15+ TOP VPN Affiliate Programs — Best VPN Affiliate Networks of 2024 For Online Money Making

Affiliate marketing is an online business where you can be your own boss. It is very profitable, and you can have a passive income, so it is suitable for a second job.

If you want to do affiliate marketing, there are a lot of options you can choose from and a lot of ways you can do it. One of the matters that you need to take into consideration is what to affiliate. You have a lot of niches and a lot of products that you can start affiliating with. One of the best things you can affiliate with is VPNs. In this article, we will be telling you all that you need to know about starting a successful job with affiliating VPNs.

First, we will talk about what a VPN is, and then we will show you all the methods you can use to make money out of affiliating with a VPN service provider. A lot of people are using the exact same method on YouTube and social media these days. You have probably seen lots of these types of ads, too.

We have done many kinds of research about this, and we are representing you with the best experience possible. Sit back and relax while we teach you how you can have an easy way of passive income.

Why You Should Choose VPNs for Affiliate Marketing

First of all, many people might not know what a VPN is. If you want to affiliate a product or a service, you need to know what they are, so you can promote them in the best places possible.

The word VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. A private network means that your network is protected and safe. With a private network, you will have access to an open internet connection. The central duty of a VPN is to protect you from your data being compromised and hijacked.

Now that we live in a modern world, and we have a lot of vital data on the internet, we also need to protect them. Back in the old days, when the internet did not exist, there were pickpockets stealing money from your pocket. Right Now, a hacker and cybernetic attackers are trying to steal your data or your money from the internet. Today with most of the out transactions being online, we need protection from these thefts more than ever. With the world of the internet becoming more and more popular and more vast, the matter of protecting data is becoming more sensitive.

Because of this, the need for a virtual private network is now more necessary than ever.

VPNs are evolving and growing faster than ever, and along with it, sponsorship and affiliating with them is also developing at a very wild rate.

The Internet is a vast place. There are a lot of people channeling and sharing millions or even billions of data throughout the internet. The speed of data getting from point A to point B is also in a blink, and you have no idea how fast it can be to get some data from one server network to another in another corner of the world.  

When you are using a public network, it is not entirely harmful if you are not dealing with any critical data. But when you are using private data such as financial transactions, private account details, or writing an official email to someone, your data becomes valuable. You do not want anybody to get their hands on such data that can be harmful.

In this matter, you need to be careful that your information does not go into the wrong hands. Anyone can use a simple program to steal your content from anywhere around the world. This is the reason why you need proper protection.

In this case, the best type of protection you can have is protecting your IP address. VPNs will protect your IP address. When you use a VPN, it will establish a secure connection between your network and the host, and it will change your IP address to whatever host you are connecting to. Changing your IP to something else will make your actual IP address invisible.

Another usage of VPNs is that if you have a website with blocked content, you can connect to a VPN and bypass the block. Many countries such as China, Vietnam, and Indonesia, which have tight filtering and blocking across the internet, use VPNs to access the blocked contents.

Many people from all over the world use this property of VPNs for illegal acts such as pirating or using torrents. After all, having a secure network and IP address makes you somewhat untrackable.

Sources of Traffic for Promoting VPNs

When you want to start any affiliate business, the most crucial factor is traffic. If you do not have enough traffic, it is the exact case when you are opening a shop, but you do not have any customers. For an affiliate, the amount of traffic they get will determine their income. The more traffic you get and convert, the more money you will earn.

Where do you get traffic from? That is the core question that whoever finds the best answer for will become more successful in their affiliate marketing journey.

First of all, we need to mention that there are mainly two types of traffic sources. One kind of traffic source is the type you pay for the traffic. Websites such as Serpclix offer paid traffic.  

The other type of traffic source that we will be focusing on is the organic type. Generally, a traffic source is a place where your traffic finds your landing page from there.

For each subject in affiliate marketing, some places are better traffic sources that will result better if you invest in them. Here are some of the traffic sources that are better for promoting VPNs.

Search Engine Traffic (Organic Traffic): Certainly, the best traffic source on the whole internet is search engine traffic, a.k.a organic traffic. You can get traffic from search engines by improving the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your blog or website. Making your SEO better to the point where you get a good SEO ranking might not be the easiest way to get traffic. There might be competitors in your way that are working on their SEO for a longer time. In the picture below, you can see the difference between paid and organic search engine traffic for some VPNs.

Social Media Traffic: For VPNs, the other traffic source that will bring a great amount of traffic is social media. The best social media that affiliates can use to get traffic for promoting VPNs are YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter.

The social media that we recommend all the affiliates to use for promoting VPNs is YouTube. If you hang out a lot on YouTube, you have probably seen VPN advertisements for NordVPN. The number of ads for NordVPN on YouTube is so much that the internet made it a silly joke.

As for other social media, we can say that Facebook or Twitter is a place for promoting VPNs, but they are not as good as YouTube. The reason why other social media are good for promoting VPN affiliate links is that they are generally decent for affiliate marketing.

You can see the share of traffic from each social media in the image below.

Paid advertisements and banners: Although paid advertising and banners might not be the best option for promoting a VPN, it is still an option that you have. Some websites that have illegal content or blocked content, such as torrent websites, promote VPNs for paid advertisement. Paid advertising was always a source of traffic for affiliates.

Now that we individually talked about each source of traffic for VPN affiliate marketing, you can see how much each of these sources brings traffic compared to the other ones.

Trends for Promoting VPN Affiliate Links and Codes

As we mentioned before, the usage of VPNs and their sponsorship of them is growing faster than you could think. You can see that the graph below shows the growth of the VPNs market and where statistics predict it to go.

Research and Markets predict that the global industry of VPNs will be worth more than 50 billion dollars in only three years. This number means that the growth of VPNs is about 6.4 percent per year.

In North America, VPNs have already started to grow, but it is still not too late to get into the market. There are still some regions around the world that have not met any kind of growth in terms of using VPN. Both Europe and Asia are big consumers of the Internet around the world, so we can arguably say that there is a lot of potential for the VPN industry. With people's lives becoming more and more dependent on the internet, having a secure network is now more important than ever.

There is no need to mention that the more people get into the world of the internet, the more they will use VPNs. One thing that happened very recently that gave the usage of VPNs a boost was the Covid-19 pandemic. When the crisis started, many people started staying home and doing their jobs from home or buying from the internet. This resulted in the usage of the internet becoming more than ever and following it, the usage of VPNs met a growth.

Right now, many people who care for data use VPNs to keep their networks secure. A lot of people are realizing this fact and started using VPNs. If you want an undiscovered industry with much potential but have not met it yet, VPNs have a great future and market.

How to Make Money from Promoting VPNs

There are many ways that you can make money as an affiliate marketer. There are a lot of pricing and payment models that different companies use to pay their affiliates. In this section of the article, we will be showing you different payment methods that are common for VPN affiliate marketing. We will also be discussing the pros and cons of each VPN affiliate program so that at the end of this article, you have a clear idea about which one is more suited for you. Let us get to it.

CPS (Cost-per-subscription) or PPS (Pay-per-subscription)

CPA (cost-per-subscription), also known as PPA (pay-per-subscription), is a type of pricing model in which the affiliates receive their amount of commission when they subscribe to the plan. For affiliate marketing, the CPS pricing model is usually the most efficient one for advertisers because it guarantees a 100 percent ROI (return-on-investment.)

Imagine if you are using another pricing model such as CPM (cost-per-thousand.) Affiliates mostly use the CPM pricing model for video advertising, and the affiliates will get a commission for every 1000 views on the ad, but how can you tell if all of those 1000 people are going to purchase from you or do what you want them to do? This is why most of the affiliate programs and affiliates work with the CPS pricing model.

The CPS pricing model is the most common way of payment that you are going to see not only for VPN affiliate marketing but for affiliate marketing in general.  

The amount of commission that an affiliate will get in the CPS pricing model is higher than other pricing models since customers need to purchase a subscription and complete a detailed task.

You can see a common example of using the CPS pricing model in the VPN advertisements on YouTube. An example of these advertisements are SurfShark and NordVPN.

Usually, the way you see YouTubers drive their traffic toward the affiliates is they will mention NordVPN at the start of their video and talk about how it can benefit them, but how will the affiliate programs, in this case, NordVPN, know who the affiliate is?

There are two main ways that an advertiser can see who is the affiliate. The first way is using an affiliate link. The affiliate who wants to drive traffic to the advertiser website’s will get an affiliate link from them. When affiliates promote that link and people subscribe to a plan from the link, the affiliate gets a commission. Keep in mind that in the CPS model, clicking on a link is not enough, and customers must subscribe to a plan of that service for the affiliate to receive a commission.

The other way you can do affiliate marketing with the CPS model is by using a code, which you can also see this example a lot on YouTube. The customers will click on an affiliate link and use an affiliate code to get their service. There remains a question. Why should customers consider buying from your affiliate link and not the main website?

The reason why customers will buy from an affiliate link is that the offers usually come in a better condition such as a discount or other special offers. The affiliate codes will most likely include discounts, and the links offer a special offer for a limited time.

The way that SurfShark or NordVPN pays you with the CPS pricing model is in commission. For instance, NordVPN pays a %40 commission with their 6-month, 1-year, and 2-year affiliate program. SurfShark also pays a %40 commission and some other VPNs such as HMA (Hide My Ass) will pay an affiliate up to %100 commission.

As for a case study and an example of how much money you will be making with affiliate programs of such, here is an example.

The YouTube channel Affiliate Watch made about $28 per action. He has around 8K subscribers and made $288 in one month with 10 actions from his affiliate link.

There are many payment models, but the CPS pricing model is the most common along with the CPA model. Most VPN affiliates use several programs to make passive income. The most famous one of these affiliate programs is going to be NordVPN. We showed you an example of its affiliate program. Because the other ones are not so popular, we could not provide you with examples, but it is well-known that a VPN affiliate can make about $100 per day, and since they use several affiliate programs, there is no exact income report about it.

CPA (Cost-per-action) or PPA (Pay-per-action)

CPA (cost-per-action) or PPA (pay-per-action) is a pricing model that is very similar to the CPS pricing model. Both models are developed in the same way, and they return full return on investment (ROI.) The only difference between these models for this niche is that in the CPS affiliate program, you will get a percentage of commission based on a plan you offer to a customer, but in the CPA pricing model, the affiliate will get a fixed amount of commission no matter what they offer. There are not many differences between these two pricing models and you can even say that they are both the same, but we have decided to make them separate because of how these affiliate programs pay their affiliates. The CPA model and the CPS model are somewhat the same things because they both refer to purchasing a product.

In affiliate marketing, CPA is more frequent because of its flexibility and affiliates mostly use CPS models for services, especially online services like VPNs. This does not mean that CPA is useless for this matter. As we mentioned, we can say they are both the same things.

As for affiliate programs for CPA affiliate marketing for VPNs, there is one that we have in mind, and it is among the best. The Express VPN affiliate program. You can also find affiliates that work with the Express VPN affiliate program on YouTube.

The way this affiliate program works is similar to other CPS affiliate programs and the difference is in how these affiliate programs will pay you. We mentioned before that VPNs like NordVPN pay in commission, but VPNs like ExpressVPN, pay in fixed amounts. For instance, for the 1-month ExpressVPN package, you will get exactly $13, or for their 6-month package, you will receive $22. For the ExpressVPN package, you will get $36 per sale.  

CPI (Cost-per-install)

The next method of affiliating with VPNs that we are going to discuss is CPI (cost-per-install,) also known as PPL (pay-per-install.) In the CPI pricing model, the affiliate gets an amount of commission when a customer installs the affiliated VPN. The CPI model is not as popular as the CPA model, and it is not as good as it either. In the CPA model, the advertiser pays the affiliate when someone makes a purchase, and the transaction happens when the advertiser receives their money. In the CPI pricing model, however, a customer needs to install an application for the affiliate to receive a commission. The difference is that in the CPI model, there is no guarantee that the customers will spend any amount of money on the product or that they will not uninstall it right after they have installed it. This reason makes the CPI pricing model less popular than the CPA model for affiliate marketing.

Although CPI affiliate marketing is not as popular or as profitable as the CPA model, it has its uses in different cases. One place where using the CPI model is better than CPA is affiliating with an app. If you have an application or a video game and you want to make money out of it by accepting advertisements, you need to work with the CPI pricing model.

You see this type of affiliate marketing only within mobile applications, and you can most likely use it only on mobiles. By now, you might have stumbled upon a VPN advertising in an in-application ad on your mobile.

There are many disadvantages compared to the CPA pricing model. The amount of commission that they give you is often very low. The standard amount of commission is $0.1 to 1$ per install. As you know, not many people pay attention to mobile ads, so the conversion rate is not high. No need to mention that the traffic and your traffic source are limited to your application.

Another matter will lower the value of CPI affiliate marketing for VPNs. Usually, the advertisers who put their ads on an independent mobile application are not major companies, and they are mostly cheap and low-value VPNs. Because of that, they will not pay a great deal to the affiliate.

Overall, if you have an application and you want to do affiliate marketing, CPI is the way you need to go. If you want to start your VPN affiliate job, we recommend the fastest and easiest way, which is making a YouTube channel and choosing the right VPNs to promote. Focus on several VPNs, so you can increase the amount of money you will be making. If you are not an application developer, avoid the CPI method for affiliating.

Conclusion

VPNs are great for affiliate marketing. They are vital for anyone who wants to have a secure connection to the internet, and soon most people are going to need that. Right now, the usage of VPNs is growing a lot faster than ever and people are buying more and more VPNs. For the same reason, the sponsorship and promotion of VPNs are also going higher at a faster rate.

VPN affiliate marketing is a profitable job, and the good thing about it is that you do not need any budget to start becoming a VPN affiliate marketer. The only thing you are going to need is traffic, and YouTube is the best and easiest place for it. Now you should know all the things that you need to know, so you can make money out of VPN affiliate marketing. It might take time, but in the end, you will have a great source of passive income that will generate you money, even when you are sleeping.