How easy / hard is it to get consulting jobs for Ruby on Rails?

I work as a full time and want to supplement my income (and later do freelance or my own product full time down the line) by offering my ruby on rails skills as a consultant.

How long does it usually take to land your first client if you don't have a personal network you can tap into?

What's the best way to get a consulting contract?

The easiest way, if you don't have an existing network you could get referrals from:

1. Have some contributions or a public project on GitHub (not required, but will make the process easier).
2. Apply for every open Rails project on We Work Remotely. Do note that some of those jobs are full time.

That's the low hanging fruit. The quality of gigs on WWR are higher than other places.

After that, you might want to try other freelance sites like ODesk and eLance.

Once you have your first set of initial consulting clients, getting more gets significantly easier (via referrals, etc).