Freelancer.com, Fiverr, LinkedIn, TopTal, Guru, PeoplePerHour, Indeed for remote jobs (have to set location to remote):
Google can be a good place to look, as well:
Look for industry-specific job boards. For example, Dribbble is a website dedicated to graphic designers and they have their own job board with listings for remote jobs:
And then, let me give you one last one (more for getting freelance work)… local business meetup groups. These can be crazy effective. I was in two for almost two years until I moved to a really small town.
Each one met once a month.
And, every time I went I’d get 2–3 leads for projects or people who wanted to work with me. The business owners at these groups invest a lot of time and energy into networking, so they usually know a ton of people.
And, they’re more than happy to help people out.
And all the work I got from these meetings, those people never saw any of my previous work. They just hired me. It’s a bit surreal. But, it happened over and over for those two years.
As for where to find them. There’s a good site: Meetup.com. It’ll show you meetup groups in your area, number of members, information about the group, etc. Which is nice to know before going in.
So, there you go. Hopefully, that gives you some ideas on where to find freelance work, especially if you’d been getting work, but hit a dry spell.
I should also mention that even though you excluded, Upwork is still a good place to get client work. It can be a little difficult to understand at first, because its ranking engine is highly sophisticated (to the point that even the time of day that a client performs a search affects which freelancers show up).
But, once you understand it, it becomes clear how to get work there. In any case, I do have a free tutorial where I show you how their ranking engine works and how to build your profile to rank higher in their results. It’s here if you’re interested.
