Ask HN: How do you hire a freelancer?

Recently I have been thinking about freelancing full time more and more. One of the worries is always "Am I going to have enough work to keep me going" and "How am I going to win clients?".

I was just wondering if there is anyone on Hacker News that works with freelancers a lot and how do you go about finding a freelancer for a certain project? I guess if you work with freelancers a lot you probably stick with people you have worked with before but how did you make the initial contact?

Also what do people think of sites like odesk and elance etc?

If I'm able to build up an understanding of what clients look for it will help to make me more appealing.