Earn Money From Price Comparison Through Web Scraping

Many individuals discover the pot of gold just within their reach. They have realized that there is money in the web. Cyber technology has blessed mankind with so many benefits that makes money very possible by just some clicks on the mouse and keyboard. Building a price comparison website is an effective way of helping clients find their desired products while you as the owner earn money at the same time.

Building price comparison websites

There is indeed much money in building price comparison websites but it is not an easy task especially for a novice in maintaining a website of one’s own. Since this entails some serious programming and ample familiarity with data feeds, you have to have a good working plan. In addition, what you are venturing into is greater than the usual blogs about just anything that you can think of. Furthermore, you are stepping into the vast field of electronic marketing, therefore you must be ready.

The first point of consideration is to identify which products or services are you going to include in your website. Choose a product or service that you and a majority of clients are mostly interested in. Suppose you want you to choose sports as your theme then you can include items and prices of sports gear, clothing such as uniforms, training videos, books, and other safety stuff. You need to do some research and even a survey to determine whether the goods and services you are promoting on your website are in demand and are what most people want to know. Moreover, it is on this stage that you may need the help of experts and veterans in the field of building to be assured that you are on the right track.

In addition, be willing to change in case your chosen category is not gaining readership or visitors. Then evaluate whether you need to expand or to be more specific in your description of the products and the comparison of the prices. Make your site prominent by search engine optimization (SEO) and make sure to acknowledge also that not too many people visit a site that is not free.

Helping visitors choose the best product/services

Good marketing strategy starts with knowing who your target audience are. There is indeed a need to do a lot of planning and research in order to understand your client’s needs and preferences. Moreover, knowing them thoroughly leads to achieving 100% consumer satisfaction. When you have provided everything they need to know about certain products, they would not need to seek elsewhere which will also gain you more regular visitors. Remember that your audience are members of communities and social networks such that there is a great possibility that they would spread the word around about the good services you are offering.

If there is a need to conduct a survey in addition to research, you should resort to it. In this manner you can discover what goods and services are not yet completely exhausted by the other websites or web creators. Ample knowledge about your potential visitors and consumers will surely make you effectively provide them with adequate statistics for their needs.

Your site will then look like a complete guidebook for them that will give them the best value for their money. Therefore, it must be thoroughly filled with product details, uses, options, and prices.

Making money as affiliate of eCommerce websites

Maintaining a price comparison website gives you less worry about getting paid or having your products bought and sold because income comes in through advertising and affiliate sales. Affiliate marketing is a way of earning money online by serving as a publisher for promotion of products, services or sites of businesses. The affiliate receives rewards from businesses for each visitor or client that comes to the business website or buys its product through the efforts of the advertising and promotion that is made by the affiliate. This is the online version of the concept of agent or referral fee sales channel. Aside from website owners, bloggers as well as members of community forums can also serve as affiliates. The affiliate earns money in three ways: through pay per link; pay per sale and pay per lead.

Trust in the reliability of the product - You should have a personal belief or confidence in the product you are promoting not only because it makes you sound more convincing, but also because you need to maintain your clients and establish credibility in your blog or website. In other words, don’t just pick any product. If you cannot use them personally, they should at least have several positive reviews and no negative ones.

Maintain credibility with readers and fellow bloggers - Befriend your readers and your co-bloggers by answering their queries sincerely and quickly. Your friendly attitude can win you their trust which is a very vital element of affiliate marketing.

Do reviews - In addition to publishing price comparison, you can gain more visitors by writing about the product and do proper SEO (Search Engine Optimization). So the expected happens, the more prominent the product becomes online, the higher will be your income.

Link with friends thru social media - Your friends have friends and their friends have also friends. Just think of how powerful your social media site can be when you post your link on your account on Facebook, Twitter or MySpace and others. Since trust is built on friendship, it is easy to get clients from among your friends and their friends.

Overall, you get all pertinent information about certain products through web data mining or web scraping. All you need to do is to be keen to the needs of your clients and use web content extraction efficiently.

Source: http://www.loginworks.com/earn-money-price-comparison-web-scraping/

Three Common Methods For Web Data Extraction

Probably the most common technique used traditionally to extract data from web pages this is to cook up some regular expressions that match the pieces you want (e.g., URL's and link titles). Our screen-scraper software actually started out as an application written in Perl for this very reason. In addition to regular expressions, you might also use some code written in something like Java or Active Server Pages to parse out larger chunks of text. Using raw regular expressions to pull out the data can be a little intimidating to the uninitiated, and can get a bit messy when a script contains a lot of them. At the same time, if you're already familiar with regular expressions, and your scraping project is relatively small, they can be a great solution.

Other techniques for getting the data out can get very sophisticated as algorithms that make use of artificial intelligence and such are applied to the page. Some programs will actually analyze the semantic content of an HTML page, then intelligently pull out the pieces that are of interest. Still other approaches deal with developing "ontologies", or hierarchical vocabularies intended to represent the content domain.

There are a number of companies (including our own) that offer commercial applications specifically intended to do screen-scraping. The applications vary quite a bit, but for medium to large-sized projects they're often a good solution. Each one will have its own learning curve, so you should plan on taking time to learn the ins and outs of a new application. Especially if you plan on doing a fair amount of screen-scraping it's probably a good idea to at least shop around for a screen-scraping application, as it will likely save you time and money in the long run.

So what's the best approach to data extraction? It really depends on what your needs are, and what resources you have at your disposal. Here are some of the pros and cons of the various approaches, as well as suggestions on when you might use each one:

Raw regular expressions and code

Advantages:

- If you're already familiar with regular expressions and at least one programming language, this can be a quick solution.

- Regular expressions allow for a fair amount of "fuzziness" in the matching such that minor changes to the content won't break them.

- You likely don't need to learn any new languages or tools (again, assuming you're already familiar with regular expressions and a programming language).

- Regular expressions are supported in almost all modern programming languages. Heck, even VBScript has a regular expression engine. It's also nice because the various regular expression implementations don't vary too significantly in their syntax.

Disadvantages:

- They can be complex for those that don't have a lot of experience with them. Learning regular expressions isn't like going from Perl to Java. It's more like going from Perl to XSLT, where you have to wrap your mind around a completely different way of viewing the problem.

- They're often confusing to analyze. Take a look through some of the regular expressions people have created to match something as simple as an email address and you'll see what I mean.

- If the content you're trying to match changes (e.g., they change the web page by adding a new "font" tag) you'll likely need to update your regular expressions to account for the change.

- The data discovery portion of the process (traversing various web pages to get to the page containing the data you want) will still need to be handled, and can get fairly complex if you need to deal with cookies and such.

When to use this approach: You'll most likely use straight regular expressions in screen-scraping when you have a small job you want to get done quickly. Especially if you already know regular expressions, there's no sense in getting into other tools if all you need to do is pull some news headlines off of a site.

Ontologies and artificial intelligence

Advantages:

- You create it once and it can more or less extract the data from any page within the content domain you're targeting.

- The data model is generally built in. For example, if you're extracting data about cars from web sites the extraction engine already knows what the make, model, and price are, so it can easily map them to existing data structures (e.g., insert the data into the correct locations in your database).

- There is relatively little long-term maintenance required. As web sites change you likely will need to do very little to your extraction engine in order to account for the changes.

Disadvantages:

- It's relatively complex to create and work with such an engine. The level of expertise required to even understand an extraction engine that uses artificial intelligence and ontologies is much higher than what is required to deal with regular expressions.

- These types of engines are expensive to build. There are commercial offerings that will give you the basis for doing this type of data extraction, but you still need to configure them to work with the specific content domain you're targeting.

- You still have to deal with the data discovery portion of the process, which may not fit as well with this approach (meaning you may have to create an entirely separate engine to handle data discovery). Data discovery is the process of crawling web sites such that you arrive at the pages where you want to extract data.

When to use this approach: Typically you'll only get into ontologies and artificial intelligence when you're planning on extracting information from a very large number of sources. It also makes sense to do this when the data you're trying to extract is in a very unstructured format (e.g., newspaper classified ads). In cases where the data is very structured (meaning there are clear labels identifying the various data fields), it may make more sense to go with regular expressions or a screen-scraping application.

Screen-scraping software

Advantages:

- Abstracts most of the complicated stuff away. You can do some pretty sophisticated things in most screen-scraping applications without knowing anything about regular expressions, HTTP, or cookies.

- Dramatically reduces the amount of time required to set up a site to be scraped. Once you learn a particular screen-scraping application the amount of time it requires to scrape sites vs. other methods is significantly lowered.

- Support from a commercial company. If you run into trouble while using a commercial screen-scraping application, chances are there are support forums and help lines where you can get assistance.

Disadvantages:

- The learning curve. Each screen-scraping application has its own way of going about things. This may imply learning a new scripting language in addition to familiarizing yourself with how the core application works.

- A potential cost. Most ready-to-go screen-scraping applications are commercial, so you'll likely be paying in dollars as well as time for this solution.

- A proprietary approach. Any time you use a proprietary application to solve a computing problem (and proprietary is obviously a matter of degree) you're locking yourself into using that approach. This may or may not be a big deal, but you should at least consider how well the application you're using will integrate with other software applications you currently have. For example, once the screen-scraping application has extracted the data how easy is it for you to get to that data from your own code?

When to use this approach: Screen-scraping applications vary widely in their ease-of-use, price, and suitability to tackle a broad range of scenarios. Chances are, though, that if you don't mind paying a bit, you can save yourself a significant amount of time by using one. If you're doing a quick scrape of a single page you can use just about any language with regular expressions. If you want to extract data from hundreds of web sites that are all formatted differently you're probably better off investing in a complex system that uses ontologies and/or artificial intelligence. For just about everything else, though, you may want to consider investing in an application specifically designed for screen-scraping.

As an aside, I thought I should also mention a recent project we've been involved with that has actually required a hybrid approach of two of the aforementioned methods. We're currently working on a project that deals with extracting newspaper classified ads. The data in classifieds is about as unstructured as you can get. For example, in a real estate ad the term "number of bedrooms" can be written about 25 different ways. The data extraction portion of the process is one that lends itself well to an ontologies-based approach, which is what we've done. However, we still had to handle the data discovery portion. We decided to use screen-scraper for that, and it's handling it just great. The basic process is that screen-scraper traverses the various pages of the site, pulling out raw chunks of data that constitute the classified ads. These ads then get passed to code we've written that uses ontologies in order to extract out the individual pieces we're after. Once the data has been extracted we then insert it
into a database.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Three-Common-Methods-For-Web-Data-Extraction&id=165416

SEO No No! Scraping & Splogging – Content Theft!

Until recently, you could as well as might possibly not have acknowledged how you can perform the earlier mentioned. Even so, the following element could be the really cool element.

Several. Get back to ScrapeBox Add-Ons and also down load your ScrapeBox Blog Analyzer add-on. Open it upwards, and transfer the actual .txt record you merely rescued. Struck start.

ScrapeBox goes through almost every back link you merely scraped and look these phones determine if these are your site that will ScrapeBox presently facilitates placing comments in. If it is, that turns environmentally friendly. If it isn’t, that turns reddish. Soon after it really is concluded, it is possible to “clean” the list insurance agencies the idea remove unsupported websites.

Just what you’re destined to be left with is ALL of the sites the competitor has back-links via, and most importantly, they all are capable of being mentioned in employing ScrapeBox!!

Help save that will “clean” listing with a report, import it this list involving websites you wish to touch upon, and then keep to the exact same steps you’d probably typically follow for you to touch upon websites. Inside of Ten mins you’ll have got all the comps website backlinks (which may be blocked by Public relations if you’d just like) along with you’ll be able to reply to every one of them inside a 20 min (because the list most likely won’t end up being Large).

Desire to force this specific even more?? Obviously you are doing, you’re in BHW

Each step is the same as over with the exception of one tiny issue as well as the addition of an extra step.

Instead of just employing a single foot print inside your first bounty (both from SB’s regular gui after which also the back link checker add-on) you’re likely to be using a A lot of open all of them. Here is what you do to consider this particular to a whole new amount.

Initial, you’re going to pick each of the URLs via AOL, Aol, Ask & Search engines using this footprint:

site:domainyourcompetingwith.org

That will go back ALL the at present found web pages in the area. Remove copy Web addresses along with save that will with a .TXT report.

Now, you’re planning to create the subsequent right in front of each of these URLs:

hyperlink:

Right now follow all of the steps while outlined above. Exactly what this may is actually obtain each of the backlinks to every single site of the rivals web site.

Because Google Back link Checker is simply capable of getting the first 1k Web addresses through Aol (while that’s all Google allows you to view) you could have missed out on a decent amount associated with website inbound links if they had been at night 1st 1k final results. Consequently performing the aforementioned further methods ensures that every brand new web site in the website anyone pay attention to backlinks implies a fresh and other pair of a listing of back-links that is possibly 1k back links long.

Now you understand how to locate, filtration along with take your competitors back links, stop looking at and also move and take action!

Source: https://freescrapeboxlist19.wordpress.com/

What is HTML Scraping and how it works

There are many reasons why there may be a requirement to pull data or information from other sites, and usually the process begins after checking whether the site has an official API. There are very few people who are aware about the presence of structured data that is supported by every website automatically. We are basically talking about pulling data right from the HTML, also referred to as HTML scraping. This is an awesome way of gleaning data and information from third party websites.

Any webpage content that can be viewed can be scraped without any trouble. If there is any way provided by the website to the browser of the visitor to download content and use the same in a highly structured manner, in that case, accessing of the content programmatically is possible. HTML scraping works in an amazing manner.

Before indulging in HTML scraping, one can inspect the browser for network traffic. Site owners have a couple of tricks up their sleeve to thwart this access, but majority of them can be worked around.

Before moving on to how HTML scraping works, we must understand the reasons behind the same. Why is scraping needed? Once you get a satisfactory answer to this question, you can start looking for RSS or API feeds or various other traditional structured data forms. It is significant to understand that when compared with APIs, websites are more significant.

The most important advantage of the same is the maintenance of their websites where a lot of visitors visit rather than safeguarding structured data feeds. With Tweeter, the same has been publicly seen when it clamps down on the developer ecosystem. Many times, API feeds change or move without any prior warning. Many times, it can also be a deliberate attempt, but mostly, such issues or problems erupt as there is no authority or an organization that maintains or takes care of the structured data. It is rarely noticed, if the same gets severely mangled or goes offline. In case the website has certain issues or the website no longer works, the problem is more in the form of a ball in your court requiring dealing with the same without losing any time. api-comic-image

Rate limiting is another factor that needs a lot of thinking and in case of public websites, it virtually doesn’t exist. Besides some occasional sign up pages or captchas, many business websites fail to create and built defenses against any unwarranted automated access. Many times, a single website can be scraped for four hours straight without anyone noticing. There are chances that you would not be viewed under DDOS attack unless concurrent requests are being made by you. You will be seen just as an avid visitor or an enthusiast in the logs, that too, in case anyone is looking.

Another factor in HTML scraping is that one can easily access any website anonymously. Behavior tracking can be done with a few ways by the administrator of the website and this turns out to be beneficial if you want to privately gather the data. Many times, registration is imperative with APIs in order to get key and with any request being sent, this key also needs to be sent. But, in case of simple and straightforward HTTP requests, the visitor can stay anonymous besides cookies and IP address, which can again be spoofed.

The availability of HTML scraping is universal and there is no need to wait for the opening of the site for an API or for contacting anyone in the organization. One simply needs to spend some time and browse websites at a leisurely pace until the data you want is available and then find out the basic patterns to access the same.

Now you need to don a hat of a professional scraper and simply dive in. Initially, it may take some time to work up figuring out the way the data have been structured and the way it can be accessed just as we read APIs. If there is no documentation unlike APIs, you need to be a little more smart about it and use clever tricks.

Some of the most used tricks are

Data Fetching

The first thing that is required is data fetching. Find endpoints to begin with, that is the URLs that can help in returning the data that is required. If you are pretty sure about the data and the way it should be structured so as to match your requirements, you will require a particular subset for the same and later you can indulge in site browsing using the navigation tools.

GET Parameter

The URLs must be paid attention to and see the way it changes as you indulge in clicking between the sections and the way they divide into various subsections. Before starting, the other option that can be used is to straight away go to the search functionality of the site. Certain terms can be typed and the URL needs to be focused again for watching the changes on the basis of what is being searched. A GET parameter will be probably seen like q which changes on the basis of the search term used by you. Other GET parameters that are not being used can be removed from the URL until only the ones that are needed are left for data loading. Before a query string, there must always be a “?” beginning.

Now the time has come when you would have started to come across the data that you would like to see and want to access, but sometimes, there may be certain pagination issues that require to be dealt with. Due to these issues, you may not be able to see the data in its entirety. Single requests are kept away by many APIs as well from database slamming. Many times, clicking the next page can add some offset parameter that helps in data visibility on the page. All these steps will help you succeed in HTML scraping.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/what-is-html-scraping-and-how-it-works/