find businesses that have a shitty website. tell them the benefits of a professional design and sell yourself.
find businesses with no website and give them your sales pitch. you can find them offline or in phone directories.
lastly search a footprint to find biz owners who use site builders like godaddy site builder. 90% of the time it is the biz owner themselves who set it up and they're terrible. the footprint for godaddy's is something like this:
Code:
"powered by website builder" + plumber
"powered by website builder" + <niche>
i would not suggest freelancing on upwork. you'll be competing with a lot of foreign labor who can afford to work at very low rates.
i used to work with a friend who had a simple method working for him. i'll share it with you.
1. pick an industry: ex: logistics company
2. make a complete website for it
3. scrape together a list of logistic companies with no/poor website from Google
4. call them with your sales pitch. my friends was he made a website for competitor who didn't pay and is selling the site for a discount.
5. edit the logo/copy to match the business you're contacting
6. keep going down your list of contacts and you can sell the same website to multiple people.
the logic was the customer seeing the well-made site already made and branded with their logo helped with the sales process.
good luck! be sure to have contracts in place for everybody you work with.