Point 1.5) Invest in paid membership. It might seem a lot today but your first job will likely cover the year's outlay. And the jobs are then far more likely to come your way. Attend the Meeting Clients free webinar to find out why.
David Jones wrote:
3) Hunt for new jobs when they come up and contact the agencies asap and build a relationship with them this way (some said that the best jobs are not actually posted on the job boards?).
Yes, many of the better jobs aren't posted as public jobs because they're filled by clients contacting a few of the best-matching profiles in the directory. They find these profiles by setting up filtered searches. This is why the contents and completeness of the profile are so important.
4) Network with other translators...
Not just with other translators; network in general and let everyone know -- en passant -- that you're a translator. Business cards too should be distributed liberally. You never know where a client may come from. The parents at your kid's school (for example) mainly have jobs, or their family members have jobs, and any one of them could be a prospective client if only they knew about you. You don't need to do the hard sell, in fact that's often counter-productive.
Truthfully I have little translating experience but lots of experience of working with the Chinese language and am very confident in my ability to translate it into English. At this stage I wouldn't like to tackle anything too specialist but would like to work my way towards more complex business / legal / financial documents as I find these very interesting.
I wonder if you don't have more experience than appears on your CV. Perhaps you did translations while you were abroad that weren't exactly paid for, but were done to professional standards. Or at college, perhaps? If you really have little or no experience, then maybe some basic training in the techniques would be a worthwhile investment at this stage. At the same time, you can always accept jobs that you believe you can handle well. Just be on the lookout for scams -- visit the Scam Centre here on ProZ.com, read all about the current scams, and sign up for notifications of new scams.