[erroneousfunk]

I think it depends on the amount of business that you want. I do freelance as a side job and only have a few clients a year that give me an extra ~10-20k of income. I mostly do web scraping, data science, data management, and teaching (workshops, taught a couple university classes, adult education)

Networking events and word of mouth from other clients have been about half of my work, and the rest just sort of email me out of the blue based on either my LinkedIn profile or a book I wrote.

I don't blog, I don't have much of a professional website. The book I wrote is fairly popular, but I find that the people who email generally haven't read the book (although they might have bought it... to see that it's real, I guess) but they find me through that.

Will agree that cold outreach doesn't work at all unless you're doing it on a massive scale (and then you're just a professional salesperson...). I've done it, but it's literally never worked for me.