I consider that the term "consultant" is used to freely and most of the time clients advertise that they are looking to hire a consultant when they actually want to hire a freelance developer.
If you want to work with them as "life support" for your practice while you figure out how to find the (innumerable) real clients that pay for business value, fine. But don't kid yourself. Call them "life support", not "clients". And just like a ventilator, staying engaged with life support is going to screw you up.
You cannot, cannot, cannot earn true market rates if your default position on incoming prospective business is "yes". You're going to say "no" a lot, and you're going to hear "no" a lot.
Fear of "no" costs more tech consultants more money than DOTA2 and Imgur ever will.
For some bizarre reason, "consultant" has taken on in common use a meaning approximately equivalent to "contractor", which has nothing to do with whether the work being contracted for is consulting or not.
Most consultants are contractors (whether they are also freelancers or not depends on whether they are individual contractors or are contracted firms), though there are some cases where internal employees job function includes consulting for some other internal group than the one to which they directly report.
But not all contractors (freelance or otherwise) are contracted to consult, and those that aren't contracted to consult shouldn't be called "consultants", in the same way that people that are contracted exclusively for tasks (including consulting) that don't include developing software shouldn't be called "software developers".
Everyone working independent needs to think of the business value they're creating; they need to think about their services the way product managers think about Feature/Function/Benefit charts. We call the people who are good at this "consultants", even when most of what they actually do is (say) Rails apps.