Most of the successful consulting business that I know of start their marketing efforts by building trust and being acknowledged as reference on their fields. They do lectures, participate and organize events and write articles to newspapers, magazines and respected websites/blogs.

At any time most of the income will be generated by 20% of the contracts and 20% of the contracts will consume most of the time the consultants have. The big secret is to align both 20% (to have the most of the income generated by the 20% that consumes most of the time) so that you don't waste most of your time on the clients that generate least results.

The charges usually will be using one of this three models:
* Per hour rates (sometimes with different rates for each kind of work/skill)
* Per result rates (an amount of the result increase or the result economy/decrease, depending on the type of the action)
* Per action rates (fixed amounts for specific actions/efforts)

If you want more examples, call me.