Content is most basic way to attract traffic – without a certain amount of quality content, neither Google nor visitors would be interested in your website because there is little value they can get browsing it.
Here are 2 main coding-free solutions for extracting content from websites to build your content base: choose one or a combination of them and have a try!
Extract content from websites using Web Scraping tools
Web scraping is the process of extracting information from a website without using an API to obtain the content, but you do need to follow the website’s robots.txt requirements for avoiding unauthorized activities.
These are some of the major pros and cons of web scraping.
Pros:
- You can scrape trending and well-rated content from various platforms with one web scraping tool. This can help you save your time and money to deal with multiple content aggregators.
- You can scrape content along with audiences’ reactions such as likes, views, and shares if there are any. The content and reaction data are valuable for making your content matrix.
- You can scrape content from competitors’ sites for competition and content strategy analysis.
- You can build a content base with a large scale of resources. When you need inspiration or references, there are always abundant resources at your hand.
Cons:
- Data scraped may need further processing and manually edit the content format on your own could be a bit time-consuming.
- Your IP may be blocked by the sites from which you scraped the content. You may lose access to these sites as you get blocked.
- The tool can’t automate the content distribution process for you as some content aggregation tools do.
If you’re looking for a good web scraping tool, there are 3 popular web scraping tools that you can’t miss out on.
Octoparse
Octoparse is a robust web scraping tool for extracting texts, videos, and images from any websites. It offers free pre-built templates for scraping data from various websites. That means users don’t have to set up a crawler themselves in order to scrape the information from websites like Amazon, Booking, etc. They just need to choose a template and input keywords or URLs to extract the most commonly extracted data fields on the site. If users want to build a custom crawler, it is also easy to set up. Just click the webpage to build one.
Besides, it has many practical features such as data reformat, task schedule, parent task set-up, cloud extraction speed-up, etc. It’s one of the powerful tools that can help you extract content from websites effortlessly.
Scraper
Scraper is a Chrome extension with limited data extraction features compared with other computer softwares. But it’s helpful for individual users to conduct online research. You can export the scraped data to Google Spreadsheets directly.
Also, this tool is designed for web crawling beginners. You can easily copy the data to the clipboard or store it to the spreadsheets using OAuth. XPath Auto-generation is one of the great features it has for beginners. If you want more precise data, it’s unavoidable to rewrite the XPath by yourself.
ParseHub
Parsehub is a great web scraper that supports collecting data from websites built on AJAX technology, JavaScript, etc. Web incompatibility issues are less likely to happen when you use it. Besides, It has an advanced machine learning technology that can help you transform web documents into data.
Parsehub supports all popular operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. No need to worry about multi-platform uses. The free version can set up five public projects at most. The cheapest paid subscription plans allow you to create at least 20 private projects for scraping websites. It’s very friendly for individual users and small businesses.
Extract content from websites using Content Aggregation tools
A content aggregation tool is an application or website that can help you collect content from a wide range of platforms and then republish all the content into one place. There are many types of content aggregation tools specializing in collecting different kinds of content(sports news, finance news, and game news, etc.) or content formats (video, blogs, podcasts, pictures, and so on.).
There are some major pros and cons of content aggregation tools that you should know before making a choice.
Pros:
- Some content aggregation tools are able to personalize content for you. This usually helps your audience connect better with your site. And it helps them know that your site is the right fit for them.
- Some content aggregators are masters of content distribution. They know very well how to maximize the reach of content to your potential audience, thus helping you to attract more traffic to your sites.
- You can leave the manual content syndication to a content aggregation tool thus freeing you from manual and tedious work, helping you focus on the valuable work.
- One of the great things to use content aggregators is that they can help you build backlinks for your site and thus improve your SEO performance.
Cons:
- When your audience is reading content aggregated from other sites, they may subscribe to the original sites and leave your site.
- Using content aggregators on your site may increase the popularity of the original content owners, not you.
- Without creating original content, you may lose the opportunity to understand your audiences better and you would have no direct communication with your audiences. This accounts for lost conversion opportunities.
- The main business of a content aggregator is gathering a large amount of content. Therefore, the tool itself can’t help screen the content or guarantee its reliability. Your site may be impacted by fake news.
Trapit
Trapit is a comprehensive content aggregation tool for businesses that offer various topics of content. It can pull text and video sources from a wide range of websites. Besides, it also offers built-in analytics and social scheduling tools. If you want to aggregate industry insights, research, and trends for your audiences on your website or across social media platforms. It’s one of the great tools you shouldn’t miss.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a powerful online content aggregation tool that keeps you updated on all the trending topics in the industry or allows you to find popular content on any website. You can search for the topic of your interest and share it across via the dashboard. Also, the “Content Research” section allows you to interact with people sharing the content.
Buzzsumo is a tool that can help sharpen your focus and give you direction.
Elink.Io
Elink.io is the fastest way to collect and share web content around any topic from various websites in minutes. It’s an all-in-one content marketing tool. It helps you save web links, bundle them and turn your weblink collections into email newsletters, or embed these links on any website/blog. Many marketers, educators, and influencers are using it to distribute content on various topics.
Conclusion
You can definitely find a suitable way to collaborate with one of the paid content aggregators and reach your business objectives. But for avoiding disputes and unnecessary troubles, do only select the legitimate one, who respect the fine line between content aggregation and content plagiarism.
When it comes to selecting a web scraping tool, do follow the website’s rules and don’t scrape the things that the websites prohibit. You definitely don’t want your IP on the sites’ blacklist.
One more thing before you leave the page, do not forget to take your customer’s needs and the buyer’s journey into consideration. Without considering these aspects, the content you provide means nothing but irrelevant information to them.
