Clients

I know that if I were reading my blog I'd be wondering where all those freelance clients came from. The answer is simple, freelance message boards and posting sites.

There are oodles of both out there and they are well worth sifting through on a regular basis.

Forums
I'm currently pretty cut and dry. I stick to Wahm, and that's more or less it. I do plan to branch off to other forums as well eventually - but I've been part of Wahm for a while now and no matter what some folks may say or think, I think it's a pretty top notch community.

Freelance Sites
This is a whole other world... I've signed up for so many that I don't even remember them all at this point. Most of them will offer a free version with a very limited number of bids available for jobs on a monthly basis. They also offer the ability to upgrade your account so that you can apply for more jobs, add more info to your profile, etc.

I honestly recommend sticking with the free versions of all of them until you feel like you absolutely must upgrade. Of course this means that you'll have to be very careful when bidding on jobs since your bids will be limited.

Here a few I'm fond of:
LiveWork - You've all seen me mention this site before, and it does fit into the Freelance posting category so I figured I'd add it here as well. The great thing about LiveWork is that there is no paid account option here and there is no limit to how many jobs you can apply for. However, there aren't many active jobs on this site at the moment either.

Guru - I signed up with them a week or so ago and went through several of their job pages. They seem like a decently set up site but I haven't really utilized them yet. None of the jobs really caught my eye the couple times I checked, but I plan to revisit them regularly anyways to see if I can dig up any good gems there.

ELance - This has proven to be my favorite so far. The site is really well designed and there is a certain degree of quality mandated from the moment you sign up. They actually test you on your comprehension of the site before you can begin bidding on jobs.

Their free version is significantly limited and only gives you 3 bidding credits (some high end jobs require more than 1 credit to bid) but if you're really careful with those three they can serve you well.

I will admit that I already upgraded my account with them... That was actually brought on by a job I was offered elsewhere that offered to pay me through paypal or Elance. I was interested in gaining the experience and feedback on Elance so I upgraded my account so that I could bid into multiple job categories. They do take a cut of the money you make (6.75-8.75%) but I'm generally all right with that at the moment.