed some changes recently. I've seen 1)more obnoxious clients and postings and 2) fewer actual awards being made.

A penny or two a word used to be the bottom end, now that seems to be mid-range and some clients are demanding downwards of half a cent per word or less while at least pretending that they want high quality work.

Needless to say I've spent even less time on there than I used to.

This article and comment thread from yesterday has some good freelancing tips.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8616952

My article about freelancing:

http://typicalprogrammer.com/tips-for-successful-freelancing...

I'm curious if you could expand on why it's not worth looking like a real business. Wouldn't a professional website, and business cards be useful for networking?

It depends on your potential clients, of course. What I was cautioning against in my article is spending a lot of time and money on the trappings of a business -- LLC or corporation paperwork, accounting, web site, business cards, office, separate phone number, etc. You don't need any of those things to get started freelancing, and it's easy to get caught up in that non-productive stuff because there's an industry profiting from selling the form and trappings of entrepreneurship, when what you really need is the substance.

Most networking is done with smartphones and social media these days. Business cards can be handy, but far more often I exchange email addresses and phone numbers (or Twitter handles or whatever) with someone I want to follow up with, or who may want to hire me. It's important to be findable online. Potential customers you meet or who hear about you from someone else will more likely be looking for you by name. A blog with prominent and current contact info works, as does a public LinkedIn or GitHub profile.

I'm always a little skeptical of so-called freelancers who have the trappings of an important consulting firm but give the impression that that's all they have.

Check out CodeMentor.io -- I make $60/hr helping people with simple Rails issues. It's great lead gen for other contracting gigs!

It seems like there are a ton of "mentors" on that site. How do you get noticed?

Set availability hours, fill out different skills in your profile, keep a CodeMentor tab open with status "Ready for Requests". You can also go to "Open Requests" and volunteer for sessions.

odesk and elance are places where you go to get work that a) doesn't pay well, b) has bad working conditions, and c) has next to no chance of future re-hire. I do not recommend this.

As another commenter suggested, codementor.io is a good place to go. gun.io is my favorite. There's a ton of interesting projects on there.

I believe you. Do you have experience with those sites?

Yeah. It was a long time ago, but the situation hasn't changed at all. You simply can't make the kind of hourly rate that you should be making in software development on those sites. It's too easy to get undercut by some guy in India, Pakistan, etc., and even if you do get work, they'll expect a ton of freebies and discounts. It's simply not worth the trouble.

Start blogging solutions to problems and contributing to Open Source projects, even if it's just docs. Raising your exposure online in general increases the number of random freelancing offers you will receive.

Basic is sell at very low when you dont have good reviews. When you have review raise your prices.