Movie Cultists, like most blogs, has three basic ways of gaining traffic: search engines, links from other sites, and me pestering friends and family to check my website out.

(Theoretically, there would also be advertising if I wasn’t broke.)

The first two are symbiotic.  The more links you have from other websites, the better your search results get, and the better search results you get, the more people visit your site and link to it.

But e-mailing other websites and begging them to put you in their Links section doesn’t really work like it did in, say, 1998.  So the best way for a movie blog like mine to get incoming links is to actually break some news.  Then all the other blogs will pick up on it and write an article, linking to me as the source.

Of course, breaking news, getting an actual “exclusive,” is very hard to do, because I don’t have any sources.  The secretary of the chairman of Warner Bros. doesn’t feed me big stories on the sly, unfortunately.

But I do get occasional interview opportunities with directors and minor celebrities.  And this is where living in Washington D.C., paradoxically, is better than living in New York or L.A.  Here, because there are fewer entertainment journalists, the interviews you get are usually one-on-ones.  In NY/LA, you’ll get bigger stars, but they’ll be roundtable interviews or press conferences with lots of reporters all shooting off questions and then everybody using the same responses, resulting in near-identical interviews across multiple outlets.  In D.C., you actually get some alone time, resulting in exclusive interviews.

Last month I interviewed four of the five members of Broken Lizard, the guys who did Super Troopers.  They have a new movie coming out this month, but during the interview I also pressed them for some info on the rumored Super Troopers 2.

They didn’t give me anything huge, but they did mention a few things that I didn’t think any other website had yet.  So I went home and wrote up a small article containing just the exclusive information.

Since I’m still a site that nobody really knows about yet, I e-mailed one of the big movie blogs, Slashfilm, letting them know that, hey, I just posted some exclusive info that you might want to write an article about.  (Internet etiquette tip: this sort of e-mail is allowed if you have something you think might actually add value to their site.  Obnoxiously spamming websites asking them to link to your latest top 10 list every day won’t get you anywhere.)

I was in luck: Slashfilm posted an article about it the next day, with a big link back to Movie Cultists.  From there the floodgates opened: since Slashfilm is one of the major movie blogs online, a ton of other websites picked up the story — not just movie blogs like JoBlo.com and FirstShowing.net but also the MTV Movies Blog and Comedy Central’s blog.

I was worried that a few sites would fail to track the story back to its original source and credit Slashfilm instead, but I was pleasantly surprised.  Pretty much everyone linked back to me.

(The only strange thing about the experience was noticing that a couple of sites had just plagiarized MTV’s article 100%.  Strange not because people plagiarize but because it clearly doesn’t work.  The sites that did all looked to be very low-traffic hack jobs.  What’s the point?)

So what’s the upshot?  Well, I got a decent traffic bump that day, enough to make it my biggest day yet.  But there’s a long-term benefit as well: getting a dozen or so high-quality, high-traffic sites to link to me improves my search engine standings significantly.

In other words, it was a successful exclusive.  Now I just need another one…

You may notice that I don’t post as many straight-up movie reviews as I used to.  That’s because over the summer, my job at TheCinemaSource segued into more behind-the-scenes coding work, and most of my work that goes into Movie Cultists at the moment involves writing more current-news articles than long-form reviews.

But have I stopped?  Absolutely not.  Over the summer I managed to crank out reviews at TheCinemaSource for Funny People and Extract.  And at Movie Cultists I’ve recently reviewed Zombieland, Pandorum, and 9.  This week I’m catching a screening of The Road, which has gotten extremely divergent reactions so far, so that should be interesting.

With Movie Cultists, my eventual plan is to get a regular writer or two to handle news updates so I can free myself up for covering bigger stories and original pieces, like more movie reviews plus features like my recent The Top 15 Biggest Oscar Movies of 2009.  But that’s eventual.  If traffic keeps increasing, we’ll see.

Next week, on October 13th, the domain name strandedinmanhattan.com will expire.  I’ve had it redirecting to this website for a good ten months, so it’s time to finally let it go.

It’s been four years since I first registered Stranded in Manhattan.  At the time, I was in the first semester of my junior year at NYU, living in a dorm room right on top of Union Square.  I had not yet written for any website aside from my old NYU homepages address, and I was just starting my very first college internship.

I’ve moved four times since then — first to Brooklyn; eventually to Washington D.C. — but I’ve always had a fondness for the name, and I’m sorry to see it go.  Not quite sorry enough to pay ten bucks to renew it and another eighteen to keep the site live, but sorry nonetheless.  Don’t worry; it’s all backed up.

My old host, by the way, was QualityHostOnline.  It’s one of the smaller hosts, and in four years I’ve never had one problem.

I’ve created a new website called Movie Cultists.

While a lot of the regular readers of this site already knew that, I wanted to hold off on an official announcement until I’d been up and running consistently for a few months — as you can imagine, the Internet is littered with half-started, quickly-abandoned movie blogs, and I didn’t want to look like just another one.  The site now has over two hundred articles (some by freelance contributors), a lively Twitter account, and even its first exclusive interview.

Updated with about five articles every weekday, it covers daily movie news with an editorial eye towards cult movies of the past and future.  Some of our popular articles so far include 10 Small Films from Big Directors and a rundown of all possible future X-Men movies.

Our traffic, knock on wood, continues to increase and appears to be doing pretty well when looking at other blog trajectories.  I just checked my Google Analytics account, and we’ve even got a few visitors from Mongolia, Vietnam, South Africa, and lots of other random places.  Kind of cool.  Visit often and follow our RSS feed, if you know what that means.

Amazing what you can accomplish on a Sunday afternoon.  I finally sat down and hammered out all the design changes and updates I wanted to make to this site, and I think it looks pretty decent now.

Aside from the obvious changes to the look and feel, you’ll see some new pages in the top navigation bar and an updated list of websites to the right.

Beyond the design quirks and typos I’ll inevitably notice in the coming days and weeks, the only thing that’s not done is the movie review archive; only a few of the titles listed link to my full reviews. I think I can actually figure out a way to add the links automatically, by creating a new MySQL table and using a lot of PHP hackery I haven’t fully thought out yet.  It’ll probably take longer than just adding each link individually, but it’ll also be way cooler.  So.

Is anybody still reading?

Check back soon for official announcements about my two new projects.  Like this site, I want to get them on solid ground before I start bragging about them.

Enjoy the new design.

New look, some new content.  I need to let it simmer for a few days and rearrange/add some things before I settle on this.

In the meantime (by request!) here are some more COED Magazine articles: 5 Action Sequences You Would Definitely F*ck Up, How to Date Out of Your League, and The 15 Most Glorious World War 2 Movies.

The middle one was particularly amusing to write considering it was about picking up hot girls in bars, something I’ve never done.  Some of the comments called me out for being a typical arrogant frat boy, which is exactly the voice I was trying to write in, so thank you.

The new look you see is temporary and, unlike the previous design, not made by me.  I’ll be trying out various WordPress themes in the coming few weeks as I prepare some changes to the site.  I wanted to implement a few things the last time I switched layouts that I wasn’t able to, mostly because of my own lack of skill/knowledge; whatever I do change, rest assured that this blog isn’t going anywhere.

Expect some news soon about some projects I’ve been working on, by the way.