Business Intelligence: Use Web Scraper Tool to Generate Leads and Analyse Your Competitors
April 25th, 2009 | Author: Noobpreneur | 2,317 views
You and I know that if you are about to enter a lucrative niche, it must have been loaded with businesses, trying to grab pieces of cake for themselves. The piece is getting smaller and smaller as many competitive new entrants offer something that existing businesses don’t.
Some will falter, some will thrive – Nothing personal, it’s just business. Talk about stiff competition.
I found out that what you need is actually Web Data Mining Software.
What is web data mining software?
Web data mining is an activity to gather abundant data from a website and process them to gain meaningful information.
Commonly used for business purpose, web data mining software enables you to mine data from various websites and use them to create information you need for your business, in a simpler manner.
One example of such software is Mozenda, that offer web data mining services starting from $49 a month. You can learn more by watching a video of Mozenda software in action.
Web data mining software = web scraper tool?
Yes. Web data mining software is, indeed, a Web Scraper tool.
Web scraping (or harvesting) is basically an activity of extracting content from a target website for various purposes.
I understand that for those of you who are dealing with the Internet and online business on regular basis, “web scraper” sounds an alarm and raises a red flag.
To clarify, although it is often used illegally – to take other’s content and claim it as your very own – web scraping is, by far, the best tool to analyse your competitors, and more.
What web scraper tool can offer for your business
The main purpose is business intelligence – analysing your competitors and competition, enabling you to read them like a book :)
Not only for business intelligence, web scraper tool can be used for other various purposes. Here are some business-related uses of a web scraper tool:
- Competitive pricing and pricing analysis
You can easily gather product information of your competitor’s website with point-and-click web data mining software like Mozenda – This enables you to learn your competitors’ pricing strategy, and react accordingly. - Market research
You can gather data from forums’ threads or other sites offering user-generated product reviews to learn what people is saying about your product. - Lead Generation
You can visit yellow page-type of sites or directories and scrape listed contact data from them for a certain term, and use the scraped data as your business leads.
The above uses conclude one thing: Web scraping save time and money to build price lists and lead lists, as well as market research.
I recommend you to find web data mining software that are appropriate for your need. Some do offer trials, such as Mozenda’s 14 days free trial – You can benefit from such offer to see whether what they are offering are beneficial for your business.
Ivan Widjaya
Web data mining
Image by flaivoloka.
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About the Author
Ivan Widjaya is the Owner/Editor of Noobpreneur.com. He is a web property investor, blogger and web property maker, and currently manages and writes for Franchise Note. He also runs a web design business, Chalcedony Design, specialising in Wordpress theme creation.
Visit Noobpreneur's profile and other posts.
Posted in about business, business resources, productivity tools | Tags: business intelligence, web data mining software, web scraper
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This is great info, Thanks for posting it. I just found a press release about this company:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/05/prweb2360474.htm
I can think of tons of things to do with this software – Very fun stuff.
Jon,
Indeed – Have you tried it yet?
I did get a chance to try it. Very easy to use. Great tool to grab data and they even have a way to ftp directly to a server. Grab data FTP – Set it up and you have fresh content all the time. I hope I can get this done. I will send a link after I build it.
Jon,
Whoa – You are really testing it :) Can you automate content grabbing process?
Hello again. I wanted to let people know that I harvested all of the Web 2.0 and 3.0 businesses I could find and put it in this directory shell. Without Mozenda, it would have taken me weeks to gather all this information! If I accidentally overlooked anyone’s business, feel free to add it to the directory.
Jon,
This is a great testimonial… Have you encountered with any scraping problems with Mozenda?
The data harvesting part was the easy part for the directory – http://www.theeasybee.com In case you want to check it out. It was very easy to get the data and manipulate it. I am still in the phase of making the site easy to use so still a bit of a beta phase. The Mozenda product worked great. Easy to use and did exactly what I asked it to. I think the directory is going to be a nice tool when I am done – Probably a week or two out.
Jon,
Nice work – Yes, how you organise information is very important in directory. Layout and navigation (beside the listings, of course) are crucial in letting your dir visitors to find what they need, fast.