paulsilver

I do similar stuff - PHP & ColdFusion coding, and search engine promotion. I get freelance work from the following sources, in order of the amount of work: 1 - Previous clients 2 - Partnerships & referrals through friends (many of them met through 3) 3 - Networking 4 - People finding my website 5 - Forums

I run a local networking group for freelancers ( http://www.brightonfarm.com ) so get a lot of work through that. If you can find some local freelancers, it's well worth teaming up with them as you'll either have complimentary skills or can refer work direct to each other when you're too busy.

I'm lucky because I live in an area with a lot of small tech companies, which is close to London which has a heck of a lot of work opportunities.

If you're trying to attract work when you don't know anyone locally, and you can't find any business networking groups, then mailing lists and forums can provide work. A simple way of getting is to post that you need some work (good for a short term boost.) More subtle is to put "I'm a freelance _____ programmer" in your signature on forums/e-mail with contact details and links to your website. I've had work from doing the latter, although I get better quality work from the other sources listed above.

You might find the sites http://www.freelanceswitch.com and http://www.freelanceadvisor.co.uk useful, they've both got podcasts as well.

[edit - getting links to work]

Personally, I found when Slashdot went over to sans-serif fonts I read a lot less of the comments than when they had a serif font. My eyes just seemed to get tired more quickly.

Having done some fiddling around with fonts after noticing this effect I've found that I prefer serif fonts for large / long lumps of text. However, I'm sure if you ask around you'll find lots of people who prefer it the other way around. I've been thinking of adding a little control panel to some of my sites to let people easily switch between the two. It's probably not worth it for short pieces, but for articles it could be worthwhile.

Agreeing with one of the options above - one of my friends who works with a lot of startups will take a lower hourly rate in exchange for equity, depending on the startup. I think the deal is he gets 1% of equity for X amount of hours worked, with an hourly rate a chunk lower than he normally works at. He seems happy with the deal and the client's happy with his work.

As a freelancer, I've been asked to work just for equity on various projects. Normally this is by people who have a poor business idea and often no real clue about how to implement their side (i.e. the business and marketing) side of the idea. So if you ask a freelancer about working for equity, even if it's a split deal with some money, please understand that you're going to need to sell them the idea just as you would any other investor. iamdave it sounds like you're not in this exact situation as you all ready know the guy.

If you'd like to try them before upgrading, you can use VirtueDesktops from www.virtuedesktops.info - it's free and a pretty good virtual desktop app.