Ask HN: How to become a freelancer without using a third party website?

A lot of times I've read comments here, about how looking for projects through oDesk, Freelancer or such websites leads to getting bad clients and to the devaluation the work you do. So if not through this websites how do you get clients? If your starting the obvious thing to me would be to build a portfolio, distribute your mobile apps, use a VM to host your sample web apps, upload code to GitHub, etc. This seems like common sense to me but what comes after that?