Remote Working: Make Money with Web Scraping
It’s interesting to read articles about remote working – how remote workers shall be managed, why you shall wear pants while working at home. After reading about how working from home is fueling the world, a new article soon jumps into your face – remote working is failing Silicon Valley.
Remote work has become a hot topic and, it is the trend.
If you are planning to learn new skills and make money from home, you may be interested in web scraping.
- When everything becomes data-driven, all walks of life are looking for data.
- Web data scraping can be done everywhere, single-handedly.
- Web scraping is so versatile that it can benefit your work unexpectedly.
You may get a sense of web scraping later. Let’s dive right in.
What Data Are People Paying For
Some of Octoparse’s users are freelancers. They are doing what exactly I am talking about – offering web scraping services to help the employer get structured web data.
You may be curious about what kinds of data people are paying for. I have visited a few job sites and found out the most typical cases. In these cases, clients are looking for a guy who can deliver quality web data efficiently to them. This data is important to their business or research.
This data is accessible if you get a hang of Octoparse, a no-code web scraping tool. While I will discuss it later.
Let’s see what data is regarded as valuable to the client.
Ecommerce Product Data
Ecommerce data scraping is always in high demand. That’s why Octoparse has developed many ready-to-use templates to scrape data from Amazon, eBay, Etsy, etc.
Online sellers are gathering product data, especially prices, to learn about the market and reinvent their assortment or adjust their pricing strategy.
This is a job posting on Freelancer.com, looking for a web scraping expert to grab 150k eCommerce product data. (And believe me, you don’t have to be such an expert to complete the job.)
This is a web scraping job rather than data mining. I bet they will be the ones to mine this data afterward, looking for insights to guide their decision-making process.
Keyword: data mining
Industry: eCommerce
Data: eCommerce product listings
Rate: around $150
Email List Building
There are always people looking for email addresses. If you are a marketer, you must be receiving emails asking if you want to buy his/her email list. My thoughts: I am working in the web scraping industry and I have my email scraper.
Web scraping is widely used by marketers to generate sales leads. The only problem is to figure out where your target has been gathering around. For example, if you are looking for writers, look at Medium; if you are seeking CEOs, go to LinkedIn.
Keyword: lead generation
Industry: unknown
Data: emails of decision-makers
Rate: $40-$100/hour
Phone Numbers Scraping
Besides email marketing, text message marketing also works wonders for some industries, for example, restaurants. And Yelp and Google Maps are perfect places to get numbers of local businesses.
However, this employer could make different use of the scraped phone numbers.
Keyword: WhatsApp, extract telephone numbers
Data: telephone numbers
Industry: unknown (probably home services provider)
Rate: around $7/hour (this guy is not going to find a right fit)
LinkedIn Profile / CV
Yes, there is always a constant need for LinkedIn web scraping for there are a great number of high-quality businesses and talents active on the platform. While scraping LinkedIn is a bit sensitive. In Europe, personal information is protected by GDPR and legality should be considered if you are scraping personal information for business purposes.
Keyword: LinkedIn web scraping
Data: LinkedIn profiles
Industry: unknown
Rate: $250-$500
Content Curation for App/Web Development
People use web scraping to gather data for analysis or contact information for marketing purposes. In the meantime, web scraping is also used to grab data to feed a website or an application (or for data migration).
This is typically true for an aggregator website.
There is a group of people making money by building up websites (eg. price comparison website) with web scraping data. And some are building up a business/company. Check out these web scraping business ideas, you may find a startup idea to work with.
How to Get Web Data Like a Pro
Octoparse is designed as a no-code web scraping tool for non-coders to crawl data from the web.
What does it mean to crawl from the web?
Simply put, it is to get data from web pages into Excel, CSV, or other file formats for offline use. This is an oversimplified version to explain it but that’s how it works for most people.
For ordinary daily use, we get the data from a web page down to a file so we can compile, process, analyze or simply save a copy.
A no-code web scraping tool like Octoparse makes this job done more easier than before. Or else, building and maintaining a web scraper can be extremely sophisticated.
So how to get web data using Octoparse?
Octoparse will load the URLs given by the users and render the entire website on the built-in browser. As a result, you can point and click the data in the browser and set commands to tell the robot what data to scrape.
For example, you might want to extract business data from Yelp. All you have to do is to paste the URL in Octoparse, select desired data, set the command to extract. Octoparse will do the data scraping for you.
Download Octoparse Free here and try it out with this step-by-step guide! You can be a data provider with a smart data grabber.
Conclusions
No-code tools make no-coders work efficiently like a programmer.
Octoparse is about making web data accessible for everyone, especially business owners who need data for smart decision-making and data scientists who rely on data to get closer to the truth.
Try it out. Have fun with data.
- What Is a Web Crawler and How Does It Work - March 28, 2022
- Build a Crawler to Extract Web Data in 10 Mins - March 24, 2022
- Price Comparison Software | What it is and why use it? - March 18, 2022
Cecilia W
I am a content writer and a digital marketer in data science who believes in the power with which data can endow people’s businesses. I am working on writings that convey real values. If you have any feedback or ideas about web scraping and data analytics, talk to me at cecilia@octoparse.com.
