I freelance in Sydney, Australia and have been doing now for about 9 months. It sounds like I pretty much went through the same thought process as you when I started. I didn't know where to find work immediately either. What I found out quickly though, is sites like freelancer.com help in no way to providing a reasonable amount of work at a good rate consistently. In fact just the nature of them are geared towards 2nd/3rd world devs/designers that are able to get a good return relative to their lifestyle costs. Which you can't compete with. Starting out I had great success going to meetups where people might need my services. Eg. Small Business meetups. Once you walk in the door you will find that non-technical people have great difficulty meeting and finding the right designer/developer for their websites, apps, projects, etc.
The other bonus is you have met face to face and from a sales perspective you will have far more success in converting people to work with you.
This has been one of the ways I have successfully managed to get work, consistently. It certainly doesn't hurt.
Checkout atmail http://atmail.com They have done excellent work with the web interface, they are really cheap and have excellent support. There is an on premise license as well as a cloud solution and they provide some neat API's for accessing the email server as well. The entire solution is built on an open-source stack as well. You can download a trial for free.
Cheers threepipeproblm. I tend to hit www.reddit.com/r/technology/ which overlaps with here. And individual blogs. Great suggestions. I will add them to the list.
I freelance in Sydney, Australia and have been doing now for about 9 months. It sounds like I pretty much went through the same thought process as you when I started. I didn't know where to find work immediately either. What I found out quickly though, is sites like freelancer.com help in no way to providing a reasonable amount of work at a good rate consistently. In fact just the nature of them are geared towards 2nd/3rd world devs/designers that are able to get a good return relative to their lifestyle costs. Which you can't compete with. Starting out I had great success going to meetups where people might need my services. Eg. Small Business meetups. Once you walk in the door you will find that non-technical people have great difficulty meeting and finding the right designer/developer for their websites, apps, projects, etc.
The other bonus is you have met face to face and from a sales perspective you will have far more success in converting people to work with you.
This has been one of the ways I have successfully managed to get work, consistently. It certainly doesn't hurt.
Cheers, Markus
http://mstrazds.com/