Web Scraping: Would you believe it if I said that affiliate marketing has been there for a long time?
Well, what is affiliate marketing? Say you wanted to sell your car, and you asked me to get you a buyer. I get a cut if I do. So I put up ads and get a buyer for you. In this case, I am making the effort of getting a customer for a product that I do not own and have no connection with. This is how affiliate marketing happened in the past and it’s a popular analogy for explaining it in the digital context today.
However, with the advent of technology, the scheme of things has changed exponentially. These days, you can share links of products hosted on e-commerce websites, be it in your blog, your post, your Instagram feed, or any other electronic medium. If someone buys the item by going through your link, you will be getting some points, which you can redeem for money in the long run.
When links are included, someone going through such an article might click on it and actually proceed to buy the item.
Voila! An affiliate marketer gets paid.
Chances are, you probably already know the best way to go about affiliate marketing. But how big of a part does data play in that trade? Are you sure you know the names of the top e-commerce companies in different sectors such as industrial goods, items of clothing, eyewear, etc, in your country?
Making a list manually would be too time-consuming and there are higher chances of bias in case you go about asking people for this information. Here’s where web scraping comes into play.
This will help you kick-start your journey as an affiliate marketer and also save resources like time and money that would otherwise be spent conducting this research manually. Once you find the best-paying companies out there waste no time signing up as an affiliate with them.
Data Scraping allows you to gather information from other websites and present them in new and unique ways for the benefits of your users or customers.
The company Skyscraper, for instance, scrapes airline prices from multiple airlines and presents them all together in a single interface and made a billion-dollar business out of data extraction – and a bit of affiliate marketing.
Literally, any kind of data can be extracted.
That being said, you need to stay on the right side of the law to – web scraping is a grey area and some sites are a no-go due to complicated terms and conditions. Google does, however, scrape the entire web and presents snippets on its home page so there is a loophole, should you need it.
Why Is Affiliate Marketing A Thriving Business?
With the start of the new decade, people are more and more focusing on solving specific problems. Affiliate marketing works well since you only pay if your marketing partner actually produces results. It also takes out the pressure of managing and paying a marketing team who is your responsibility regardless of whether they can provide results or not.
That’s the gist of it. But let’s get into specifics.
How exactly can Web Scraping help you?
Identify top e-commerce sites
It is better that you scrape the web and create a list of the top e-commerce companies in the different sectors in your company – such as eyewear, clothing and industrial products.
Record names that everyone seems to be talking about, names that have a lot of mentions throughout the internet, and names that have appeared in articles too.
Identify the best-selling products
If you want to know which affiliate products result in high sales and proportionally high commission, data science can scrape from your competitors, such as other affiliate marketing websites or blog sites. To make your efforts more successful, being aware of some of the best-selling products can help you stay ahead of the competitive curve.
Of course, there are numerous websites and products that you may have to take a look at, but ultimately, this is what will bring you the best solutions. The use of web data extraction in this way can help you promote the best-selling products and optimize your earnings.
Stock availability
Let’s say a customer visited your website and looked for a product. He saw the product is out of stock.
Now what?
Chances are high that the customer will bounce to another site that is fulfilling their needs. It’ll be a while before they visit your site again. They might not even visit your site at all. This is where you need to be aware of unavailable products so that you can keep your inventory maintained to the optimum level.
Things like these are ever-changing since a product might go out of stock at any given moment.
You can benefit from web data extraction regarding stock availability behind the scenes and disable links of all the products that are currently out of stock.
Better yet, it might just be your website that consumers head to when they find a website lacks what they need, but because of web scraping, you’ve got it.
Locate related product links
If you are a blog-site, you can’t even consider writing about and sharing links of multiple products that are available on your partner company’s website. But you can scrape their website to get the most popular items from each category and write about them.
Web data extraction you can provide relevant links to your customers and overall increase the chances of them clicking through.
Affiliate marketing is simple stuff when you look at its surface level. But it really isn’t, unless you do it methodically and scientifically.
Once you build your on your brand image, and reputation and build a loyal customer base, affiliate marketing can multiply profits for you over time. Automating it with the use of data scraping can significantly lower operational costs and can very well work even with a small team, thus increasing your profits exponentially.
Image Credit: Curatti
