If a person is lucky, good freelancing work just falls in their lap. Ordinary humans, on the other hand, have to hunt well paying contracts down. Most of the work of freelancing is identifying good clients, being there when the client has work that can be handled by a contractor, and closing the deal successfully. The work itself is often the easy part.

Developing leads means making contact with many busy people. Those people need to be busy with work that pays well enough that they can pay you well. A good source of that sort of work is well established contractors/freelancers/consultants/agencies because they take projects that pay well and this means there is likely to be meat on the bone when they use outside workers. The will take on outside help when they have more work than they can handle, and good consultants often do.

The rest of the world of freelancers is racing toward the bottom in pursuit of clients who want to pay zero dollars.

Good luck.