Same in my case, and the problem is very clear: the kind of clients i am serving. Most of them are random walk-in people who don't really belong to the industry, so they don't really have anyone to share my contact with. For all the 11 years trying, i had only a few attempts with the clients who were actually in the game, and it always failed in one way or the other :(

Judging from my inbox, scraping contact information from WHOIS and spamming the hell outta people seems to be quite popular.

When's the last time you went with a whois spamming agency?

Never, but apparently some folks do or else they'd quit doing it.

Join forums orientated towards what you do (or better, start your own!) then make friends, socialise, position yourself as 'the expert', give free advice and help (but not too much, obviously) then you'll get clients like that.

It's basically networking but online instead of the 'real world'.

This seems to be good advice. Thanks

Join forums orientated towards what you do (or better, start your own!) I didn't get the whole "start your own forum" part.

Get some forum software (IPB is good https://invisioncommunity.com/solutions/fan-communities/ ) then get your clients on there, advertise get more people etc.

Another good way to get clients is to throw up some script on a place like codecanyon, and people will come to you for custom work/customisations, steer them towards your forum too.

Why not social media groups? Wouldn't people by nature use those sites more?

Also, I'll try the codecanyon tip :)

Yeah just whatever works for you personally!

The monthly “Freelancers” thread on HN seems reasonably lenient about small agencies posting. I’ve had a number of clients from it over the last few years.