"Back in the day" I crawled Craigslist to get the urls for every location served in north America. Craigslist allowed you to create an rss feed from a search, so I scripted rss links to every location's jobs section with the search "freelance telecommute lamp developer".

Looking through that every day, got many contract jobs and 2 full time 10+ year "careers".

Low tech, but when it got to the sales calls was able to push the "creative problem solver" and "time/cost aware" angles, in addition to my tech resume. There was literally hardly any competition in many of these markets, because everyone else was on monster or whatever. Ymmv