Bustin' Out: Blogging Full Time

We’ve been mumbling for some time now about quitting our day job to devote ourselves full-time to blogging. Well, by this time next week, that dream will be a reality. For a variety of reasons, we’re going to have to keep a low profile for a few more weeks, but we’ll be throwing a coming out party by house tour season for sure.

So what does this mean? In addition to no longer dreading getting out of bed in the morning, we’ll have a lot more time to focus on building the content of the site. The first sign of this will come on March 1 when we launch a new Contractor Ratings feature (hey, at least the brokerate.com software was good for something!). We’re looking for a few beta testers in the meantime, so if you’ve had occasion to use a GC, plumber, carpenter, etc. in recent months and wouldn’t mind spending a few minutes uploading some info and kicking the tires on the new site, please drop us an email at brownstoner@brownstoner.com. We’re also about ready with some new slide show technology that will let us start doing more interiors and renovation features. In addition, we are already working on some off-line events for the Brownstoner community (more on those later).

Until now, there has not been a lot of pressure for the site to generate income, a luxury which goes out the window with this move. Obviously we think the trade-off of a few more ads will be more than worth the benefit to the site of our full-time attention. And although we don’t think Brownstoner’s going to feel any more commercial going forward, we are going to spend some time trying to increase the number of direct ads on both this site and Brooklyn Record, as Google ads won’t exactly pay the mortgage. The one thing we would ask of our readers would be to please participate in the reader survey we’re going to put up in the next few days. While it’s primarily to help us get a clearer picture of reader demographics for the purpose of selling ads, we bet there are more than a few of you who will be curious to hear the results.

In the meantime, we’d like to thank everyone who has sent us tips, participated in discussions and contributed content over the past two years. The next two should be even more fun!

Cheers,

Mr. B