The author touched briefly on one thing that's worth noting, but it might have got buried in the article so it bears repeating:

If you build something cool, people will find you and give you consulting work

That's a strategy that has worked for me several times over the years. I mentioned a silly unmonetizable Travel Blogging site elsewhere in this discussion, but if you look at the paying client work that resulted from that site's existence, you could argue that it's been one of my most successful products.