How to Scrape Business Contacts? You’re probably aware that the internet is an enormous resource for collecting business contact details in order to build your own database or mailing list, but you’re not sure where to start.
You can do this in three ways: manually, with a program like Ontraport or C3, or by outsourcing to a data scraping company like us at ListScrape. Each has its advantages and disadvantages; we’ll run through them here so that you can determine which approach works best for you.
An Overview
Scrape website content: Scraping is a term that refers to extracting or copying content from websites. In order for scraping techniques to work, you have to find a way of recreating dynamic data—such as a collection of links, news stories, or social network posts—into static HTML. Without HTML, search engines and spiders can’t index scraped data and people won’t be able to see it on their screens.
Title: How To Scrape Business Contacts From The Web (A Step-By-Step Guide) Business Contact Information – Where To Find It?: When looking for information about your target companies, start by checking out public sources such as industry publications and company press releases.
Import Data Into Excel/CSV
Your address book contains contact information, but it’s a pain to update. How do you get all of your contacts into Excel or a CSV file where they can be easily updated and searched? Scrape them! Create a script that will scrape your Outlook contact list and import that data into an Excel or CSV file. This can be used for other similar applications as well.
You can even take things further by scraping websites for relevant contact information (e.g., LinkedIn). Once you have everything in one place, it becomes much easier to keep your database up-to-date than if you were doing everything manually. Paste Email Addresses into New Email: Let’s say you have several email addresses in front of you and need to quickly send each one an email without copying/pasting each address individually.
Remove Invalid Data
This is important. There will be a lot of bad data: phone numbers that belong to other people, addresses that don’t exist, and so on. If you have bad data, your results won’t make sense! The easiest way to remove invalid data is just to throw it away – delete all records with an empty email or phone number field. Then you need a way to identify which records are valid and which aren’t – a simple is_valid flag should do nicely for that purpose!
Preprocess Data Before Processing
First things first—while you may want your scraper to use proxies and VPNs, it’s best that it preprocesses any data before handing it off for processing. If, for example, your source uses encryption, you need a way of stripping that out. This can be as simple as re-writing URLs before scraping, but care should be taken so that when you re-write them after scraping they are still valid. You also want to remove any tracking codes or parameters (such as utm_source) that might skew results. Title: how to scrape business contacts?
Scrape Email Addresses Into a New Column
Google Sheets makes it easy to scrape an email list. Start by copying your contact information into a spreadsheet, separating each row with a line. (You can use an advanced search trick or simply copy and paste in bulk.) Then select all of that data and right-click; under Data Tools on Chrome or Get Data on Microsoft Edge, click Import JSON from Web then follow those instructions.
The rest is mostly automated—Google Maps API V3 should create a new column with your emails separated by @ symbols. Now you just need your recipient’s email addresses—take a look at my scrapping tips if you’re having issues with that step.
Scrape data from websites
If you’re trying to scrape data from a website, your best bet is to use a tool called Scrapy (or one of its competitors). This open-source software can quickly crawl through websites and extract data. For example, you could scrape a LinkedIn profile for all of that person’s connections.
Instead of wading through LinkedIn’s interface or entering one contact at a time into your CRM, you can simply tell Scrapy who you want it to find and hit go. It’ll take care of finding those people and importing them into your system—and it will even handle duplicates automatically.
