This marks Movie Vault’s 4th video footage at a premiere. Next week, we will be interviewing Angelina Jolie (and possibly Brad Pitt) at the Salt premiere in the UK.

You can watch our video from The Expendables premiere below (you may need to visit TylerCruz.com via your web browser if you’re reading via e-mail or an RSS reader):

New Features and Improvements

I’ve been continuing to work on Movie-Vault.com ever since I launched the massive revamp of the site 9 months ago. I don’t want it to fall into disrepair or neglect like before and so am constantly adding new features, making improvements on existing areas of the site, and continuing to add great content to the site.

I recently had a number of changes made, improving some of the administrative and staff functions as well as adding and implementing a lot of social media into the site. I created a Facebook page and had Interberry add “Like” buttons on our news and reviews, added a “Get News by E-mail” feature, and even had Interberry convert our news to an RSS format so that I could set up a Feedburner account and offer RSS for our news.

Please feel free to join Movie-Vault.com’s various social media outlets, or at least “Like” our Facebook page:

• RSS
• Twitter
• Facebook Fan Page

My next plan for Movie-Vault.com is to start sending out regular newsletters to our members who did not opt-out of receiving them, which is 1,800 and growing. The newsletters will probably go out twice a month and will contain a summary of what’s new on the site as well as a small advertisement plugging a recently released movie or TV season on DVD/Blu-Ray from Amazon.

In addition, I plan to also start sending out mailings to the double opt-in “partners” newsletter, which is a small list at only 100, but is growing and the users specifically requested to receive movie-related offers, so the conversion rate should be fairly high.

I am also investing a lot into SEO for the site. So far the results have been relatively decent, but I saw a small setback during this past week, so we’ll have to wait and see how things progress over the next month.

The next major thing I would like to do for the site is to acquire the non-dashed domain name, but I’m having trouble finding any contact information for the current owners since it’s a private WHOIS registration and the company’s main website has been down for a few months as well…

So, what do you think about Movie-Vault.com? Do you have any ideas or suggestions on how I could improve the site or grow traffic to it?

While the website is now done, there is still the small matter for the actual game to be completed… Unfortunately, the original developer I had hired for this project ended up turning out to be a complete waste of my time and money, and so I had to fire him.

I have since hired a new development company who I hope will be able to finish this project for me once and for all. So, while there have certainly been many setbacks during this project, there is progress being made, as can be seen from the website’s screenshots below:

Once the game is done, I plan on having some more changes to the website made, such as having the forum skinned and more pages done (a RobotWarz Wiki would be extremely helpful in detailing the game’s fairly large scope).

I may replace these static images with animated Flash in the future.

All the graphics are complete, and the website is now finished. Now we just need the actual game

I’ll keep you posted as more progress is made.

The images lost some quality and don’t look quite as good here due to being resized and saved for the web, but they should still give a good idea as to what the game will look like.

Below you will see 10 new screenshots that the designer just sent me last night. It’s really unbelievable how fast he’s working… scary really This is how it should be!

He’s now almost done all the graphics for the game… all that’s left are the icons, a few more weapons, possible add-on’s and textures, and a simple website and logo. That sounds like a lot, but this guy will probably have all that done in 24 hours!

Anyhow, enjoy the screenshots and let me know what you think:

I didn’t get all that much work done since I published my last post as I had to take care of some personal things, and spent a lot of the time when I was working chatting with various people such as BeckyMarie and the designer for RobotWarz.

My unread e-mails are back up to 202, so I’m going to need to put in some good work hours over the next few days to try to bring that number down.

Anyhow, here are the updates on two of my current projects:

Movie-Vault.com Attends Killers Premiere

Last night, Movie-Vault.com attended the European premiere of Killers which was interviewed by Movie-Vault’s newest interviewer/host, Andy Oliver, in London’s Leicester Square.

Interviews include Director Robert Luketic (21, Legally Blonde, The Ugly Truth) and Katherine Heigl (Knocked Up, The Ugly Truth, 27 Dresses). Unfortunately, Ashton Kutcher was not present at the premiere.

You can watch the video below – I like Andy just as much as Claire!

RobotWarz.com User Interface & Helper Bots

I’ve been working with the RobotWarz graphic designer over the past few days, and he’s continued to pump out results at a very nice rate.

We are now all done with the character and weapon graphics, which was the most gruelling part. In the screenshot below, you will notice the debut of the “helper bots”. These are little bots that can be purchased by players through the game’s store/credit system that help your bot fight.

There are several different types of helper bots you can choose from, including repair bots that help repair you as well as little battle bots that go “pew pew”. They’re really quite cute!

I plan on making the helper bots fairly expensive as to make them a rare thing to obtain and see in the game. For those wondering, the game’s store system uses in-game credits, which cannot not be purchased or traded for with real cash. Memberships which offer more fights per day (and thus more opportunities to level up and gain credits, etc.) will be the only option people have in terms of spending money on the site.

It’s possible of course that I may change this in the future, to simply let people purchase credits for cash, but for game balancing issues this is not planned for the initial version.

With the character work all done, the focus has shifted to revamping the user interface to an improved, sleeker look. I actually estimate for most of the UI to be completed by tonight, and then work will most likely proceed to icons.

The programmer will be back to work on the project tomorrow, hopefully implementing the site’s new graphics into the game.

Here are two screenshots of the new user interface so far:

We’re not too far away from a closed beta… perhaps as soon as a few weeks…

A number of issues brought this about: my weight loss challenge took up a lot of my time, I have been rather lethargic (despite losing 17 pounds), and I overburdened myself with too many projects and websites to run. In fact, I got up to nearly 400 unanswered work-related e-mails the other day because I simply have too many things going on at once.

But at the same time, I also have myself to blame. I simply haven’t had the desire to work lately. I think I’ve been too stressed from having too many projects under my belt and not enough time to dedicate to each of them. I’ve been procrastinating by playing a lot of games and spending too much time on sites such as CollegeHumor and TodaysBigThing.

Fortunately, I seem to have found some of my lost passion for working, and have put in some decent hours during the past few days. In fact, I got quite a lot done today, and as I write this post I am on my 4th hour straight during this work session. I am now down to 181 e-mails and actually feel great. I only hope that this lasts and I am able to continue putting in some decent work hours.

Since I own so many sites and have so much going on, I cannot list everything here, so here are the most notable updates of my projects to mention. I am also going to keep things as to-the-point as possible as I don’t want this post to get too long to read:

RobotWarz.com

In all the online projects I’ve ever done in my entire life, developing RobotWarz.com has got to be the worst experience out of all of them. Second-worst was with Replayer.org, when my programmer just disappeared without a trace halfway into the project.

I won’t go into details here, but I’ve just had so many issues with the programmer I hired for RobotWarz that it isn’t funny, and goes beyond ridiculous. He seems to be somewhat back on track now, but is still very slow to respond.

Also, the freelance designer I had hired ended up getting a full-time job at a game design studio and wasn’t able to continue with the project. I don’t blame him though, as he was waiting alongside me for months as the programmer disappeared and slacked on the project.

The good news is that I have since hired a new designer, and he is awesome! He speaks great English and is extremely good at keeping me up to date and responding to me. He has game design experience and understands what we need, and best of all is very fast! He’s just what we need to get caught up in the development of this game and get it completed once and for all.

He just started working with us a few days ago so still has a lot of work to do, but has already made great progress and is on a Usain Bolt pace to help us finish RobotWarz.

Below is an image of what he has come up with so far. As you can see, we ditched our previous robot designs, partly because we wanted to keep the new look consistent throughout:

The images aren’t final, and I’ll be requesting some modifications here and there, but overall I’m very happy with this new designer so far. He actually made me optimistic about this project again.

Movie-Vault.com

I’ve been doing a fair bit of work on Movie-Vault, especially over the past couple days.

We have a new volunteer content writer who has been great – he has a true passion for movies and is very set on helping contribute and grow the site. I haven’t seen passion and help from a volunteer in years… back in the golden age of the site when I had a staff of 2 dozen.

I also just gave a list of new features to Interberry to add to the site. They’re all small improvements to the admin area as well as 2 bug fixes, but they’re still improvements.

Later, I plan on adding a Twitter and Facebook button to the left side and possibly adding a Facebook “Like” button to all news posts in order to help grow the site.

I’ve had my final straw with a private advertising agency that I signed a contract with for Movie-Vault.com. They promised me eCPM’s of $6-15 but have delivered only $0.50 and under, which is disgraceful. I was very patient with them and tried them for around 3 months or so, but am done with them now. What a waste. I just finished replacing my ads with AdSense for now, and applied to the Break.com ad network.

We’re attending the UK red carpet premiere of Killers, starring Ashton Kutcher, Tom Selleck, and Katherine Heigl in a couple days and will have video footage from the event. I asked our interview host to try to get Ashton Kutcher to say “I love Movie-Vault.com” on camera, as I feel he might just do it, but I’m not sure if she’ll remember or feel it’s appropriate

If he does though, that’ll be cool and then I’ll be asking her to ask everyone to do that, lol.

I have the opportunity of getting actual private one-on-one sit down video interviews with celebrities, but cannot afford to at the moment. Once the site grows I’ll start our foray into that.

Marketing-wise, I have a couple of new things up my sleeve, but we did try posting to the various social bookmarking sites ala Socialmarker.com which unfortunately didn’t help at all. I also tried running an AdWords campaign targeting “movie reviews” and “movie news”, but for some reason I can’t understand, those terms got no traffic whatsoever… like just a few clicks per day… and they had no competition. I still don’t understand it.

It’s been hard growing Movie-Vault.com, but I haven’t been neglecting it and am really trying to take it to the next level.

My First SEO Test

I actually plan on writing an entire post dedicated to this, but thought I’d mention it here as well. Basically, after hearing how SEO has been working for an affiliate friend of mine, for the first time ever, I hired a professional SEO guy.

I have him working on 2 of my sites (Movie-Vault.com and my main affiliate site) to increase the ranking position of certain keywords.

I have him on a monthly basis, but am scheduled to have him working on my affiliate site for 6 months and Movie-Vault.com for 12 months as that is how long he estimates it to rank in the top 10 for the keywords I gave him.

We’re 3 weeks into the first month and so far I haven’t noticed any improvement except for 1 keyword which may have improved a bit. I understand SEO takes time, but I hope I haven’t shelled out a lot of money before I see that it isn’t working…

I think, though, that he has spent most of this time so far, on writing articles, and not actually link building, so we’ll have to wait and see. If I see absolutely no improvement by the 2nd month I’m most likely going to cancel my agreement with him.

PokerForums.org

In yet another effort to try to cut down on the number of websites I am struggling to manage due to having so many, I put PokerForums.org up for sale a couple months ago.

I had a couple people originally interested around the $100K-$125K mark, but I was set on closer to the $200K mark at that time and so turned them down, and they are no longer interested in the site.

However, earlier today I received a bid of $75K from a guy who has continued to show serious interest in acquiring the site. I have since lowered my price and am now willing to accept $100K for the site, but not $75K so I had to decline his offer.

$75K is a lot of money, but PokerForums did pull in $120,000 net profit during the past 36 months with basically no work on the site, so that was $120K net made without any real work or time put into the site, basically passive income. And after escrow fees and taxes, $75K does not account for very much and would be gone before I know it so I feel that $100K is a very fair price for the site.

Affiliate Marketing

I spent a fair bit of the time that I did work over the past few months on affiliate marketing, mainly really trying to scale my zip/e-mail submit offers.

I was on great track to scaling one campaign to $500 a day, but ended up getting blacklisted on that offer and had to shut it down. My main problem with submit offers is that they seem to get a lot of internal shaves, most likely because they’ve been promoted to death and the submit companies already have millions of e-mails and so the offers have been saturated.

My “main” offer did well a while ago, but hit a real dry spell the past few weeks, so I paused all my affiliate marketing attempts. The good news is that this has given me more time to concentrate on my other projects.

Starcraft2.net

I haven’t touched Starcraft2.net since I launched it, but am posting this update because Starcraft 2 is scheduled to hit stores on Jul 27, 2010, less than 2 months away.

Starcraft 2 is a HUGE release and if you’re a Blizzard fan or gamer of any sort, then you’ll know just how big it is. Even if you’re not a gamer, I’m sure you’ve still heard of World of Warcraft, another Blizzard game.

I won’t bother talking about just how big of a release Starcraft 2 is and how much staying power it has (Starcraft 1 came out in 1998 and is more popular today than ever, 12 years later), but am just mentioning it because once the game actually launches and hits stores, I expect for Starcraft traffic to skyrocket.

I own the domains Starcraft2.net and SC2.net as well as many other Starcraft domains, and Starcraft2.net is already ranked extremely high just because of the domain name. Check out the SERPs below:

As I write this, I am currently ranked #19th on Google for “starcraft 2” and #6 for “starcraft2”.

Since I am already so busy with so many projects, I am considering putting my Starcraft domains/sites up for sale on Flippa. I am curious what the “general public” deems the value of Starcraft2.net to be. I am also wondering if I should hang onto it until after the release and wait a bit for the popularity to soar, and then put it up for sale at it’s peak.

I do know that 24 hours after obtaining Starcraft2.net and SC2.net, my friend offered me $12k for the both of them, to which I declined. As a huge Starcraft fan myself, I would like to build the site into something that really contributes to the community – for example, I was thinking of getting into the custom Starcraft maps business as Blizzard is offering a revshare deal to map designers – but I do not have the time for this, so may just put it up for sale.

About a week ago, I was talking to a guy who owns a number of publisher and advertiser networks when the discussion once again turned to how we could work together. I kept saying how it was “too bad” that he couldn’t run his advertiser networks on PublisherChallenge. After a while though, I thought “why not?” and the idea for AdvertiserChallenge was born and has been at the back of my mind ever since.

My idea for AdvertiserChallenge is to make it exactly the same as PublisherChallenge, only it would be for advertisers who spend money to purchase advertising instead of publishers and affiliates who generate income from advertising and affiliate networks. It would therefore be a measurement of the amount of money spent as opposed to the amount of money generated.

The main criticism that some people had with PublisherChallenge was that they felt that they were limiting their offer increase potential since they would need to register through our referral link which pays out 5%. They didn’t like the thought of losing out on that 5% referral cut.

However, that criticism is unfounded in most cases since in our contests with PeerFly for example, they would still guarantee beating any other network’s payout, including any bumps they already received. Therefore, whether or not we receive a 5% commission is rather moot when you consider that they would still be receiving a higher payout than they would find anywhere else.

But in any case, with AdvertiserChallenge, since there would be no offers or payouts to worry about, the referral cut would have no influence on costs whether an advertiser signs up through a referral link or not. This is because it’s coming 100% out of the networks profits. For example, if you signed up to AdWords without a referral, you’re still paying the same ad prices as somebody who signed up through a referral link.

Extra Leverage

One of the great things AdvertiserChallenge would bring to the table would be allowing affiliate marketers to participate in both a PublisherChallenge competition and an AdvertiserChallenge competition at the same time.

For example, below is the winner list from the PeerFly competition of May 2009:

Let’s imagine that eMonetized spent $4,000 in advertising to make those $6,410.80, and used the traffic source from the AdvertiserChallenge contest that was held during the same time.

He ended up winning the Aluminum 13-inch MacBook in the PublisherChallenge contest which was a $1,300 value. Let’s assume that he placed 1st in the AdvertiserChallenge with $4,000 in ad spend and ended up winning a prize worth $1,500.

Let’s take a look at his overall profits:

Total profit without contests: $2,410
Total profit with PublisherChallenge: $3,710
Total profit with both PublisherChallenge and AdvertiserChallenge: $5,210

So in this case, he would have profited over twice as much by entering the contests as opposed to not, and by entering AdvertiserChallenge would have made $1,500 more.

This is of course assuming that he would be able to successfully transfer and keep the same (or better) quality and cost of traffic with the advertiser hosting the challenge, but you get the idea.

Prebuilt Infrastructure

The nice thing about AdvertiserChallenge is that most of the framework for the site is already done due to PublisherChallenge. I would need some programming done, but a lot of the infrastructure could be modelled directly after PublisherChallenge.

I could even use the same design, only changing some minor things such as the logo. I could then tie the two sites into one, so that members would only need one account (still optional), which would simplify things and reduce the need for many duplicate areas.

What do you guys think? As stated in my introduction, I already have the owner of a bunch of advertising and publisher networks very interested in running some challenges on AdvertiserChallenge, and he has a very big budget so would probably be putting up some very nice prizes on the line.

What’s nice too is that you wouldn’t need to be an affiliate marketer to partake in AdvertiserChallenge – as long as you buy traffic, you’re good to go.

A number of you have been inquiring as to the status and current progress of RobotWarz.com, but I never responded because it was a sore spot with me.

You see, I had a lot of crazy setbacks with the developer I hired. He had some personal issues that caused huge delays with the project, and they kept reoccurring (and most likely still are). Fortunately, he seems to be back on track now (fingers crossed) and development is progressing along at a decent pace again.

The designer I hired for the project, who was a freelancer, ended up getting a pretty good full-time job at a gaming company, so that will cause some delays later on when more graphics are needed, but he is willing to work at night and on the weekends since I already prepaid him.

Below is a short video of the current state of RobotWarz. As always, please take note that the game is still in its early stages and the current graphics and gameplay are just temporary.

There are many missing features (2v2, Replays, Helper Bots, etc.) which should be added fairly soon.

While development has been admittedly slow during the past few months, most of that was spent on the framework and mechanics of the game, most of which is not visually viewable. Now that most of the framework is complete, more focus can be put on the features and actual gameplay of the game, as well as graphics.

We are not too far from a playable beta. We have no ETA on an exact date, but it could be as soon as 1-2 months from now.

What do you think of the game so far? It’s still in such a rough state at the moment that my feelings won’t be hurt if you hate it. I’m very curious to see how it will fare on Facebook and as an iPhone/iPad app once it is finished.

I hope to have another video update for you within 7-10 days. If things go well, you should notice quite an improvement over the current state of the game.

After spending around $10,000 on a complete revamp, gutting it out completely and having it redesigned and recoded from scratch, my next step was to bring back regularly updated content, since all my past site volunteers had vanished over the years while the site slowly crumbled away due to my lack of attention and focus on the site.

With the help of a long-time forum member and the resurgence of a couple of past reviewers, content started to slowly fill the vaults up again. I then hired a freelance writer who has a passion for movies part-time to really help bring in regularly updated content.

The most recent thing I did was commission for a host/interviewer and small film crew to attend red carpet movie premieres, representing Movie-Vault.com, and conduct real video interviews with the Hollywood stars and celebrities. I believe that this will really help set us apart from all the other movie review websites out there.

A few days ago, Movie-Vault.com attended the world premiere of Clash of the Titans in Leicester Square, London.

Watch the video below as our resident host, Claire Bueno, interviews some of the starring cast including Sam Worthington (Avatar, Terminator Salvation), director Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk, Transporter 2), and Alexa Davalos (Defiance, The Mist):

I don’t know about you, but I’m personally really excited about this new addition of high quality video media news to the site.

We will have more videos soon. Next up is full access to the highly-acclaimed It’s a Wonderful Afterlife film directed by Gurinder Ghadha (Bend it like Beckham, Bride & Prejudice), and we may be able to get a John Landis exclusive there.

Also on the list of premieres we may attend are:

• The Last Song (Greg Kinnear, Miley Cyrus)

• Iron Man II (Robert Downey Jr., Samuel L. Jackson)

• The Backup Plan (Jennifer Lopez, Alex O’Loughlin)

We’re Giving Away Awesome Prizes

While Movie-Vault.com has held its fair share of contests and giveaways in the past, our prizes are getting better and better.

Iron Man 2 will obviously be a huge blockbuster, and the soundtrack is being done by music legends AC/DC.

Movie-Vault.com has 6 awesome AC/DC prize packages to give away, with one of them being a grand prize that will be sure to impress your friends. I’m mentioning the contest here, partly because your odds of winning are actually VERY GOOD.

The full contest can be found here, but basically all you have to do to enter is sign up to the Movie-Vault.com Partner Newsletter found on the contest page. There are currently only 49 subscribers to our newsletter so your chances of winning are incredibly good – 12% in fact!

GRAND PRIZE: AC/DC Backtracks – The Ultimate AC/DC Box Set

This grand prize includes five discs of rare AC/DC in one brand new, never-before-released collection as well as an AC/DC amp:

• A REAL WORKING AC/DC GUITAR AMP!    
• 1 CD of Studio rarities
• 2 CDs of Live rarities
• 2 DVDs: Family Jewels Disc 3 + bonus videos & Live at Circus Krone in Munich
• 180g LP of Studio rarities
• 164 page 12”x12” hard-back scrapbook-style book
• Loads of collector’s items

Main Prizes: 5 X Collectors Editions of the AC/DC Iron Man 2 package

Five lucky winners will each receive an AC/DC Iron Man 2: Collector’s Edition package.

The CD/DVD package includes 15 classic AC/DC songs plus over an hour of videos including the brand new video for ‘Shoot to Thrill’. It also includes an exclusive, limited edition Iron Man comic book reprint with a custom, variant cover by Adi Granov, AC/DC stickers, poster and 32 page booklet.

Now What?

Awesome revamp? Check. Fantastic and regularly updated content? Check.

So what’s next?

Marketing and advertising. This is the final stage of my plan to have Movie-Vault.com  rule the world become a successful authority website in the movie niche. In fact, growing Movie-Vault.com to 100k unique hits a month is one of my work goals in 2010 I hope to achieve.

I deem this the final stage and not monetizing the site, as monetizing a site is always the easiest thing to do.

However, I am nervous about the marketing and advertising. First, I’m broke. Things have been pretty slow the past 18 months, and I’m also in the midst of buying a house. I therefore don’t have a whole lot of spare cash that I can just spend willy nilly.

Secondly, the movie niche is definitely oversaturated and competitive as hell. I’m not concerned about the big boys such as IMDb and RottenTomatoes, as they’re huge size actually turns away a large amount of people. My main concern is competing against all the other sites around my size.

It’s also difficult because the movie niche is one of the lowest paying markets out there, which means that I’m unable to justify paying a lot for visitors when they’re worth so little when you view them as dollar signs.

I may try running a PPC campaign for Movie-Vault.com soon, and perhaps trying some more creative types of marketing services… it’s a great site, it just needs traffic.

Looking at Movie-Vault.com now, it’s almost hard to believe that I was only asking $12,000 for it less than a year ago. I told all the haters in that listing that Movie Vault was a diamond in the rough, but all most buyers see these days is current revenue or traffic. That’s fine, though, because now I can reap the rewards myself.

What do you think of the new and improved Movie-Vault.com? Did you like our video coverage of Clash of the Titans? Do you have any suggestions on how I could or should market it? Do you want to contribute to the site as a movie reviewer or news poster? (volunteers only!)? Share your thoughts in the comments below.