I've been an independent professional since 2008, in the creative industry since 1999. I used to get a ton of work from Craigslist. I'm talking $15k/mo. But these last years since COVID I have really struggled to find any work at all. I'm very good at what I do, and I've had clients that include Pixar, a POTUS, an MLB team, and tons of mid sized and small businesses. I'm an expert in Joomla, WordPress, Magento, CSS/LESS, .js and php-based Open Source. I specialize in custom websites that my clients can manage easily without hired help. The lack of work isn't for lack of skill or experience – I just don't know where people are finding leads to quote and write estimates for. For others in my field, where do you find work? And please don't tell me bottom feeder sites like Fivr.
Have you tried building a personal brand and advertise on different platforms? You can treat it like an ecommerce business. Considering the low overhead of digital work and the big margins, it shouldn’t be an issue spending some money on ads.
I’m in the same boat as you. No POTUS or Pixar, but I have worked with an MLB team and some other pretty prestigious clients.
I was making $150k/yr pretty regularly for a while, largely through marketing/creative agencies and a couple of enterprise clients (one of them a US-based defense contractor).
But I’ve been applying for jobs the past six months or so. Upwork was a last ditch effort to find some freelance work under my barely treading water “glorified freelance company”. I’ve been on a waiting list at Toptal for like a year. Upwork was a race to the bottom between shitty low-paying clients and shitty low-bidding developers.
I thought about making a website that sells subscriptions to Bricks templates, but that market is quickly becoming saturated.