13 Simple Ways To Make Money Online: Lead Generation (Part 2)

In a previous article, we learned about the benefits of having a newsletter. Now that you have one, where are you going to get the prospects to email with your brand new super-powered newsletter? If you don't have a newsletter service set up, we recommend GetResponse to easily get started before proceeding with this article.

Lead generation Basics

This is the process of identifying and acquiring potential customers for a business. It is an essential aspect of growing a small business as it allows the business to reach new customers and increase revenue.

Why You Need it?

1. To identify potential customers: It allows small businesses to identify individuals or companies that may be interested in their products or services.
2. To increase revenue: By acquiring new customers, small businesses can increase their revenue.
3. It is Cost-effective: Compared to other marketing methods, lead generation can be relatively cost-effective. It can help small businesses to reach a larger audience without spending a lot of money.
4. Specific targeting: It enables small businesses to target specific groups of customers, which can lead to higher conversion rates and more sales.
5. Building a pipeline: It helps small businesses to build a pipeline of potential customers, which can be beneficial in case of a downturn in sales or market conditions.

Web Scraping

Web scraping, also known as web harvesting, is the process of automatically extracting information from websites. Scraping public information refers to the practice of using web scraping techniques to obtain information that is publicly available on the internet. Businesses can use this information to get leads for their businesses.

Scraping Sources

1. Business directories: Small businesses can scrape business directories such as Yellow Pages or Yelp to obtain information about potential customers, including contact details and business details.
2. Social media: Small businesses can scrape social media platforms such as LinkedIn or Twitter to obtain information about potential customers, including contact details and interests.
3. News websites: Small businesses can scrape news websites to obtain information about potential customers, including contact details and recent business activity.
4. Job boards: Small businesses can scrape job boards to obtain information about potential customers, including contact details and job titles.

How to get started with Scraping

Getting started with Web scraping can be simple depending on how you want to approach it. You can decide to build your own scraper from scratch if you have the skills using Python libraries such Beautiful soup and Selenium. However, if you are a business and your core offering does not involve coding, you are probably better off using a pre-made scraper such as Outscraper. This is one of the  easiest options as it's tailor-made for lead-generation. There are other options such as Octoparse and Oxylabs but we'll focus on the one that's quickest to get to the end result.

Using The scraper

Once you sign up, using the scraper is fairly simple. Just specify your categories and choose an enrichment addition such as social media etc so you can get more details on your target business later.

In the end you'll get a nice clean csv file that you can then load into your CRM and start emailing your prospects. I hope this guide has been useful to get started with Leads generation for your business. You can sign up for an outscraper account here.

Conclusion

Web scraping  can be a useful method for small businesses to obtain leads, as it allows them to access a large amount of data in a relatively short amount of time. However, it's important to note that scraping information from websites that don't allow it, is illegal and can lead to legal issues, so it's important to check the terms and conditions of the website before scraping.