Should I Hire an Online Agency to Find Freelance Work?

The advantages of having an agency to work with are that you get a chance to experience bidding and completing projects while the agency handles the financial end so that you don’t have to bill and collect your fee from the client. Working with an agency may give you the opportunity to work on a variety of projects with different types of clients. You also won’t have to pay money for advertising and marketing.

The biggest disadvantage in using an agency may be the amount that the client is willing to pay. With online agencies, you are competing on the world market. If you live in the US, you may find you are constantly underbid by providers in India and other countries with a lower pay scale. You may find it impossible to compete with providers who will do the job for $2 per hour. In that case, you would only want to offer your services to employers for whom it is important that their freelancer be in the same country.

Another disadvantage of using an agency may be the overall quality of the projects being offered. In addition to shockingly low budgeted projects, often there is not much screening of the projects. For example, there are lots of project offers for someone to post multiple ads on craigslist in multiple cities daily which violates craiglist's terms of use. There was a project wanting someone to go to multiple online radio stations and request a specific song, and they suggested that you use fake email addresses when making the requests. It seems to me that if you had any interest in a career as a craigslist spammer or an Internet hoaxer, you could do this without paying an online agency. If they were a brick and mortar agency and you went in in person, you would not expect to be offered something unprofessional and possibly illegal. Online agencies should be held to the same standard.