How Do I Make Money using CAKE Basic?

CAKE is a Saas solution that handles Campaign Management for Affiliate Marketers.

Leveraging CAKE allows its users to streamline work flows and better manage direct relationships with the CAKE users partners(Advertisers, Agencies, and Affiliates). By managing direct relationships with partners, you can better track and analyze the performance of each respective relationship. By assigning a value to traffic, you can back out an Affiliate or Offers performance to see if the relationship is of value to your business.

Affiliate Marketers, normally work off a commission basis. Meaning they earn based on their performance, this is also referred to as Performance Marketing.

Scenario:

Lets say you have a relationship with an Advertiser(a brand like Netflix) or a Network(an indirect relationship to the Advertiser). The Advertiser/Network strikes a deal with you to pay you $5 for every unique user that signs up for their site. This $5 is essentially your commission for driving traffic to that Advertiser/Networks site. This is where the concept of Traffic = Money stems from. You have to drive traffic in order to earn your commission.

Since the Advertiser is at the top of this flow, every thing beneath it could be considered "Down Stream", understanding the flow of money helps to implement the flow of your traffic. Remember the end goal is to get quality traffic(to earn commission).

In the Example above, the CAKE user would be the Affiliate. As the CAKE users is connecting their Affiliate(SubAffiliate) to their Advertiser. On the outside looking in, your Affiliate is really a SubAffiliate to your Advertiser, but an Affiliate to you. This concept is situational, meaning the CAKE user may not always be the Affiliate.

Scenario 2:

You may have your own Offer that you are looking to get traffic for, if that is the case then the you would be the Advertiser in the flow above. As you would not be earning any money, only Paying out Money for the Traffic you received.

More often then not, CAKE users will always be the Affiliate in the flow above, as they are receiving traffic from the SubAffiliate and sending it to an Advertiser to earn Money.

Since any one partner can be any entity depicted in this step, its best to keep this flow in mind when creating these relationships in CAKE. Meaning an Affiliate in CAKE is your Affiliate, not necessarily the Affiliate from the image above.

Affiliates have their own Affiliates. These affiliates, Affiliates are Sub Affiliates in CAKE.

If you are having a hard time identifying where you or your business fits in this model, try to remember.

Affiliates - Drive Traffic and earn commission.
Advertiser - Receive Traffic and payout commission to Affiliates.

Once you have the relationships with Advertisers/Networks they normally provide a Unique Tracking Link(from their system) and Creative assets (Images, emails, etc). Once you have the deal struck with your Advertiser, you will take the Unique Link and Creative Asset to begin creating this relationship in CAKE. There is a 5 Step Process in order to build out a new relationship in CAKE.  Check out the CAKE Basic Getting Started Video.