We’ve got a really awesome, interesting, and big interview for you today. The guest of the article is Andrey Teftelka. Andrey has told us everything about doorway pages, in the past and nowadays, about how we got into affiliate marketing, about SEO traffic conversions, payout rates, and other fun things. So get comfy, we’re about to meet Andry and his knowledge of doorway intricacies.

1. Hello, Andrey! The affiliate community doesn’t know that much about you. Please tell us how you got into affiliate marketing and how you started working with doorways.

Hello. I came into affiliate marketing in 2014 when I saw a targeted ad for CPAKing on VKontakte (I still have no idea why their targeting chose me, I never even googled, nor heard of affiliate marketing), so I followed his public page and started reading his posts. Back then he used to pay 1000 rubles for other people’s case studies. I submitted my case and he didn’t publish it because his public page could have gotten banned if he did. Then I started following his Evo Proadvert blog (he is an actual mastermind) and got even more into this whole topic!

Sign from Evo to Andrey, back in the days.

Since Sasha, the CPAKing, didn’t publish my case, I decided to create my own public page and share my own approaches there (at first, that page wasn’t about affiliate marketing, it was about earning with affiliate programs by promoting VKontakte games or public pages). Or we also worked bypassing VKontakte moderation to promote webcam services (this landing page initially pictured Chinese socks SOSU).

Then people from the “SMMschiki” public page started hating me. After, I started driving traffic from various new sources: Yandex.Direct, social media platforms, and teaser networks. I made a profit but never had any big cases. On my public page, I posted different tutorials, cases, and reports. That was a great time.

I didn’t become an affiliate back then. As I ran my blog, I met some new people, and so I was offered to try out a doorway scheme with VKontakte public pages. So I tried that and that was a success. Then I found out you could put doorways on trusted blogs and forums (which was pretty easy, does anyone here remember addurls?). I was compiling articles from several different people’s articles that I’d find on Google: I was copying their text, clipping landing page screenshots, and adding those finished articles on trusted forums (i.ua, meta.ua, yvision.kz) – the same night, I added addurls and was making it to the top by the following morning.

Important: I only ever worked with and I’m still only working with doorways for products and nutra in the CIS countries.

Then people got into SEO websites, SEO stores, and other things in the same vertical.

People don’t know much about me because all I did was work, the last article written about me dates back to 2018. There was no point in revealing my work.

2. Do you think doorway ads are better or worse than Facebook, GDN, and TikTok advertising? What are the differences in their launches, quality of traffic and its volume?

SEO traffic is considered to be the best out there, the highest quality. Until Hotpartner became a scam (you could track your buy-back rates in real-time in their account), my leads’ buy-back rate was 70% at its worst. Keep in mind I also have a 100% rate pretty often. I don’t know about other affiliate programs though. One affiliate program was paying me 7000 rub for a bought-back product (considered that the client bought the product for 12000 rub), or 2-3k rub for simply approved leads (since you could set for what you wanted to get paid)

The only problem is in the number of your leads. Like, you can drive 10 leads a day for each of your affiliate programs and get 200+ leads altogether, but for these affiliate networks you’re just a publisher who drives 10 leads, that’s it.

The challenge is to always adapt and do what search engines want you to do. One day search engines favor informative websites, the other day – online stores, and the day after that they ban your advertised supplements.

I’ve never worked with TikTok, Facebook, or Google Ads and sometimes I’m stunned by how hard it is for the other guys that do. And I think it’s even tougher than the guys from the community say – I recently launched a targeted ads campaign from my 9-year-old Facebook account and that was hell.

I think that every niche has its challenges and they become even tougher with each year. There’s no easy work, as far as I’m concerned.

3. Doorway ads were destined to go extinct back in 2019. It’s 2022 now and you’re still working with them. Why did everyone but you leave this niche?

People gave up on doorway pages in 2014. And before that, they also gave up on them in 2012. I’m 100% positive about this. See, doorway ads didn’t even change that much: they evolved into SEO websites or parts of SEO promotion. Almost all of those are doorway pages now. As for me, the adcombo public page is a doorway because they added tons of keywords into their description and show up when people search for “leadbit” on VKontakte.

The Wildberries online store, too. It used to get tons of free traffic from Google, plus this store also has its internal search engine (if your supplement isn’t certified then you won’t be able to sell on Wildberries). But one affiliate network did it.

Alcozeroks – supplement for reducing alcohol cravings.

Even when Yandex search engine was updated (Y1 update), they started showing YouTube doorway ads.

Doorway ads on the bottom.

4. And what about your ROI? What was your highest doorway ads ROI rate for over a month period? What ROI rate is considered average and how do you estimate it?

I’ve never understood why people calculate ROI in affiliate marketing.

For example, I once posted information about a product that fought hogweed on a website that’d already generate income. I had spent 400 rub on rewriting that info, and by the next morning, I made it to the top 7 in my affiliate network. That night, I added that ad on 2 more websites and 2 online stores, to increase my income. Then I had to spend a week next to my computer because I had so much traffic I didn’t have time to reply to the customers. That was when the ROI rate was ridiculously huge. Although if affiliate teams weren’t driving traffic to that offer using Facebook and teaser networks, no one would have been looking for that product, so I wouldn’t have gotten any traffic. So, that time I had a gigantic ROI rate, but those affiliate teams probably had it at 50%. Although that team made the same amount of money in a day that I would’ve only made in a month.

I only ever counted my monthly income. And annual, just for fun.

5. Search engines such as Yandex and Google must be working hard to increase their anti-doorway protection so that SEO websites don’t get on the SERP. What kind of updates did these engines release in 2021? Did it become harder for you to work?

Yes, they do this constantly. You have to adapt and be flexible. My first serious case was back when I didn’t even know how to create SEO websites: I just bought a ready-made WordPress medical website about allergies for 12000 rub. On Telderi, but it has a nice domain that tracked back into 2009. Search engines favored informational sites then. I published reviews of different nutra products on there and since the domain was trusted, it was rated high.

Then Yandex introduced its turbo pages and Google – AMP and when these updates happen, search engines boost websites that follow their rules. I was one of the first people to install all the necessary plugins and set up links in my articles so that they can work correctly on Yandex’s turbo pages. This may sound funny today, but for some time, Yandex’s mobile pages were all mine because I was the first one to think of new ways to work with them.

Later on, Yandex’s “affiliate network” filter and Google’s YMYL were knocked down. Information websites were out. I didn’t understand what I had to do next, support agents were all saying that we need to put up a service. At first, I started working with calorie calculators but then I realized that the service they were talking about was the presence of a cart in my online store, some delivery options, etc. All because information websites were promoting goods so that people buy them but they were never selling them.

That was when the SEO online stores era started.

We started playing by new rules, adapting and masking doorways under the layers of stores.

But information websites still exist and since there aren’t that many of them in search results, those are all top-notch and follow new standards.

Then the E-A-T filters were introduced and the expertise became more valuable than ever, those websites had to be curated by experts on their topics. Actual certified experts – doctors, for example, in the case of health-related websites. We were required to state that we were promoting dietary supplements and not medication, that we never favored self-treatment, etc.

6. Please tell us your algorithm for getting your doorway page to the top of the search results. How much time does it take you?

1. You need to have a trusted resource or a website favored by search engines (this is the only tough aspect in this niche, no one can really tell you how to get this sort of site).

2. Then use it for doorway pages and SEO pages.

That’s it.

If it gets to the top of all results and generates income then you can go on and enhance what’s working best – add crowd links, social signs to those aspects that bring conversions and the entire website.

If you already have this kind of website then it won’t take you long to get the profit. If not, then you first need to put a lot of time into working on your website, and only then you’ll be able to reap its benefits.

Although it’s very important to know that there’s no point in getting to the top of the SERP if affiliates and affiliate teams don’t work with that offer you chose. This is why I’ve worked with 95% of all nutra products out there and almost all affiliate programs.

7. And what about conversions? For example, Facebook affiliates reported problems with conversions in the middle of December, they reduced 2-3 times. Does this even happen with doorway traffic? If so, then how do you fight it?

On the one hand, conversions are great. We get warm leads from people who specifically look for more information on our advertised products.

I also increase my conversions by communicating with people using the online consultation widget, I collect people’s contact information, their phone numbers, and enter them on affiliate networks’ landing pages.

I cloak online stores as online drugstores. But on the other hand, people tend to turn down buying the products in the past 1-1.5 years. They often attack my support chat, threatening me that they won’t buy the order back (oftentimes, these aren’t even my leads, these people just text anyone who they can find in the search engine).

If I have a lead for an offer that’s been discontinued or that’s out of stock, then I send the application for a similar-sounding offer, for instance, Gelmifort and Gelmiflor. This hasn’t harmed my approval rates. You can even swap them for offers that don’t sound similar. This has made some affiliate network managers mad but they’d sometimes get approved anyway. Why would you lose a good lead, right?

8. You drive nutra traffic. How do you arrange a pool of key queries for your site promotion? Do you constantly have to make new sets of queries depending on what type of product you’re selling? Please tell us about it.

No SEO text, no spam, no such things. I have simple, high-quality rewritten texts from landing pages so that customers can fully understand the idea behind the product.

Titles look like this: *offer name*, buy, price, ingredients, facts as to why the product isn’t a rip-off.

Descriptions look like this: *offer name* – product description, where to buy it, how much it costs, ingredients, effectiveness, etc.

I crop images from original landing pages, trying to find high-quality pictures of the actual product. Photos provided by affiliate networks work great.

9. How do you create doorway ads? All manual work? Or do you use doorgens? If so, then please, recommend a good doorway page generator.

I do it manually. I don’t work with actually questionable doorways. I use quality websites and stores such as websites with product catalogs, online stores, websites about one certain product, online drugstores with dietary supplements.

10. How much time does it take to create a doorway page and lead it to the SERP top? Can you promote multiple doorway pages for a month and then enjoy your SEO traffic somewhere on a tropical vacation? Or does it not work like this?

Strange as it may be, it’s always been this way.

Here’s what I did from scratch:

I would lock myself in a room for like 2 weeks to either create a website from scratch or rearrange and brush up a website I bought for these purposes (this includes its design, plugins, social media, some conversion-related details, etc.) – then I would spend 2-3 hours a day to fill it with products.

And when the traffic would start flowing, I could really go on my vacation since all the orders either went directly into the affiliate network or into the cart (I changed my IP address to the lead’s GEO so that it didn’t get trashed), I also took the consultant’s contact information from the app or sent the customers to the email with the algorithm mentioned above. And such stores do have the option of telling the customers that the company’s on vacation so that users are only left with the flow link in the product description.

It was only stressful when search engines were changing their rules or the rules of the stores’ products (and as we know, the best stores were built on constructors like 15 years ago, these are the most trustworthy).

Again, locking myself in a room for a week or two, changing everything according to the new rules. Website builders are sometimes a bigger pain than search engines’ requirements (though I won’t say too much about it, it’s a niche type of issue. For example, once we had to remove all photo duplicates of all the products, or remove all watermarks. And how many products do you think I have? 95% of all the offers out there. So, you could go crazy checking and rearranging all of those offers).

The products are constantly either dropping in leads or driving super high traffic, it all depends on what sort of traffic affiliate teams are driving at a given moment (the more they advertise a product, the more often people search for it). So the traffic is always uneven. And one offer always has higher conversion rates, and so on.

11. Do you buy links? If so, then how many do you need for one website, how much does it cost, and where do you get them? Do you make deals with particular online services or are there people that specialize in selling backlinks?

Sure, these links are supposed to be good. At first, when I was starting out, I used to place backlinks manually on different forums, YouTube comment sections, etc. These are quality links if you don’t overdo it. When they started selling these links, I turned to buying crowd links on forums from different services (“zapostim”, for example). This costs about 200 rub for a link, cheaper in bulk. If people don’t follow these links, then they’re practically useless.

I’ve already mentioned above how I work with these. One of the main business principles – enhance what’s already working best. So first, I do backlinks for my top-rated pages and then add them to other pages with time.

12. How does the audience react to these websites? Any negativity towards doorway pages?

My websites look serious and reliable. Users can chat with the online consultant, contact the store via Viber or another messenger, make a call (but I’ve never answered calls).

They can also leave their order in the cart, so that I can take that contact information and enter it onto a real landing page and that customer will get a call from that affiliate network’s call center, asking about their intent to purchase that product.

It works well since they don’t name the store.

13. What do you think, is it worth it to start working with doorways in 2022? If an affiliate wanted to switch from, say, Facebook to doorways, what would they need to do?

For starters, they’d need to determine which vertical and niche they’d like to work with (provided that they already know how to put a website on a hosting or download it). For example, I’d like to create a gambling-themed SEO website. Well, I can’t do it if I don’t know how casinos work, what Curacao license is, etc.

Then, they’d need to google the offer and see what the results are, trying to understand why those pages are on the SERP. Then, try to do better than them. The key to success is pretty simple:

I work with almost all affiliate networks and it’s very important to be the first one (I make sure to create a page for a new offer as soon as an affiliate network introduces it. But be careful, they can introduce 3-year-old offers too, I wouldn’t work with these because its search results are already full of other sources). If an offer has a trusted platform and many affiliates already work with it, then success is practically guaranteed.

Affiliate marketing implies getting a lot of money faster and under higher risks.

Doorways have fewer risks, income and spending, but you need way more time to get around to it.

Come up with something fun, there are many cases when a website is on the top of SERP, this website reveals a scam and tells the whole truth about a product, but if it has a link to your flow, then you’d still get leads since the site is top-rated. People don’t really want to go through many search result pages.

14. Do you use any services for automation, analytics, or anything of the sort?

No, I don’t. What’s the point of being on top if no one drives traffic to that offer? I make profits working with many offers and networks, high quality and trustworthy websites. My analytics are very basic – metrics, GTM, mail.ru top results. It’s also hard to automate this process since you won’t be able to pass applications via API on website builders, can’t even do the iframe.

15. Do you use redirects? If so, then how do you do this considering that search engines block websites with redirects?

No redirects, no cloaking in this niche. An affiliate network flow link in the product description is the most I can do here.

16. Which search engines do you work with? It can be faster to drive doorway page traffic with Google. Tell us about it.

Google, Yandex, Mail.ru.

In my experience, Yandex indexes websites faster, they have a fast bot that can get you to the top for a while, either leaving you there for a longer time or removing later. Lately, it became possible to get actual traffic from Yandex on the same day of your product launch.

It’s always different. Search engines tend to change their algorithms, which causes some pages to rank lower or higher in various engines.

These are platforms and message boards that Google just loves or those favored by Yandex. Sometimes search engines do the job for you so that you don’t even have to reindex them.

17. You have a popular VKontakte public page. Tell us about it, how much time did it take you to promote it? Do you monetize it? What are you planning to do with it in the future?

I made it in 2014, at the same time as Max Dovolny, Sensei, Sandalik, CPA Noob (CIS affiliates), and other guys that have already disappeared since then. That was a great time, we would always share our knowledge and tips with each other.

I promoted it using targeted ads, barter ads, shared content and submitted posts on other pages. In the last few years, I mostly do viral content that (potentially) gets reposted – conference reports, PDF-type manuals, infographics, and so on. I haven’t done original content for a long time now. This page’s prospects are pretty vague.

Because of VKontakte’s policy, I moved to Telegram and Instagram a long time ago. And a couple of years later, we’re all going to be on TikTok because trends repeat themselves, and Telegram and Instagram, too, will give the floor to other networks.

VKontakte, like search engines, forces you to play by its rules. For some time in the past, it was boosting long-read posts, then it favored unique content, now it likes reports. If a post has an outer source link included, its impressions are so much lower.

By the way, here’s a link to my public page – https://vk.com/teftelkaaa_cpa

18. A couple of months ago, you started promoting affiliate media source Lenta. Affiliate media is a challenging and pricey business, so please, tell us, how has the site been growing lately (traffic-wise) and what are your hopes for it?

To be honest, right now I’m sticking to the concept of affiliate marketing digest. It’s a simple digest but a big one. step-by-step, I’m going to make it a media source, I want the content to be unique and unusual. Many sources have interview segments, but no one has talked to a person that’s been a guarantor of deals between affiliates or someone who’s worked for an affiliate network for like 8 years and has seen it all, it’d be fun to elaborate on these insider topics. Affiliate chats, forums, and channels live a different kind of life, unlike the media. Anyway, it’s going to be something that I like doing.

At first, I wanted to create a media source that’d ask uncomfortable questions, such as “Why is your affiliate network’s original offer’s pay rate is $12 but its resale price is $14?” and do that while I can. Then I’d like to create a media of one person but don’t make it a blog. I guess my background isn’t good for this, it’s better to have a blog or publish my articles on my channel.

The channel was created back in 2016 for appearances’ sake, I’m only putting effort into it now. I’ve also created a website this summer.

This is a pricey job. I always spend money on targeted ads, buy public pages ads, and ads on other media channels, a lot of them.

Telegram channel ads are costly. Sometimes, a small-channel owner has an unreasonably high advertising price. And, a lot of channels don’t advertise other channels.

You can create a blog on my source and I will post you for free. I also advertise reports and job offerings for free.

I’m already an SMM manager when I do this, also an affiliate network PR agent.

The cpalenta.ru website hasn’t been promoted yet, I’ll get to it soon. It’s driving 300-500 unique visitors a day now, constantly growing. So, my heart is already melting from these brand queries:

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Here are my expectations: I want to create a user-friendly, convenient website that’ll have everything necessary. I want to have my blog on there and have other users do that too so that publishing their articles in the main channel brings them income and boosts their performance.

I’m always busy working on this project, on the holidays and on weekends, and this brings me much joy!

19. Your advice for those who read the whole article.

Who am I to give advice. But if you’re asking, then here are some obvious ones:

1. The main things in life aren’t things. Don’t forget to live while you’re trying to make money. Live so that you have something to remember,

2. Money should work. Have some savings, though not 95% of your income. What’s the point of money if they just sit in a bank?

3. Don’t ever be jealous. Especially people’s lives on Instagram. Especially when you don’t know those people.

4. Communicate with people and don’t be scared to ask questions. Be friendly with everyone – you might meet some great people that may help you in the future. And, everyone deserves a second chance but not a third one.

5. Try to be flexible and adapt to new realities fast.

6. And, finally, just start doing it. Maybe it’ll be chaotic but you’ll still get some kind of result, you’ll get the grip of it in the process.