Craig is about to get some competition. Ebay owns Gumtree an overseas focused classified ad sites that some savvy affiliates I know have been capitalizing on. Well now Ebay just launched a brand new free classified ads site for the US called Kijiji.

Here’s an article from the New York Times - Can Ebay Take on Craig?

Now, I’m going to plant some seeds about affiliate marketing through classified ads and talk about the VERY VERY LIMITED WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY I see for affiliates with Kijiji.

But 1st a DISCLAIMER: I don’t advocate unethical affiliate spamming on classified sites and you should not advertise at all on classifieds that prohibit it. However if you are partnered with a mattress merchant that offers name brands at the lowest prices with free shipping - I don’t think it’s so bad to advertise that offer in your local area, provided the classified sites does not prohibit affiliate links. But posting “get rich quick” affiliate ads in every city… just don’t even try it. If you spam a bunch of crappy affiliate links - it just ruins it for everyone!

With that said, here’s a QUICK overview & some marketing thoughts I had about Kijiji :

I took a quick look and there are VERY FEW ads there yet. Even in the big cities, many ad categories had 0 - 3 ads. So that means there is a short window of opportunity to get ads up that last for awhile and get the lion’s share of eyeballs.

The downside, of course, is that even though you will be one of very few advertisers, there probably won’t be many consumers reading it yet either.

I could not find anything in the rules YET that prohibits affiliate links. BUT I just did a quick scan. Please do your own due diligence before posting anything that could be against the rules.

I also scanned trying to find any LIVE links in the ads which of course would be a big plus.
I could not find any. It’s entirely possible that the only ads I found were posted by people that didn’t know how to add a live link - but I tried pretty hard and could only find raw unlinked URLS. eBAY’s UK classified site, Gumtree has live links, and I know some affiliates that are taking advantage of that marketing opportunity - but again, it’s not US focused.

So there’s a chance that powered by Ebay, Kijiji could rival Craigslist and soon get huge amounts of traffic. But if that happens, it will most certainly become spam ridden and prohibit affiliate links eventually. Til then…

I’ll be starting a thread in the forum about this as well as some other online classified ad opps I know about. Join us and let’s talk about it.