How To Find Contracting Work

I have a full-time job and do some contracting work on the side but am looking to quit and do full-time contracting work. Historically, my contracting work has come through my personal network, but that won't be enough to do full-time at this point. I was wondering if people had good recommendations (job sites, articles about starting this process, finding out about networking events, etc) for obtaining contracting work. Thanks so much!

Here are some good ways, some of this has a slant towards the ruby/rails community but that's just because I'm more familiar with it:

Help people. Lots of people. It's pretty easy to find people that need help:

• here
• quora
• stack overflow
• for ruby folks there's #railsbridge and #rubyonrails in irc.freenode.net rails forums. There's going to be very similar options in almost all other tech, certainly in all the languages
• contribute to open source. pick a project and throw some time into it you'll become an expert and be recognized for your contributions. Eric Davis @edavis10, a friend of mine on twitter, did a great job at this with RedMine and now ChiliProject.

Network

• go to meetups, brigades, local conferences, hack nights, etc
• find people doing what you want to do and join in, conversation will turn to work at some point and you can mention availability
• find people that do stuff that is similar or complimentary to work you do. Designers need copywriters. Developers need sysadmins. iPhone developers need UX people. And so on and so forth.
• go to other networking meetings, you might not find someone that knows they need rails at a Chamber of Commerce event, but you're providing a solution not a platform.

Beat the bushes, so to speak

• hit up everyone you know, tell them what you need and ask if they have someone who could use your services
• set up twitter searches for folks looking for rails help
• hit the job boards
• chase lots of leads

If you're in the "beat the bushes" phase I beat them for you at Freelance Funnel and send you what flies out every morning

LinkedIn

Xing

etc. Plus tons of agencies out there that gladly look for people / work. FOr years I never "went out" but let them come to me, by watching the boards in some social networks.