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Recently, some of you have been contacting me about services and products that you offer. I'm currently looking for contest sponsors for a future Chessvine.com major contest giveaway. If you have any products or services you would like to donate or advertise then by all means contact me! I can be reached via e-mail (colonel_crockett@yahoo.com) or through Facebook. Your product does not have to be chess related but please put "Chessvine" in the subject line.

Anton Taylor (also known as ColonelCrockett from here at Chessvine.com) has finally become a member of the Chess Journalists of America. It was a long time coming and I received a kind note from Alexandra Kosteniuk congratulating me ... which was an incredibly nice touch.

Check me out on the member list!

Well, people ... it's quite a major update to the site I have to tell you about. My stats for the site (over on the sidebar under "rankings") have now been updating and are being automatically maintained now.

Let's compare:

Name - Old Stat - Updated Stat
Feedburner Subscribers - 15 - 180+
Twitter Followers - 1700+ - 6500+

That's quite a bit of difference!

There are a number of new items to add to the "I'm working on the blog" list.

1) I'm contemplating giving the blog a new template. The current one looks fairly professional but there a few unappealing bugs in the system that I'd like to see cured. The simplest solution is to change the template.

2) I'm going to be updating my sidebar. For some reason my blog subscriber counts have remained monstrously low when they're displayed on the sidebar while the numbers have actually skyrocketed. I'm going to revamp the widgets and see if I can't have a more accurate representation of my 1000s of followers from various online services.

3) updating the social media networks. The facebook groups are still growing but the pace has become a trickle and I'm going to fix that through aggressive expansion. Likewise, the chessvine network that I began on LinkedIn for professionals needs to be revamped and relaunched with more publicity.

4) Backroom business deals are still currently being made to get this blog generating some real money for my personal gain. The blog is getting enough traffic to monetize but I just haven't made the real effort. It's now been one year of full-time operation and the business plan is working ... I just have to mine the gold to create a cash flow form the personal branding I've been doing.

5) Last but not least: As part of the back room deals I'm looking for vendors willing to donate products and services to consumers as advertising. In other words, I'm actively seeking stuff to give away as contest prizes. Free stuff is a big part of the 5-10 year business model for this blog and it's going to happen.