Thoughts About Reviews and Stuff

My husband is making me stay in bed because I’m sick, apparently he doesn’t enjoy the sound of me coughing up phlegm and blowing my nose into tissues. Sheesh. So that gives me lots of time to poke around online and when I get too tired for that, to lay in bed staring at the ceiling with my mind wandering.  And where it’s been wandering today is around the topic of being a product review blogger.

When I wrote my first product review, I was so excited that someone wanted to know what I thought about their product!  It was a redesigned Swiffer Sweeper that I reviewed for MS&L, and I put my heart into writing that post.  I didn’t use the product description on the Swiffer site or copy anything from the press release, I wrote from the heart.  Here’s the post if you’d like to read it – The redesigned Swiffer sweeper. I don’t know what happened to the photos, I know there were some in the original post. Weird.

After I started getting more and more requests for reviews, I created this blog just for that purpose.  What I’ve noticed over the last three years is that I’ve gotten away from writing completely from the heart and have been trying to be “more professional” sounding. And when I thought about that earlier today, it sort of was like a thunderclap in my head.

I should never write a review that doesn’t come from my heart in my own voice. EVER. I should never regurgitate press releases or product descriptions because I feel pressure to get a review posted. That’s not a review, that’s posting someone else’s information!  A true REVIEW means saying exactly what I think about the product. EXACTLY WHAT I THINK.

I mean, I went back and re-read that Swiffer post. The writing style is nothing like how I write now, and why? I HAVE NO IDEA. What happened to that person who wrote that review? Where did she go?

There are bloggers who say you don’t have to post your thoughts about making any kind of change, you should just make the change. Well, I disagree. Blogging is how I work out my thoughts about stuff, and this is me working out my thoughts about what products I accept for review and how I write about them.

You know what? I used to be kind of funny. And snarky. I used to have regular readers who came to my blog and left comments about what I wrote. It’s true!  Do you know how long it’s been since someone left a comment on anything I wrote here that wasn’t a giveaway? That is just sad. I’m not saying I’m writing for the comments, I’m saying that if I was writing WELL, if my writing was INTERESTING, I think people WOULD leave comments. So that right there should tell me something.

I’m done beating myself up. I’m done panicking over the state of my inbox. I’m done writing reviews of products that I didn’t really love. I might even be done being MomReviews, I don’t know. It was pretty disheartening to go to BlogHer this year and realize how few people even knew I HAD a review blog.  I started reviewing products because a company liked something I wrote about their product and asked me to tell them what I thought about another product. I’m Elizabeth from MomReviews, and I like to tell my readers about products I love.  That’s all I have to say about that.