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/

Scraping a website from a windows service

Question

Hi there.  I have a windows forms application that scrapes a website to retrieve some data.  I would like to implement the same functionality as a windows service.  The reason for this is to allow the program to run 24/7 without  having a user signed in. 

To that end, my current version of the program uses a web browser control (system.windows.forms.webbrowser) to navigate the pages, click the buttons, allow scripts to do their thing, etc.  I cannot figure out a way to do the same without the web browser control, but the web browser control cannot be instantiated in a windows service (because there is no user interface in a web service).

Does anyone have any brilliant ideas on how to get around this?

Thank you very much!

Answers

Hi Andy,

There is a tool which could let you manipulate anything you want on the website. This agile HTML parser builds a read/write DOM and supports plain XPATH or XSLT. It is a .NET code library that allows you to parse "out of the web" HTML files. The parser is very tolerant with "real world" malformed HTML. The object model is very similar to what proposes System.Xml, but for HTML documents (or streams). More information, please check:

http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/

Have a nice day.

Best regards

All replies

You are not telling if you are using a .NET Express edition or not

You are not telling which Framework

You are not realy saying what data you are getting from the web site.

So

I made an example of service that work on any Studio edition (including the Express)

to install it, I supposed that you have at least the Framework2, so you will use something similar to:

    %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\installutil /i C:\Test\MyWindowService\MyWindowService\bin\Release\MyWindowService.exe

In the example, I supposed that you are downloading some file from the site

You will need a reference to Windows.Form for the timer


Imports System.ServiceProcess

Imports System.Configuration.Install

Public Class WindowsService : Inherits ServiceBase

  Private Minute As Integer = 60000

  Private WithEvents Timer As New Timer With {.Interval = 30 * Minute, .Enabled = True}

  Public Sub New()

    Me.ServiceName = "MyService"

    Me.EventLog.Log = "Application"

    Me.CanHandlePowerEvent = True

    Me.CanHandleSessionChangeEvent = True

    Me.CanPauseAndContinue = True

    Me.CanShutdown = True

    Me.CanStop = True

  End Sub


  Private Sub Timer_Tick(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Timer.Tick

    If IO.File.Exists("C:\MyPath.Data") Then IO.File.Delete("C:\MyPath.Data")

    My.Computer.Network.DownloadFile("http://MyURL.com", "C:\MyPath.Data", "MyUserName", "MyPassword")

    'Do Something with the data downloaded

  End Sub

End Class

<Microsoft.VisualBasic.HideModuleName()> _

Module MainModule

  Public TheServiceName As String

  Public Sub main()

    Dim TheServiceApplication As New WindowsService

    TheServiceName = TheServiceApplication.ServiceName

    ServiceBase.Run(TheServiceApplication)

  End Sub

End Module

<System.ComponentModel.RunInstaller(True)> _

Public Class WindowsServiceInstaller : Inherits Installer

  Public Sub New()

    Dim serviceProcessInstaller As ServiceProcessInstaller = New ServiceProcessInstaller()

    Dim serviceInstaller As ServiceInstaller = New ServiceInstaller()

    serviceProcessInstaller.Account = ServiceAccount.LocalSystem

    serviceProcessInstaller.Username = Nothing

    serviceProcessInstaller.Password = Nothing

    serviceInstaller.DisplayName = "My Windows Service"

    serviceInstaller.StartType = ServiceStartMode.Automatic

    serviceInstaller.ServiceName = TheServiceName

    Me.Installers.Add(serviceProcessInstaller)

    Me.Installers.Add(serviceInstaller)

  End Sub

End Class



 Hello Andy,

Thanks for your post.

What do you want to scrape from the page? HttpWebRequest class ans WebClient class may be what you need. More information, please check:

The HttpWebRequest class provides support for the properties and methods defined in WebRequest and for additional properties and methods that enable the user to interact directly with servers using HTTP.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.httpwebrequest.aspx

The WebClient class provides common methods for sending data to or receiving data from any local, intranet, or Internet resource identified by a URI

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.webclient.aspx

If you have any concenrs, please feel free to follow up.

Best regards



Hi Andy,

What about this problem on your side now? If you have any concerns, please feel free to follow up.

Have a nice day.

Best regards



Hi Andy,

When you come back, if you need further assistance about this issue, please feel free to let us know. We will continue to work with this issue.

Have a nice day.

Best regards



Thank you for the reply. Sorry it has taken me so long to respond.  I did not receive any notification that someone had replied!

I am using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition and the .NET framework 4.0.  Actually, I am upgrading some old code written in VB 6.0, but I can use the latest and greatest thats available.

The application uses a browser control to go to the page, fill in values, click on UI elements, read the HTML that returns, etc.  The purpose of the application is to collection useful information regularily/automatically.

I know how to create a web service, but using the web control in such a service is problematic because the web browser control was meant to be placed on a windows form.  I am not able to create a new instance of it in a project designated as a windows service.



Andy

Thank you for the reply. Sorry it has taken me so long to respond.  I did not receive any notification that someone had replied!

I thought a web request was for web services (retrieving information from them).  I am trying to retreive useful information from a website designed for interaction by a human, such as selecting items from lists and clicking buttons.   I currently use a web browser control to programmatically do what a person would do and get the pages back which in turn get parsed.

Andy



Hi Andy,

There is a tool which could let you manipulate anything you want on the website. This agile HTML parser builds a read/write DOM and supports plain XPATH or XSLT. It is a .NET code library that allows you to parse "out of the web" HTML files. The parser is very tolerant with "real world" malformed HTML. The object model is very similar to what proposes System.Xml, but for HTML documents (or streams). More information, please check:

http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/

Have a nice day.

Best regards



Thanks for the suggestion.  I will go to that link and see if it will work.  I will update this post with what I find.

I am writing to check the status of the issue on your side. Would you mind letting us know the result of the suggestions? If you have any concerns, please feel free to follow up.

Have a nice day.



Best regards

Hi Liliane

Thank for the follow up reply.  I don't have an answer as of yet.  Implementing this is going to take time and I haven't been given the go-ahead by my boss to spend the time to pursue it.



Hi Andy,

Never minde. You could have a try when you feel free. If you have any further questions about this issue, please feel free to let us know. We will continue to work with you on this issue.

Have a nice day.

Best regards

Source: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/f5d565b1-236b-43c2-90c7-f5cc3b2c341b/scraping-a-website-from-a-windows-service

Social Media Crawling & Scraping services for Brand Monitoring

Crawling social media sites for extracting information is a fairly new concept – mainly due to the fact that most of the social media networking sites have cropped up in the last decade or so. But it’s equally (if not more) important to grab this ever-expanding User-Generated-Content (UGC) as this is the data that companies are interested in the most – such as product/service reviews, feedback, complaints, brand monitoring, brand analysis, competitor analysis, overall sentiment towards the brand, and so on.

Scraping social networking sites such as Twitter, Linkedin, Google Plus, Instagram etc. is not an easy task for in-house data acquisition departments of most companies as these sites have complex structures and also restrict the amount and frequency of the data that they let out to crawlers. This kind of a task is best left to an expert, such as PromptCloud’s Social Media Data Acquisition Service – which can take care of your end-to-end requirements and provide you with the desired data in a minimal turnaround time. Most of the popular social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook let crawlers extract data only through their own API (Application Programming Interface), so as to control the amount of information about their users and their activities.

PromptCloud respects all these restrictions with respect to access to content and frequency of hitting their servers to make sure that user information is not compromised and their experience with the site is unhindered.

Social Media Scraping Experts

At PromptCloud, we have developed an expertise in crawling and scraping social media data in real-time. Such data can be from diverse sources such as – Twitter, Linkedin groups, blogs, news, reviews etc. Popular usage of this data is in brand monitoring, trend watching, sentiment/competitor analysis & customer service, among others.

Our low-latency component can extract data on the basis of specific keywords, categories, geographies, or a combination of these. We can also take care of complexities such as multiple languages as well as tweets and profiles of specific users (based on keywords or geographies). Sample XML data can be accessed through this link – demo.promptcloud.com.

Structured data is delivered via a single REST-based API and every time new content is published, the feed gets updated automatically. We also provide data in any other preferred formats (XML, CSV, XLS etc.).

If you have a social media data acquisition problem that you want to get solved, please do get in touch with us.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/social-media-networking-sites-crawling-service/

How to Generate Sales Leads Using Web Scraping Services

The first stage of any selling process is what is popularly known as “lead generation”. This phase is what most businesses place at the apex of their sales concerns. It is a driving force that governs decision-making at its highest levels, and influences business strategy and planning. If you are about to embark on an outbound sales campaign and are in the process of looking for leads, you would acknowledge the fact that lead generation process is of extreme importance for any business.

Different lead generation techniques have been used over and over again by companies around the world to satiate this growing business need. Newer, more innovative methods have also emerged to help marketers in this process. One such method of lead generation that is fast catching on, and is poised to play a big role for businesses in the coming years, is web scraping. With web scraping, you can easily get access to multiple relevant and highly customized leads – a perfect starting point for any marketing, promotional or sales campaign.

The prominence of Web Scraping in overall marketing strategy

At present, levels of competition have risen sky high for most businesses. For success, lead generation and gaining insight about customer behavior and preferences is an essential business requirement. Web scraping is the process of scraping or mining the internet for information. Different tools and techniques can be used to harvest information from multiple internet sources based on relevance, and the structured and organized in a way that makes sense to your business. Companies that provide web scraping services essentially use web scrapers to generate a targeted lead database that your company can then integrate into its marketing and sales strategies and plans.

The actual process of web scraping involves creating scraping scripts or algorithms which crawl the web for information based on certain preset parameters and options. The scraping process can be customized and tuned towards finding the kind of data that your business needs. The script can extract data from websites automatically, collate and put together a meaningful collection of leads for business development.

Lead Generation Basics

At a very high level, any person who has the resources and the intent to purchase your product or service qualifies as a lead. In the present scenario, you need to go far deeper than that. Marketers need to observe behavior patterns and purchasing trends to ensure that a particular person qualifies as a lead. If you have a group of people you are targeting, you need to decide who the viable leads will be, acquire their contact information and store it in a database for further action.

List buying used to be a popular way to get leads, but their efficacy has dwindled over time. Web scraping is the fast coming up as a feasible lead generation technique, allowing you to find highly focused and targeted leads in short amounts of time. All you need is a service provider that would carry out the data mining necessary for lead generation, and you end up with a list of actionable leads that you can try selling to.

How Web Scraping makes a substantial difference

With web scraping, you can extract valuable predictive information from websites. Web scraping facilitates high quality data collection and allows you to structure marketing and sales campaigns better. To drive sales and maximize revenue, you need strong, viable leads. To facilitate this, you need critical data which encompasses customer behavior, contact details, buying patterns and trends, willingness and ability to spend resources, and a myriad of other aspects critical to ascertain the potential of an entity as a rewarding lead. Data mining through web scraping can be a great way to get to these factors and identifying the leads that would make a difference for your business.

web-scraping-service

Crawling through many different web locales using different techniques, web scraping services pick up a wealth of information. This highly relevant and specialized information instantly provides your business with actionable leads. Furthermore, this exercise allows you to fine-tune your data management processes, make more accurate and reliable predictions and projections, arrive at more effective, strategic and marketing decisions and customize your workflow and business development to better suit the current market.

The Process and the Tools

Lead generation, being one of the most important processes for any business, can prove to be an expensive proposition if not handled strategically. Companies spend large amounts of their resources acquiring viable leads they can sell to. With web scraping, you can dramatically cut down the costs involved in lead generation and take your business forward with speed and efficiency. Here are some of the time-tested web scraping tools which can come in handy for lead generation –

•    Website download software – Used to copy entire websites to local storage. All website pages are downloaded and the hierarchy of navigation and internal links preserve. The stored pages can then be viewed and scoured for information at any later time.     Web scraper – Tools that crawl through bulk information on the internet, extracting specific, relevant data using a set of pre-defined parameters.

•    Data grabber – Sifts through websites and databases fast and extracts all the information, which can be sorted and classified later.

•    Text extractor – Can be used to scrape multiple websites or locations for acquiring text content from websites and web documents. It can mine data from a variety of text file formats and platforms.

With these tools, web scraping services scrape websites for lead generation and provide your business with a set of strong, actionable leads that can make a difference.

Covering all Bases

The strength of web scraping and web crawling lies in the fact that it covers all the necessary bases when it comes to lead generation. Data is harvested, structured, categorized and organized in such a way that businesses can easily use the data provided for their sales leads. As discussed earlier, cold and detached lists no longer provide you with enough actionable leads. You need to look at various factors and consider them during your lead generation efforts –

•    Contact details of the prospect

•    Purchasing power and purchasing history of the prospect

•    Past purchasing trends, willingness to purchase and history of buying preferences of the prospect

•    Social markers that are indicative of behavioral patterns

•    Commercial and business markers that are indicative of behavioral patterns

•    Transactional details

•    Other factors including age, gender, demography, social circles, language and interests

All these factors need to be taken into account and considered in detail if you have to ensure whether a lead is viable and actionable, or not. With web scraping you can get enough data about every single prospect, connect all the data collected with the help of onboarding, and ascertain with conviction whether a particular prospect will be viable for your business.

Let us take a look at how web scraping addresses these different factors –

1. Scraping website’s

During the scraping process, all websites where a particular prospect has some participation are crawled for data. Seemingly disjointed data can be made into a sensible unit by the use of onboarding- linking user activities with their online entities with the help of user IDs. Documents can be scanned for participation. E-commerce portals can be scanned to find comments and ratings a prospect might have delivered to certain products. Service providers’ websites can be scraped to find if the prospect has given a testimonial to any particular service. All these details can then be accumulated into a meaningful data collection that is indicative of the purchasing power and intent of the prospect, along with important data about buying preferences and tastes.

2. Social scraping
According to a study, most internet users spend upwards of two hours every day on social networks. Therefore, scraping social networks is a great way to explore prospects in detail. Initially, you can get important identification markers like names, addresses, contact numbers and email addresses. Further, social networks can also supply information about age, gender, demography and language choices. From this basic starting point, further details can be added by scraping social activity over long periods of time and looking for activities which indicate purchasing preferences, trends and interests. This exercise provides highly relevant and targeted information about prospects can be constructively used while designing sales campaigns.

Check out How to use Twitter data for your business

3. Transaction scraping
Through the scraping of transactions, you get a clear idea about the purchasing power of prospects. If you are looking for certain income groups or leads that invest in certain market sectors or during certain specific periods of time, transaction scraping is the best way to harvest meaningful information. This also helps you with competition analysis and provides you with pointers to fine-tune your marketing and sales strategies.

get-results-from-your-lead-generation-campaign

Using these varied lead generation techniques and finding the right balance and combination is key to securing the right leads for your business. Overall, signing up for web scraping services can be a make or break factor for your business going forward. With a steady supply of valuable leads, you can supercharge your sales, maximize returns and craft the perfect marketing maneuvers to take your business to an altogether new dimension.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/how-to-generate-sales-leads-using-web-scraping-services/

How to Build Data Warehouses using Web Scraping

Businesses all over the world are facing an avalanche of information which needs to be collated, organized, analyzed and utilized in an appropriate fashion. Moreover, with each increasing year there is a perceived shortening of the turnaround time for businesses to take decisions based on information they have assimilated. Data Extractors, therefore, have evolved with a more significant role in modern day businesses than just mere collectors or scrapers of unstructured data. They cleanse structure and store contextual data in veritable warehouses, so as to make it available for transformation into useable information as and when the business requires. Data warehouses, therefore, are the curators of information which businesses seek to treasure and to use.

Understanding Data Warehouses

 Traditionally, Data Warehouses have been premised on the concept of getting easy access to readily available data. Modern day usage has helped it to evolve as a rich repository to store current and historical data that can be used to conduct data analysis and generate reports. As it also stores historical data, Data Warehouses are used to generate trending reports to help businesses foresee their prospects. In other words, data warehouses are the modern day crystal balls which businesses zealously pore over to foretell their future in the Industry.

Scraping Web Data for Creating Warehouses

The Web, as we know it, is a rich repository of a whole host of information. However, it is not always easy to access this information for the benefit of our businesses through manual processes. The data extractor tools, therefore, have been built to quickly and easily, scrape, cleanse and structure and store it in Data Warehouses so as to be readily available in a useable format.

Web Scraping tools are variously designed to help both programmers as well as non-programmers to retain their comfort zone while collecting data to create the data warehouses. There are several tools with point and click interfaces that ease out the process considerably. You can simply define the type of data you want and the tool will take care of the rest. Also, most tools such as these are able to store the data in the cloud and therefore do not need to maintain costly hardware or whole teams of developers to manage the repository.

Moreover, as most tools use a browser rendering technology, it helps to simulate the web viewing experience of humans thereby easing the usability aspect among business users facilitating the data extraction and storage process further.

Conclusion

The internet as we know it is stocked with valuable data most of which are not always easy to access. Web Data extraction tools have therefore gained popularity among businesses as they browse, search, navigate simulating your experience of web browsing and finally extract data fields specific to your industry and appropriate to your needs. These are stored in repositories for analysis and generation of reports. Thus evolves the need and utility of Data warehouses. As the process of data collection and organization from unstructured to structured form is automated, there is an assurance of accuracy built into the process which enhances the value and credibility of data warehouses. Web Data scraping is no doubt the value enhancers for Data warehouses in the current scenario.

Source: http://scraping-solutions.blogspot.in/2014/09/how-to-build-data-warehouses-using-web.html