Looking for ideas on how to market myself properly.

So I've been working with a consulting project up until now, mainly offline for a local company, but what I really want to do is to start working from home entirely. I've got things I can do and I know that I can always learn more and get better. But it's getting this daily business system in place that I don't seem to get quite right yet..

I want to work from home and do stuff related to reading and writing. I can do programming, proofreading/typesetting of books, research and writing. So I have a business - sortof. But it's the marketing for this business that needs to improve.

For instance, I can program in C#, python, PHP, HTML and JavaScript - I know all this stuff and I can do it from home. But I still haven't quite rationalized to myself how to present this business to the world in an attractive way so that I can get a steady stream of new work to do.

The marketing I've been doing so far was mainly in terms of writing online and allowing people to get to know me better. But I haven't been doing much direct marketing over the telephone or email. I've recently started calling businesses though and basically asking them if they are currently experiencing any challenges and offering my help. I've gotten all of my offline projects through direct contact and my own initiative.

I can get projects this way and find work, but it just seems wrong to me. It's because I'm not building any equity within my own business when I work on them since all of these projects have so far involved going out and working with the client at their office coding something instead of working at my own place from home. And also the client owns the code so it does not make any good business sense to me to continue working this way.

Quite honestly I can work 16 hours per day and learn everything that I need to learn in order to do my work better provided that I have a steady stream of work to do coming in 'through the door' so to speak. And I also want to write more stuff that I can reuse between different clients so that I can build more equity within my own business.

It seems to me that the main issue that companies have with hiring someone who works from home is that they themselves want to build equity for their business and so they want to have people who are working only for them and at their office. Also I think another issue is that they don't want to outsource sensitive stuff to you when they don't know where you are at because they perceive this as a security issue.

Perhaps I'm just not soliciting the right kind of work though or perhaps my whole approach is not quite right. But I'm pretty certain that I'm going to make this work somehow because people are getting their businesses working every single day and get to spend every day at their own office doing the work they love.

Maybe I'm subconsciously soliciting "job" type deals instead of focusing on a different model. I know I could try other options for building a business online such as maybe building a community or a website where I sell stuff. Although right now what I want is to simply find a way to apply my computer skills while working from home and to build equity.

How have you guys moved from consulting and into starting your own company and hiring people working from your own office while creating your own stuff that you love to make?

:-)