Earning Big Bucks as a Freelancer

Freelancers can easily use web scraping as a side hustle to increase their overall income by collecting data and selling it to data-hungry companies or individuals. The dataset contains critical information analyzed to develop products, services, or promotional content to generate more income.

A proxy is essential in scaling web scraping abilities. This is especially true if we want to target a business that operates in the United States. A US proxy will allow us to access its data and ensure our anonymity while scraping. The working of a proxy is simple; it masks and rotates your IP address through multiple devices that make it seem like multiple users are accessing a website from a given region, in this case, the US. Smartproxy provides its users with an IP pool from legitimate devices operating in the US; this makes it impossible for websites to detect web scrapers working in the background by dividing the load through numerous IPs.

The Benefit of Scraping Tools 

Some users have a common misconception that they must be excellent coders to make their mark as web scrapers. However, that is not the case. Numerous pre-built web scrapers, such as ParseHub, OctoParse, and ScrapeBox, are available on the internet. These licensed tools are ready to work without any coding requirements by their user.

The main benefit of using these tools is that they are safe, reliable, and come with 24×7 customer support if you find any problems. Many professional web scrapers prefer using scraping tools as they deliver considerably high in value when compared to the cost. All they have to do is provide secure internet to the scraper and watch it work magically.

The Need for Fresh Data

The world is evolving and generating better information daily. Therefore, after a few hours, the scraped information becomes outdated. Businesses require accurate and up-to-date information almost daily. Sometimes, they opt for scraping data through freelancers even when they have significant resources to scrape data themselves.

Some companies become data hungry because the key ingredient in their success is data. They perform multiple analysis on scraped data to get critical insights to develop services and products specific to the hidden demands of the customer. Businesses use this technique to generate vast amounts of profits.

Another reason why businesses require new data is to see what their competitors are doing. If they launch a new product, they want to know everything regarding its specifications, functions, target market, reaction, and review. By using this information, businesses design better products that capture the market even better than the competitors.

Finding Clients

Numerous company representatives or individuals turn towards Upwork and Fiverr to obtain data from freelancers. They may or may not be clear about their intentions while posting jobs, but their sole purpose is to get data for analysis.

As a web scraper, you must generate a database on the parameters defined by the client, which can vary from simple Google reviews or information-sensitive information. Let’s look at it as an example.

A client reached out to you to scrape information and reviews for their product line. Here is how you will deliver a dataset to your client:

Scraping Data to Close Leads

If your freelancing career hits a snag and you cannot find credible clients that need specific data scraped, you can always scrape data for yourself. The information generated from scraping websites can contain precise details that you need to make the sale. There is a high probability that there are numerous people who are interested in specific products. Once you have this information, you can easily pitch them the product and make the sale while using the amazon affiliate program.

Scrapers can generate a reasonable sum of money through affiliate selling from the information scraped from the web. However, scrapers also need convincing powers because even when a person shows interest, they still require some convincing before their purchase.

Putting Scraped Data for Sale

Scraped information is never useless. There are always options that allow you to use the information for your benefit. After scraping data, it is possible to set up a website to sell datasets containing specific information. However, there may be a need for investment to cover the promotional expenses incurred in reaching the right audience.

Let’s say: you got hold of a dataset that contains personal information about shoppers who bought laptops from an online store. After you update the information of the dataset on your website, it’s available for sale. After some time, a person contacts you regarding the dataset because he has an online laptop accessories store and would like to send promotional offers to numerous people based on the laptop they have purchased.

Even when this information was partially beneficial to the scraping, selling it through their website made earning money more convenient. Therefore, there is no harm in scraping the internet for all types of information. There is always somebody who needs a specific type of dataset for their business. Making a website to market your scraped datasets is an easy way to sell them to multiple users and earn a handsome amount of passive income.

Conclusion

Being good at web scraping has nothing to do with coding skills; only delivering accurate datasets matters. Online scraping tools can easily automate data collection procedures by using US proxies to mask their IP. All these reasons combine to make web scraping the hottest side hustle for freelancers.