In this post I am going to do a review of earnings and performance on my affiliate website for Latvian audience called epelna.lv.

Actually, I have been working on that website for 6 years, but till the start of 2018. it was garbage. I was trying to do affiliate marketing in the wrong way. But in december of 2017. I started to build that website from scratch, started to produce really quality content for SEO researched topics and the results are amazing now!

I`m dominating the “How to make money online” niche in Latvia, and for some keywords I am not only in the spot one on Google, but also on second position in SERPs. This website covers following topics: Business ideas, How to make money online, Forex trading, Investing, systems and services, a bit of Internet marketing (SMM, e-mail marketing, SEO etc.) and also a blog section. If you look at the top menu on this site, then you will see something really similar, because I am trying to replicate my success in the global market now with this website.

So let’s get through the things that I have done. I really hope, that you will get some ideas or inspiration for your own Affiliate projects from this experience of mine.

How much content did I produce?

The most important thing that I understood was that to succeed you need to produce unique and useful content for your readers. This may sound self-evident, but that is probably the most important thing in Affiliate marketing – to give your readers and users what they want. Before, I was producing bad and far too little content – I just didn’t like to write. But now I have learned to devote time to writing and creating content and I am super happy about that.

Maybe you have already noticed, that English is not my native language – sorry for that.

Okay, but lets get to the point – how much content did I create for my Latvian affiliate website.

In total, I created over 150 articles on various topics related to Internet marketing and “how to make money online ” in the year of 2018. The creation of these articles was really hard work and I probably spent hundreds of hours creating them. But if I look back and review what I have done, I`m a bit proud, because majority of those articles are very high quality and the feedback from customers are proving it. The Google search engine likes my content too, because it ranks really well on SERPs and website is getting tons of traffic despite the fact that Latvian audience is really limited (about 1 million users).

content creation for affiliate website

Here is a sample of articles from epelna.lv sitemap. You can look at the full list here. I know, that you do not understand what is written there!

How much visitors did I get in 2018?

Considering the fact that the site visit was close to 0 in November 2017, in October 2018 it was 6725. In my opinion, for the size of the Latvian audience, which is about 1 million, this is an extraordinary increase in visitor count.

By the end of the year, the average site visitor count is around 4,000 visitors per month. The largest number of visitors is made up of organic traffic from Google. The second largest source of traffic is from Facebook paid ads and a third visit from email marketing campaigns. Organic traffic from Google search stands for about two thirds of all traffic.

epelna visitor count

epelna.lv traffic statistics from Google Analytics. Again in Latvian, but you should be able to understand what is what if you have visited Analytics.

If we look from a different point of view, the content of the portal is read for 101 days or 146216 minutes. I am happy that I have managed to create content that is interesting to so many people and also I hope that this content has inspired and helped to make money for site visitors.

How much money I made from Affiliate marketing?

Probably the most interesting section in this article for readers will be the portal’s revenue. This information is also summarized in a table:

epelna affiliate profits

Income graph of epelna.lv portal through year of 2018. Blue column stands for gambling gffiliates, red for Forex affiliates, Yellow for P2P investing affiliates, Green for systems and services, Orange for Google Adwords, Turquoise for month total income.

The turquoise column stands for total monthly income. If in the first month of the year the income from this affiliate project were less than 100 euros, then, as you can see in the graph, in December it reached highest point at around 1300 euros. If we look at the year totals, the average revenue from the epelna.lv portal has been around EUR 400 a month. I guess that is not bad for the first year of affiliate website like this. And if we look at the trend, 2019 promises to be a good year!

In the table you can see how the monthly earnings of the affiliate project have increased on monthly basis. The profits of the Epelna.lv mainly came from affiliate marketing programs, but the there was also some revenue from the Google Adsense ad network. I am using Adsense network to get some revenue from mobile traffic, because the website is mainly designed to offer something useful to desktop users.

Affiliate marketing revenue consists of 4 major niches: gambling affiliates, P2P lending platform affiliates, Forex affiliates and systems and services (my own and some from Clickbank). All of these niches have been quite similar in terms of revenue. The most noteworthy is definitely a red bar in the table, in December, where revenue from Forex affiliate marketing networks was around 700 euros.

Throughout the year, website has earned 160 euros from the Google Adsense Display Network. Minimum sum that you can pay out from Google Adsense network is € 70, and the funny thing is that it took me 8 months to collect that sum. The next payout of € 90 was collected within 3 months. That was achieved through optimization of ad placement and some other changes.

Maybe someone will wonder why I work with gambling affiliate programs. First of all, bookmakers and casinos offers their new customers the chance to earn money with no risk (one of the two epelna.lv “make quick money online” schemes), as well, the demand for Google organic search is relatively high for gambling related keywords. If people are looking for it, then some smart affiliate marketers will definitely offer it – and it is in my interests that people looking for gambling-related keywords come to my website.

If there is a demand, then there will be someone to offer it. We all know that and it is good to you, if you are the one offering it.

What Affiliate programs I use?

In order to get the best results from your Affiliate marketing activities, you have to find good affiliate programs and networks. I work with both – direct affiliate programs that offers only one product or brand and affiliate networks that are usually offering products and services from different verticals.

I will list all my affiliate partners here:

Forex Affiliates: Admiral Markets, Plus500, Etoro partners, IQOptions

Gambling affiliates: Optibet, Olybet, Betfair, 11.lv, Betsafe

P2P investing affiliates: TargetCircle affiliate network

Others: LiveChatINC, Shopify affiliates, Zanox marketplace, Clickbank, MailerLite, DoAffiliate.net, ShareAsale, Printful, CJ Affiliate, PokerStrategy, Fiverr Affiliates, RebelBetting, Awin, InstaZood

How did I manage it?

Can anyone do it? How to Earn 400 Euros online every month? How to Earn Money online? I often get asked such questions from website visitors. Unfortunately, my answers are often negative.

Why did I manage to create a portal that has lots of visitors and that generates profit every month? First of all, the topics on the portal are very close to me. I am offering internet marketing services to others as freelancer, so I can talk freely about IM related topics. Also I have been passionate about finding ways how to make money online myself. I have earned money on the Internet in at least 13 different ways. Read about some of them here. Secondly, I finally realized that there was no easy and quick ways to make money on the internet and I started working really hard. Thirdly, by experimenting, becoming more skilled and learning new things, I’ve figured out how to turn website visitors into paying customers and earn money from my website traffic.

In addition, I filled in a free niche. There were some websites where you could find information about various opportunities to make money online in the Latvian market, but none of them was so detailed like epelna.lv. “How to make money online” or wealth in general is one of the three green industries in affiliate marketing, the other two are health and relationships.

Three evergreen niches in marketing are: Wealth, Health and Relationships

Did you know that there is such an unwritten law, that in order to become a Master in some profession, you need to invest 10,000 hours of work? According to my calculations, I am somewhere around 8,000 hours and I know that all the great successes are still ahead. And do not be disappointed with your first 2000 hours – probably you will be terrible, your profits will be poor and most often you will give up.

And here we come to the fact that success is achieved by those, who work hard and do not give up when they face obstacles and difficulties. If you looked carefully at both tables previously, you definitely noticed that during the first months I didn’t get almost any profits. But I did not give up and continued to work hard, and of course the results came!

How can you start making money online?

If you have decided to try something new in 2019, for example, to start make some extra money online, then you are on the right track! By reading case studies like this and getting to know how others have started their Affiliate marketing careers, you will get inspiration and some knowledge how to do it yourself.

Maybe Affiliate marketing is not the right thing for you? If you are just starting out, then think about what you would like to do, consider your strengths and weaknesses. Everybody is different, so there is no magic formula suited to everyone to start making money online. Someone likes to write, someone may be really good at Forex trading, etc. Put all your ideas on paper and then seek some professional advice to tell you something more about these ideas.

Making money online is also possible with many Internet marketing tools such as Facebook, Instagram, Google Adsense Display Network, affiliate marketing networks, dropshipping service providers, Youtube, etc. The possibilities are unlimited, but everyone has to find his way. It is also possible to create a service on the Internet, such as a social network management platform, e-mail service, hosting services, websites or applications.

Summary

Probably, this is one of the very rare cases when someone tells you how much money he has earned. I want to inspire you to start working on your own projects to improve your financial situation, devote more time to your hobbies or family, leave the work that you don’t like or improve your quality of life in any other way. 2018 was the first year that I could really pat myself on the shoulder and tell that I have worked hard, reached my yearly goals and achieved something.

I have learned a lot while making epelna.lv, this and other websites and I hope that you will find something useful here too.