EDIT: Although I studied Mechatronic Engineering for 3 years and so have some formal programming education I dropped out of Uni and have no formal qualifications.

You'd be surprised how many shitty little jobs you can get by just meeting people and doing websites and occasional IT odd jobs around the place.

Put up a site, get some business cards, start telling everyone that's what you do. Eventually, you start to get your act together and figure out how to be a real business but at the start you can make enough money to live on simply because most people at the very low end of the market have no idea how, or cannot be bothered, to go in search of good "IT people" or "someone to fix up the website". If you happen to be there, sometimes that's good enough.

Also don't underestimate the power of knocking on doors.

A couple of years back I was really hard up. I had run out of work and money and my credit card was dangerously close to it's $10,000 limit.

I was finding it very hard to get a job because I'd broken my heel into 12 pieces trying to do parkour (massive, massive fail - note to self: lose weight next time you try to jump off things) and was really not very mobile and having to turn up to interviews with a cast on crutches all sweaty and pale was not particularly attractive. On top of that I've been self-employed since 2003 and it does NOT look good on a resume, believe me. I was starting to think I was unemployable.

Anyway it was a difficult time. I moved into a new house when I left hospital and didn't have an internet connection (pretty crippling when you work from home, and are actually phsyically crippled as well).

I didn't have a car and couldn't get far on my crutches so I was catching taxis to internet cafe's everyday to do work. I was finishing up a few projects (the money from which was already spent), supporting others (for free) and trying to get some more work out of existing clients.

One day I struck up a conversation with a cab driver about his mobile EFTPOS system and he said that he gets 4% of the revenue when he uses that rather than the normal one and that it was owned by a local broker company. He said "Man that guy is rich" (referring to the taxi broker that owns the EFTPOS system).

I run an SMS gateway so I thought hell, if he's rich, maybe I could sell him something so I had the driver take me over to the broker and walked in there without ever having met the guy and asked if he needed any software.

It turns out he was sick of his driver database software which was this old monster written in Access and paid me a few thousand dollars to redo it for him in PHP/MySQL as a web app running on a server I setup on his LAN.

That few grand kept me going until I got my next big project at the end of the year.

Sometimes you just gotta hustle mang, you gotta hustle.

Of course, there was every chance nothing would have come of that meeting, but if you put yourself out there like that 10 times a week, something will happen.

Always think "how am I promoting myself today?", always think what opportunities there are in every social interaction you have.

I hand my business card for SMS gateway services to almost everyone I meet. Cafes, real estate services, people I meet in bars, gig promoters, bands. When I buy coffee from places and notice they have a signup sheet for their email news letter, I ask if they also do SMS.

If I ever overhear someone in a cafe discussing anything relevant to my business, I introduce myself (if it's possible to do so without being rude).

I've only ever gotten a handful of customers this way but this type of self promotion doesn't cost anything, it's just a way of life (WARNING: there is a thin line between hustling and being an annoying prick!! Tread carefully).

There is great value in talking face to face with people and always being aware of what opportunities that presents you with. Find out about people's businesses and their problems and help to improve their situation somehow.

If you really listen there are opportunities all over the place.

Also RememberTheMilk.com mentioned last night that they're hiring and will hire people remotely :)