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Q: What is the best affiliate marketing convention that I could attend to learn the most about the business?

A: I am not sure how objective I can be, since I am a Co-Founder of Affiliate Summit. I’d suggest having a look at the agenda for the latest Affiliate Summit, as well as past conferences, to see the topics covered and speakers featured.

Also, you can listen to many of the past sessions from Affiliate Summit at GeekCast.fm.

Additionally, there are affiliate conventions run by the various networks. There are events from Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network, LinkShare, ShareASale and others.

Check out whether the affiliate networks you promote are having any sort of convention, seminar, etc.

Then there are a number of other events that are not specifically focused on affiliate marketing, but they often have one or more sessions dedicated to the topic, such as ad:tech, Blog World Expo, PubCon, SES and SMX.

And if you are in Europe, there is the a4uexpo.

Q: What are some great ways to promote the eBay affiliate program?

A: It really depends on your skill set. There are some excellent tools for all levels of affiliates through the eBay Partner Network.

Optimally, you would leverage the eBay affiliate API (Application Programming Interface), which can be used to access eBay’s data and functionality to present in a customized format on your affiliate site(s).

Some ways you can leverage the eBay API as an affiliate include creating a comparison shopping site, niche content site, and desktop or mobile apps.

Even if you’re not familiar with APIs and don’t have a programming background, you could always hire developers to create a site for you.

Then again, if you’re more of a newbie trying to break into affiliate marketing, there are some easy to use tools like the eBay Editor Kit, where you can create links to pages for particular keywords, categories, and other parameters.

Q: How do I, as a Malaysian who studies in Australia as a temporary resident, make money in the U.S. market? Should I focus on the U.S. market or other markets?

A: There is money to be made as an affiliate marketer all over the place… the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, the U.K., all over Europe, etc.

It comes down to which sort of affiliate programs you prefer to promote and the audience you are able to attract.

Your niche will typically dictate your audience and their geographic location to a degree.

However, if your site is about something sort of generic like clothing, look at your logs to see where your visitors are coming from, and cater to that group accordingly.

If you’re finding that 90% of your audience is based in the U.S., then you should certainly cater to that market.

Rather than try and force a certain audience to come to your site, I would recommend testing the path of least resistance and appealing to your existing audience.

Also, be sure to check with any affiliate programs you promote to confirm that they ship to the countries of origin for your most frequent visitors.

Q: I have a new Web site that is a portal for outerwear apparel. Is there a central depository for online apparel merchants that offer affiliate programs, or do I have to just hunt and peck with each merchant and ask if they offer and affiliate program?

A: There isn’t really an affiliate directory that is comprehensive. And I say that even with having one of my own, the Affiliate Thing directory.

Hopefully you know your market well enough to know the players. Just go to each of those sites and look at the footer for a link that says Affiliates, Affiliate Program or something like that.

If nothing turns up that way, try searching within the site via the Google toolbar for the word “affiliate”.

Some companies have an affiliate program and they manage to do a really poor job of getting it in front of affiliates.

Those strategies should be effective for you. Also, create accounts with the affiliate networks, where you can search for affiliate programs by category.

Q: I’d like to buy/acquire an established affiliate site. Do you have any places you’d recommend to do this?

A: There are two sites where a lot of buying and selling of affiliate sites takes place: Digital Point and SitePoint.

Some folks use eBay to search for affiliate sites for sale, too.

As far as determining the value of an existing affiliate site, part of the worth of a site will be the domain name. There are some third party domain appraisal services you can use to get an idea about the market value.

I would also encourage you to perform some due diligence on whether the content on the site is original.

And if they are trying to use a metric like an Alexa ranking to prove popularity of the site, don’t put too much stock in it, since it can be manipulated.

I would suggest asking to see the actual stats provided from their host to determine the most popular pages, referrers, traffic volume, etc.

Good luck.

Q: Do you think $100 to $400 is enough to run a successful PPC campaign?

There are many variables missing with your question, which make it tough to gauge where you are with PPC.

I don’t know if that budget for you is daily, weekly, monthly, or some other period of time.

Also, it depends on how you define success. In my view, a positive return on investment for a PPC campaign is a success, but certainly I’d refer a 300% return over a 110% return.

So that ties into your ultimate goal. Do you want this to be a full-time job for you, or a hobby that nets you a few hundred dollars a month?

I would suggest that you start testing with a modest investment to get a feel for what works and play around with the systems a bit.

And then, just keep scaling up so long as it is profitable.

You could easily spend $400 a day with PPC, and if it’s returning a profit for you, that’s great.

You could do the same with $1,000 or $5,000 a day. It all comes down to whether you’re seeing positive returns, and perhaps how risk averse you are as you try to scale it.

Is it true eBay pays $12 if I drive traffic to their site, and the person registers and places a bid?

I know the eBay affiliate program has had various arrangements for how they pay out affiliate commissions over time, but on August 1 of this year, eBay announced a new value based pricing structure.

“As you may have heard, we’re in the process of implementing a new pricing structure for Active Confirmed Registered User (ACRU) compensation. The new value-based pricing scheme is based on quality, instead of just volume, and will reward affiliates for the amount of quality traffic they drive to eBay advertiser websites. The new value-based pricing system is part of our ongoing effort to reward our best marketing partners and promote trusted commerce on eBay.”

I would suggest visiting the eBay Partner Network site to get a thorough explanation on how the affiliate commissions are structured.

On the site, eBay has a drop-down menu where you can select which country version of their affiliate program you are going to promote, and the associated payment structure.

More details at http://www.ebaypartnernetwork.com/.