Doorway traffic is a profitable traffic source for making money in affiliate programs. In essence, it is organic traffic from search engines, although it is mined by automatically generated sites. 

A lot of questions from affiliates prompted us to write an article that reveals the basic principles of doorway pages creation, their monetization and answers to frequently asked questions. At the end of the article, you will find an interview from the experienced doorway affiliate. 

What is doorway

A doorway is an automatically generated site optimized for low and medium frequency keywords to collect organic traffic from search engines. Affiliates usually earn money on doorways due to a large volume of traffic on LF and MF keys with its subsequent redirection to affiliate programs. 

There are two types of doorways: for people and with an instant redirect. In the first type, a user can visit the site and use it. In the second one, users do not see the doorway, as there is an instant redirect. There are also black and white doorway promotion methods.

The creation of a doorway differs from the creation of a classic site, since most of the processes are automated with the help of special tools. 

The doorway’s life cycle usually looks like this:

1. 1. Doorway creation and its placement on a hosting;
2. 2. Indexing;
3. 3. Organic growth;
4. 4. Doorway traffic monetization;
5. 5. Doorway banning by search engines.

Why doorways

Although visually the doorway may look like a regular site, it is not useful for visitors. It is designed only to rank high in search results and collect traffic. Search engines identify doorways as sites that do not benefit the user, hence spam and bans.

How do they look and work?

Doorways can contain both readable (DFP – doorways for people) and non-readable information. DFP may look like a regular multi-page site. Doorways for redirects are invisible to users and are usually a canvas with unreadable information. When working with doorways, you can use cloaking, which allows you to split traffic into two streams redirecting users to the offer and bots to the site.

Doorways collect traffic from search results and redirect it to offers. When creating doorways, the emphasis is placed on maximizing site optimization for better ranking and taking the highest positions in the search results. Depending on the search engines, certain manipulations need to be done in order to get to the top of the results. For example, the links to the home page and the anchors of these links are important for Google. The right doorways are capable of overtaking regular sites and collecting large volumes of traffic due to the low and midrange keys.

How to create a doorway

To create doorways, you need to stock up on keywords, doorway generator, domains, template, server and content.

You can take keywords in the affiliate program (just leave a request to the support) or parse them yourself. Usually, they take LF and MF queries from the selected topic and expand them as much as possible, and then cleanse them of irrelevant keys and add negative keywords.

Next, you need to get domains. Both free and paid options can be used. All of these will affect rankings and trust.

Domain types for doorways:

1. 1. With the help of the freenom service, you can get free domains for a year.
2. 2. When buying fresh domains, preference is given mainly to the more trustworthy version or top-level domains (TLD), such as com., net. or TLD for the required GEO. You can also use a cheaper version such as xyz.
3. 3. Drop-Domain is an already registered domain, which, for various reasons, has not been renewed. This domain already has search engine trust, a history and link weight. More details about the option of working with Drop-Domains can be found in the article about purchasing Drop-Domains.

In case of hosting, free hosting will not work since it’s not bullet-proof and has a weak configuration. We recommend looking for a more reliable, paid option.

The doorway generator (dorgen) is needed specifically to generate doorways. Some dorgens or their plugins may have additional features, such as content generation. Examples of dorgens include the following: AgDor, PandoraBox, JakoDorgen, Thunder, SEODOR, SED. The most popular dorgen is PandoraBox, for which we created a template for our webmasters. You can find more information on PandoraBox here. Write to the support team and we will send you the PandoraBox template.

Earnings on doorways

Below you can see a doorway traffic monetization case in the essay niche for Tier 1 countries, as well as statistics on earnings from doorway pages from a beginner and from an experienced webmaster. This data will help you understand what to expect when working with doorways.

The Earning from scratch case 

The webmaster registered in the affiliate program and expressed a desire to work with doorway traffic. He had no experience in doorway pages creation, but he had basic knowledge of html and php. The first month was necessary to collect information and prepare necessary materials. The webmaster received the first sale 3 months after the start of work. Below is the analytics on this webmaster’s work within a month after the first sale.

Tools that the affiliate used:

• – Doorway generator – PandoraBox;
• – SEO indexing tool – Speed-Links;
• – Tool for mass content editing – TextCrawler Pro;
• – Tool for searching and expanding semantics – Key Collector.

The results of earnings for 1 month, taking into account the start from scratch:

Unique visitors: 105656

Sales: 14

Rebills: 18

Balance: $ 771.17

Expenses: $ 220 (PandoraBox — $ 100, hosting — $ 30, domains — free, links and other — $ 90)

Total: Net profit $ 551.17

Conclusions: Not bad for a start, given that the one-time fee for PandoraBox paid off in the first months. You should not count on a huge profit from the start, but it is quite possible to get one.

Newbie stats:

Data from a practicing doorway webmaster

Now we will consider the data of an experienced doorway webmaster who has been working in the custom writing niche for 2 years. Statistics show that with an average traffic of 8k unique visitors per day, you can count on the following profit: $ 7,000+ in peak months (November, April) and $ 3,000+ per off-season month (January, August). In Edu-Money, there are no restrictions on the amount of traffic, and accordingly, there is no limit to your profit. You can start with free domains, then expand your horizons and test different approaches. 

Experienced doorway statistics:

Answers to questions from a practicing doorway maker

We asked 5 most frequently asked questions to a practicing doorway affiliate who agreed to share his experience with us. And here’s what we got: 

• The affiliate knows how to create doorways but does not know how to enter the essay niche. Where to begin?

• In the beginning, I can recommend what I started with myself: observing and copying a lot. Find a themed door and make it as similar as possible. In the process, you will have an understanding of what increases the ranking of the doorway pages, and other insights.

• How long does it take on average to figure out how to create doorways for an SEO specialist?

• Everything is very individual and depends on your base and resourcefulness. The technical base will clearly be an advantage. In a couple of months, I gradually made my first doorways and made a profit within 3 months.

• What advice can you give to webmasters?

• All the information is available on the Internet. Don’t buy bases. Observe the structure of the site, look for links to trustful resources, post videos, pictures, social networks, legal pages. On-page SEO fosters better indexing. The main task is to constantly create new doorways, analyze current ones, watch competitors and test new doorways optimization approaches.

• Where to get content?

• I’m scrabbling texts from Bing. This is a popular method as Bing does not have strong parser blocking and persistent captcha that is easy to face on Google.

• What are the best keys to use?

• The volume and relevance of keys is important. Library sites and sample databases are great for finding huge databases of reasonably relevant keys.

Let’s summarize

Doorway traffic is profitable. Those who do not give up at the beginning of the way but continue to analyze search engine algorithms and optimize their doorways can achieve high conversions. The Edu-Money affiliate program accepts doorway traffic at favorable rates, and also actively works with your leads to increase the number of their repeat purchases and your passive earnings. You can contact the support team for help in setting up the doorways and necessary promotions (we provide a doorway template). Passive income is the best motivation for getting started with doorway traffic in the essay niche.