Benjamin Christie: celebrity spammer or chef?

It all starts with what seem like friendly emails. A friendly invite to link to or visit this or that post. But if you click through on “celebrity” chef Benjamin Christie’s links it soon becomes clear his matey correspondence is a cynical attempt at marketing.

And who is Australia “celebrity” chef Benjamin Christie anyway? As one well known food journalist said to me (in an email) after I asked:

“I’ve seen his name from time to time on boards – I get the impression he spends more time at the keyboard than in front of the cameras or behind the stoves.”

Now I realise he’s using Emarketing companies such Wiliam and Sitecast as accomplices in his spammy ways, tracking every click from his emails.

It’s a cynical attempt to build links, which builds traffic which will build business. That’s selling his so-called celebrity, his consultancy and a variety of Australian herbs, spices and manufactured ingredients for Vic Cherikoff.

Benjamin did ask for my input (complete with link tracking) to his original post:

Food Blog Secrets and how to make yours successful

1. What is your food blog about Benjamin Christie?
BC: “My food blog, www.benjaminchristie.com is my primary marketing tool for what I do promoting the flavours of Australia around the world.”
Tomato: No comment.

2. What about the design of your food blog?
BC: “…do resist the temptation to use a blog template, as ultimately they all look the same and don’t create any uniqueness.”
Tomato: And apart from the logo and picture, it has two columns, search, links to previous posts. Um, where have I seen that before?

3. A Content Management System for your Food Blog.
BC: “Serious food blogs will opt for a hosted solution, using one of the many open source CMS systems available.”
Tomato: Sorry Benjamin, what about the two leading hosted blog CMS systems, Movable Type (which, as an affiliate, I can sell you a commercial license for) or t he open sourceWordpress? For a blog, you’d be better off using a specialised blog CMS rather than a generic one. Disclosure: I was paid to help someone set up a blog and possibly could take money again.

4. Your food blog’s domain name
BC: “I don’t know how many times I have seen food bloggers write an article about changing their address from a blogspot or typepad address to their own domain name.”
Tomato: I’d add that the name of a blog should be different from the name of the business or personality. Issue names work well. Check out the excellent Corporate Engagement blog.

5. Food Photography on your food blog
BC: “Think if the difference between a cookbook with food photography and one without. Which would you choose to use more often?”
Tomato: Actually, the two best cookbooks I bought this year have no pictures and some excellent blogs rarely feature them. Bad food photography hurts a cookbook or blog a lot more than no photography, and if BC’s examples in his article are anything to go by (by “celebrity” blog standards) I wouldn’t be including them at all. Check out Jill Dupleix’s pics.

6. Recipes on your food blog
BC: “If you are using ingredients which maybe foreign to readers from other parts of the world, I often provide a link to an online shop where they can be purchased from.”
Tomato: Ah yes, that infamous Vic Cherikoff shop you keep promoting.

7. Tag your content and get your Food Blogs on Technorati
BC: “Do a search for a related topic like “Food and Drink” at www.technorati.com/tag/Food+and+Drink. You’ll see on the results page there is a comment “Add this tag to your posts”. Simply copy and paste the HTML there into the bottom of your article.”
Tomato: Or try a system such as Moveable Type where you simply enter the word into a field in the system. WordPress has plugins for this.

8. RSS feeds
“When deciding on a CMS, you need to make sure it has the capability of providing your users with an RSS feed for your food blog”
Tomato: Actually, if you chose a decent blog system in the first place RSS feeds are built in. Near 10% of traffic will come from feeds so it’s worth when you start out signing up for Feedburner to track this.

9. Pinging your food blog
BC: “My CMS automatically pings www.weblogs.com, but I make it a routine that after every post I manually visit Ping-o-matic and do a ping of all the major services.”
Tomato: Save yourself a trip to ping-o-matic, by getting a decent blog system. it will do it all for you.

10. Syndication Networks and Food Blog Aggregators
BC: “Syndication is where your content is republished on other websites.”
Tomato: And I call it stealing.

11. Social Bookmarks on your Food Blog
BC: “Social bookmarking sites have grown in popularity over the past year”
Tomato: True.

12. Food Blog Events
BC: “Food Blog events are a good opportunity to … get noticed if more traffic is your outcome.”
Tomato: Ah, that’s what you are up to.

13. Directories to join
BC: “There are so many free web directories on the internet its hard to know which ones to get listed in.”
Tomato: True

14. Newsletter
BC: “To do this you’ll need to create a signup form and preferably use software which automatically add subscriber’s details to your database.”
Tomato: Or you could simply use the Feeburner or Feedblitz service, two among many.

15. Advertising and Affiliate programs
BC:“I’ll be honest; having a food blog, maintaining the content, hosting the blog and bandwidth does cost money. To offset some of these costs, a lot of food blogs now have advertising on their pages or use and affiliate programme to generate a little revenue.”
Tomato: Ah, Vic Cherikoff’s site again! I’ll be honest. You’ll make bugger all – unless you sell Bluehost as I do (see sidebar) where you can make $65 a sign-up. I’ve had two purchases since April!