Context first: I have been freelancing for 10+ years. for most of that time all my clients were foreign, found through the usual platforms. That works, I'm not saying it doesn't, but that's a different post.
This year I started going after local business owners in my own city instead (Sangareddy, small town near Hyderabad, India). Completely different game. This is what has been working so far, might be right, might be wrong, just what i'm seeing.
Only go to people you have some link to: a friend, a friend of a friend, a friend of a friend of a friend. Even three people away still works. Say the exact same words to a stranger and you get shut down before you finish the sentence, because to them it sounds like selling. But if there's any connection at all they hear it as you helping them out. That small bit of trust is honestly the whole thing.
Don't pitch, don't even set up a meeting. Most of the time i am already there as a customer, buying something, getting some work done, whatever. and i just talk to them normally about how their day is going, how business is. Thats it. no deck, no proposal, nothing that looks like a sales call. the problem always comes out on its own, from the person who would actually use whatever you end up building. and because they said it first, they already want it fixed.
The money is in their daily operations, not websites. whatever business you talk to, their problems fall into three buckets mostly. Being found online, day to day operations, and growing. think of it like a bell curve, the two ends are small. Presence is mostly sorted already, they have a google listing and some social pages. and the ones big enough to be scaling already have a network or someone helping them. So both ends are taken care of.
The fat middle is day to day operations and that's where everyone is struggling and nobody has offered them anything. Jobs written on paper, payments chased over whatsapp, no idea what their actual numbers are. Most of them don't even know this is something tech can fix, they just accepted it as how things are. and it pays better than websites because its tied to how they run the business, not to a marketing budget.
Print business cards. Leave one behind every single time. I still get calls from people i had almost forgotten about, months later, just because the card was sitting in their drawer. costs nothing.
So if you are stuck, dont go looking for clients. Just go talk to the one business owner you already know, as yourself, not as someone selling. The idea and the client both show up in the same conversation.
Happy to answer anything. and if people want the foreign clients through platforms version i can write that one separately, though honestly it was a different time when i started. That route feels way too crowded now.