[robinwarren]

Last year I started thinking I might one day go freelancing, so started attending relevant meetups and trying to figure out who to connect with locally. It was partly that which lead me to build the http://jobstractor.com (shameless plug) to try and find who was hiring near me so I could connect with them on twitter and start getting myself known. I've not made the leap to freelancing as of yet but networking has I think got me in a far better position should I want to in future.

To the OP, I did find that a lot of people in the local freelancing community were strongly connected with each other. A little bit of networking could go a long way and in my experience there has always been people looking for good developers.