For any business to thrive, you need sales. If you can sell your products or services, you stay in business. If you can’t sell, you’re out. It’s as simple as that. Having great sales people on your team helps tremendously, but all sales start with one thing…Leads.
You simply can’t make any sales if you can’t get people onto your list of hot leads. All business owners know this. In fact, a survey conducted by Content Marketing Institute in 2016 found that 86% of business owners admit that generating leads is their number one concern. If you’re not yet familiar with the idea of lead generating through targeted prospecting campaigns, read here first.
Running a large-scale prospecting campaign is the best way to generate prospective sales leads in a relatively short time. Depending on your niche, you might turn to Zillow, Craigslist, Amazon or a whole array of other sources.
But if you need to harvest business contact details, then you need Yellowpages. We’re not talking the old phone books you probably still have an old 1990’s version of tucked away in the far reaches of your closet... we’re talking Yellowpages online.
There’s no better place than Yellowpages if you sell to a niche group of businesses as you’re able to extract:
But how do you get started with a prospecting campaign on Yellowpages? Assuming we completely eliminate the manual (aka dinosaur) method of copy/pasting into an Excel sheet, you’re left with two options, one more solid than the other.
The Old Method: Rotating IP’s
What most beginner prospectors start with when scraping large scale data records like Yellowpages is using multiple, rotating IP addresses.Why?
When scraping through business directories, web servers are able to pinpoint multiple and repetitive requests and subsequently put them on hold temporarily or in some cases, permanently.To get around this, it’s common to use a proxy rotation service which works to change IP address. It’s not a perfect method though because there are still major considerations to keep in mind with rotating proxies such as:
While rotating proxies is a good option for some, it’s important to note that crawling websites without getting blocked is getting harder.
What’s the solution? Read on.
The New Method: Targeted Web Scraping
Web scraping through Scraping Solutions allows you to easily extract information from Yellow Pages in a matter of seconds. And you’re not limited either, our custom scraper is able to gather details from:
So, why web scraping vs rotating proxies?
Web scraping means you’ll never be blacklisted from Yellow Pages while being able to extract thousands of pieces of data. You’ll quickly be able to fill your leads with the harvested data, so you can get back to running your business.
Through Yellow Pages web scraping we can break down multiple extractions including but not limited to:
There you have it. In this article we explored that Yellow pages is an ideal place to start prospecting if you want to increase your business leads in a short amount of time. We learned about the old method that used to work, Rotating IP’s, and why that’s no longer a viable solution for a business that wants to grow. We also learned about the better option, Web Scraping.
Based on this information, if you are the type of business owner that wants to save valuable time, energy, and money, you already know the option that’s best for you.
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