Commissions Automator - Genius Marketing or Lame Spamming Machine?

I spend a lot of time writing articles to promote Wordpress blogs featuring affiliate products for specific markets. Thanks to the research involved, hyped up, save-time, make-money emails hit my inbox with gatling gun speed on an hourly basis. I delete far more of them than I read. So why did I open the one regarding Commission Automator's supposedly fantastic, out-of-this-world Wordpress plugin?

Two reasons.

#1 - The right plugins make life easier. A good Wordpress plugin is priceless.

#2 - I've used Ken Reno's products in the past and have benefited from reading Richard's ezines.

At first glance, this plugin sounds like a time-saving, potentially income increasing idea. Add the plugin to a Wordpress blog and every time a new product is released, a post appears. The writing is done for you, your affiliate link is already encoded and it's all good to go.

There's even an automatic Twitter plugin included so that as the blog post appears, a tweet goes out. Two potential markets are simultaneously alerted.

Okay. So far so good.

---> Saves me time.

---> Advertises itself.

---> Might make me money.

First pause - Commission Automator is designed to promote those items/products/services being touted by Ken and Richard. So why is it not a free tool given to all of their affiliates instead of a paid plugin?

I pay them $5.00 for the right to use a plugin I'll be using to sell for them? Why?

Obviously, they'll make money from every sale of the plugin. Perhaps it is also because affiliates who pay for the plugin are more likely to actually use it?

Whatever the reason for the cost, I took a chance on it. As I said earlier, I have learned from Ken and Richard. (After 3 plus years, I still cringe at the title of Richard's ezine.)

Most importantly, the plugin seemed a perfect fit for one of my latest blogs. Having a few automatic posts interwoven with fresh content would help build up the blog in less time. (Blonde or not, it seemed logical to me.)

Installation was easy. So was opening a Twitter account for the particular niche market associated with the blog.

The installation instructions warned me not to be alarmed when there were three immediate posts - the plugin would "catch up" so that all of the latest product announcements were posted. Thereafter, new posts would be made daily or as new product offers were added.

Users have the option of setting how often the plugin should search for updates and post them. I skipped the hourly option and used the daily one.

Once I put in my affiliate code and added a new category for the posts to be filed under, I hit the run button.
A minute later the three posts appeared in my blog.

Fast, neat and tidy.

Almost too tidy. The blog posts were excerpts of the sale pages. Fine. It's just that those sale pages do not reflect my writing or the 'tone' of the blog. So I edited them just a bit and updated. Added images and decided it all looked pretty good. Three short posts, didn't take more than a couple minutes to dress them to fit my blog.

This could work.

Went to bed thinking happy thoughts.

Morning arrives. Get ready for work.

Log on.

View blog.

Uh-Oh.

My blog has been hi-jacked by more than a dozen new affiliate product posts. They range in length from a couple lines to a couple paragraphs. They're all worded like..... like what they are. Sales pitches.

My once beautiful blog now looks like one long page of "buy me, get me, take me please" Internet Marketing hype-hawking spam.

Worse, the accompanying Twitter auto-poster has obviously blasted the same - under my name. This blonde twit has tweeted when she should have kept her beak shut.

It's a good thing the account is new and I don't have a lot of followers.

On the other hand, will this cost me the few followers that I have?

Carp. What's an article writing, affiliate marketing gal got to do to restore and protect her reputation?

Step 1) Deactivate Commission Automator.

Step 2) Use bulk apply to turn all the posts back to draft status.

Step 3) Deactivate automatic Tweeting.

Step 4) Re-install Commission Automator on another blog, one where the Wp plug-in content fits in better and looks more like what it's supposed to be - legitimate offers for legitimate products.

Step 5) From this moment on, stay on top of the daily deluge. Product announcements will be left to appear (and be tweeted) only on individual blogs appropriate to individual topics.

So how do I really feel about Commission Automator?

While it has proven to be a bit more work instead of less, I'm not sorry I spent nearly $5.00 on it. (Five bucks is cheap.) The product does have its uses. Like every other aspect of running a business (online or offline) use of this tool demands proper supervision.

It's great that the guys are rolling out all kinds of products. Some of those products I could, and will, use myself. However, business products, even affiliate marketing ones, are not one-size-fits-all solutions.

So while I encourage you to take a look at Commission Automator, I also encourage you to think about how it fits into your Internet business plan. Do you have time to oversee what gets posted and where it gets posted?

Can you create enough fresh content to offset an avalanche of automatic affiliate posts or will your blog be left to look like a classified ads page?

Building a business takes work, even with great tools. While I do believe this plugin can contribute to a good business plan, I don't believe this plugin should be left unattended.

Used properly, it can be a genius marketing machine. Left to run wild, it could just as easily be a hideous spam machine.