Best Friend Reviews is a site where I review things I try and experience or just talk about what I want to talk about. It’s centered around my life and what I do in it. I’ve been online for over 12 years, and I’ve never created such a personal site before. But, I started this site in 2017 for a few reasons that are still true to this day.
1. I Wanted My Own Review Site
On iWriter, before I got my biggest client, I wrote mostly reviews for a few regular clients. I did that for over 5 years. I was really good at writing these reviews, which is why the clients came back again and again. As I was doing this, I started to see the value in writing real reviews as opposed to fake reviews.
I realized that writing reviews was not something I had done for myself over the years, and I couldn’t figure out why. Probably because many bloggers were blogging about specific topics and not reviewing things, and I felt like I should do the same thing.
Since starting online, I had created other sites focused on various topics, such as personal development and relationships, but I had never created a site where I could personally review the things I try in my life. And I wanted to do that!
I named this site Best Friend Reviews because, unlike the reviews I wrote for clients, I wanted to write reviews that I would be willing to share with my best friend.
I wanted to write reviews that could help someone like my best friend understand if she wanted to try out something or not.
I wanted to review things and talk about things that I would talk about with my best friend.
Therefore, Best Friend Reviews seemed like a natural blog title for this site.
2. I Wanted To Write For Myself
I feel like I spent WAY too long writing for other people. Some people enjoy ghostwriting and writing for other people, but I feel like I’ve been there and done that and it isn’t meant for me.
Most of it was on iWriter. I always felt like I got paid way less than I was worth. And I hated creating content and then giving it away. Even when I got paid well for writing other people’s content, I regretted it because I ended up creating something for someone else that they could have for years to come and I no longer had any rights to.
I also wrote on Hubpages for many years, and I hated that they could change my content to suit their needs. It didn’t feel like my content at all.
Even though I was writing all the time, it didn’t feel like I was doing anything for myself. It felt like I was doing a heck of a lot of other people, though.
In short, I wanted to produce content that was published under me and mine to do what I wanted with.
When you write your own content, you can delete it, change it, and use it the way you want to use it. There is much more freedom, and that’s why I got into the business of working online… I wanted more freedom to do what I enjoyed.
Yes, there are a lot of things that drive me crazy about writing online, but I feel like having my own website is by far the best way to go when it comes to the freedom to create in a way that I want to create.
3. I Wanted To Spend More Time Living My Life
I’ve always enjoyed research. Even when I was out of college, I would write research papers because I enjoyed it so much. So, at the beginning of my online career, writing about various topics was really fun for me. But research can take a lot of time.
I started to get heavily into personal development and wanted to spend more time focused on that then researching things and writing about them.
Writing on my own review site gives me the freedom to live the life I want and then write about it. It comes much more naturally than trying to write about things that I don’t have experience with, and it makes the creative flow much easier.
For instance, I was taking a few Mindvalley courses at the time I started Best Friend Reviews, but I found myself unable to focus on them like I wanted to because I was too busy writing for other people and that took up a ton of my time.
My thought was this: it takes time to take a course, so why not combine it with my creative outlet and work? Why not do reviews of the personal development programs I was taking? It just made sense.
If you are going to start a website or blog, I highly suggest you focus it on your interests and life. It becomes so much easier to do what you want to do in life and in your professional life.
