Reviews Of Freelancers

Omar Khafagy
omar.ak@gmail.com
Toronto, Ontario

The next copywriter - Omar Khafagy from the Toronto, Ontario area. He was to do the copy for a different site.

I was surprised at his behaviour because he was sooo happy to get work from me being a jr. copywriter.

I was trying him out on a smaller project.

We talked on the phone for a while several times.

He kept saying he’d do the work, then he got another gig with some Japanese businessman, but he still said he’d do the work as if he was doing me such a big favour.

Then he said his father came into town and I never heard from him again.

He had done one version or the rewrite, and I even e-mailed him to get it from him, but I never got it, or a response.

He like the other 2 led me on for over 3 weeks telling me he couldn’t start on it until then. Seems to be a pattern amongst these so called copywriters.

He later on e-mailed me when he saw this post & was very upset about it. He was trying to make excuses that he had been naive because he was only 19 or 20 years old, I think he said there was no Japanese businessman or whatever & he had lied to me because he listened to the lies about me from those other copywriters. He realized he had made a mistake.

That’s what happens when a group of people get together to spread lies about one person, the naive ones end up getting hurt the most in the end. It was clearly & still is, a witch hunt with one copywriter telling a lie, then the next one lying & in the meantime, not one of them even knows me, nor does even one of them who did do work for me step up to the plate & sincerely apologize for their actions.

I refused to take this down because while Omar was sort of apologizing on one hand, he was using excuses & then trying to say he did soooo much for me by talking to my son about becoming a man. He had talked to him about shaving, etc.

Omar, this has NOTHING to do with that. This has to do with the fact that you said you were going to do this job, & you practically begged me for it.

I spent a ton of time with you on the phone socializing, & in the end you did nothing for me, you disappeared, you lied & I wasted a ton of my time.

Others need to know how you treated me, it doesn’t matter if you talked to me socially or my son socially. Business is business, & you disappeared, so in the end you weren’t really my friend, you were some guy who buttered me up & then left me hanging with no webcopy & a ton of wasted time, & my time is worth money to me. Had you told me right from the beginning you didn’t want to do it, this post never would have made it to my blog.

If I really wanted to be nasty, I could detail what we talked about, but that’s NOT who I am as a person, I only talked about work, not what we talked about personally.

Eric Louviere
www.copywriting-club.com
ericlouviere@gmail.com

Keep in mind since these guys all know one another, I won’t be surprised if they start bashing & lying about me, but I don’t want you to have to go through what I went through, and like I’ve stated many times, people need to be held accountable for their actions. They can’t just get away with treating people/businesses like this just because they are only online.

I found the 2nd copywriter (Eric Louviere) from that Warrior site. He runs this copywriting business with his partner.

Right on the site they claim they give excellent customer service, so I was very happy to read this.

It’s unfortunate they don’t live up to their claims.

I spoke to Eric Louviere one night going over what I needed. He seemed okay, but I could sense that “I’m great and know it all” attitude that really irks me.

He knew I was a small business, and reworked some numbers so he came up with a price I was happy with. I was thankful.

He told me to send him a 50% deposit, and he would be starting it in 3 weeks.

I sent Eric the check the following day via Bill Payment which takes approximately 3-5 business days, but people usually get it within 3 days.

Then I didn’t hear from him, but I waited patiently. I even sent him my NDA to sign & never received that either.

I end up getting an e-mail stating he was out of town for a week or something, which he never told me about when I hired him.

I waited again until he came back.

Still no e-mail, phone call, nothing.

So I finally call him and guess what happens.

Eric Louviere claims he didn’t receive my 50% deposit until 3 weeks later, so he hadn’t even started on my work.

I was PISSED!

Then he starts trying to play games saying he told me to pay 100% upfront.

This is a total LIE.

I don’t pay anyone 100% upfront unless I know them well, and I think I would have objected had he stated this on the phone.

When I told him this, he had nothing to say about that point.

He didn’t even go out of his way to make me happy and do the work.

His way of justifying his unprofessional disrespectful behavior, was to go on and on about how he gave me a discount.

So? What does that have to do with treating your clients with respect. You give a discount to a client & then treat them like they don’t exist? Boy, you don’t know how to run a business, do you Eric.

I didn’t put a gun to his head telling him to give me a discount.

He could have quoted me full price and I would have just said it was too much and walked away.

I’m sick and tired of these independent contractors blaming me because of their actions.

They decide to give me the discount, I don’t make them.

To top it all off, I found out a day or two later he was giving a major discount to everyone who signed up for his services via that Warrrior site, but I already knew he was a liar, so this doesn’t surprise me.

I don’t need to call him names, it’s clear what kind of a person he is.

While he said he’d return the money, that wasn’t the point.

He had also just wasted a month of my precious time because I was waiting, waiting & waiting & you will see that this is what copywriters do, they make the client wait & pretty much old them by the balls because they are beholden to them since they need to make sales, & sales depend on the webcopy.

Then there was also confusion about the check; he snail mailed it to my home address in Canada, when I wanted it to go into my US account in the States.

The entire thing was a waste of my time, and stressful.

So, that was my experience with Eric Louviere.

John Hostel

I’ve been dealing with website copywriters for a couple of years now, and at first I was naive and didn’t know any better and hired any old copywriter who didn’t know what they were doing.

I once even hired one who 2 years later told me she really wasn’t a copywriter, marketing was really her thing.

LOL, so I paid her money and she didn’t really know what she was doing, and she finally admitted it to me when I told her why I wouldn’t hire her again.

I finally got around to hiring one that did write the long sales copy web copy.

My sales increased, but as I later learned, he still didn’t completely know what he was doing, because he had no clue about opt-in auto responders (ARs), and how they are a MUST for certain types of sites, especially mine.

So, for 4 months (as of November 2006) I was trying to find a copywriter within my budget who knows all this stuff about auto responders, including upsells.

Needless to say my experience turned into a nightmare.

I will post separately about what happened with each copywriter I came across.

The first copywriter (John Hostler) came this close to taking the project and then disappeared.

He strung me along for over a month. I was going to hire him, so in my mind I did hire him & he was just going to write something up, I can’t remember now, it was almost 2 years ago.

After waiting for for so long, I got pissed off and told people on http://www.warriorforum.com/ a message board (MB) where these mean spirited money hungry people hang out.

I was on there only because I realized it may have topics of interest on marketing and copywriting that I need to know about.

I only found out afterwards by another copywriter that it’s a hang out for all the dysfunctional egomaniacs that think they are gods gift to the Universe when it comes to making money, selling and marketing.

They tend to be mean spirited, and they all stick up for one another whether the person they stuck up for is doing something unprofessional, negative, or whatever.

It’s basically a boys club with the odd female in there.

So I complain about how John Hostel hasn’t gotten back to me in 1-2 weeks.

Of course they all stick up for him.

He comes on the board and comes up with this story that he changed his mail server & my e-mails got lost, etc. etc.

I believed him, but then later on realized that he could have easily have called me. Now that I know copywriters so well, I’m pretty sure he was lying, but of course there is no way to prove this.

After that he responds to one of my e-mails and then once again just disappeared.

He never did the work, he never even had the respect to tell me he couldn’t do the work, so I wasted over 4 weeks of my time chasing this so called copywriter John Hostel.

His post to my thread on the Warrior Forum was only to defend himself and probably ensure his buddies in arms that they would stick up for him.

I never received an apology from him, NOTHING!

Thanks John Hostel. Just because you didn’t do the work for me doesn’t mean you don’t have an ethical business responsibility to communicate with me & NOT waste my time.