URL Extractor

Overview

The URL Extractor is a simple tool designed to return a list of URL's to be used in the Custom Website box. This utility can either strip the URL down to the original domain or keep the original URL intact. We can use this tool to do much more than simply provide a list of websites from any given keyword. In fact, it is only limited to your imagination. The first thing you'll want to do is extract a list of websites based on the most powerful keyword relating to your niche. You'll want to filter out duplicates and remove any websites that aren't directly related. I'd personally only keep the top 10 to 20 websites returned. There are other websites we can add to the list as outlined below.

Extracting Forum Related Websites

People love to have their opinions heard. A forum is a meeting place where users exchange ideas, thoughts and sometimes sarcastic remarks. In any event it's a great place to scrape emails from. Let's create a list of forum websites to scrape against for our target niche which will be…"cars". While extracting from forums may not be my first choice for this particular niche I'll use it anyways so that you can see the process.

First, let's understand the who are the major forum players:

http://www.phpbb.com
http://www.vbulletin.com

These two forum players (creators/platforms) are generally the most popular forum boards throughout the entire web. There are many others and I'll leave it to you to search for them. Personally, these two should be sufficient in my opinion. The way we'll be using the URL Extractor will allow for other forums to be added to the list anyways. Now what will do is use the URL extractor to include our target niche and cross-referencing it with related website forums (strip down to domain):

cars phpbb (This will return a list of phpbb forums relating to ‘cars') cars vbulletin (This will return a list of vbulletin forums relating to ‘cars') cars forum (This will return a list of a variety of different forums relating to ‘cars')

Using this method is not fail-safe. You may return websites relating to the movie ‘cars' or the main forum software home page with no direct relationship to the keyword you're targeting. It is important to review the results and determine if there is a direct relevance. In most cases there will be.

Scraping against forums for a target niche is an excellent way to gather highly-targeted email addresses as the accuracy is usually very strong.

Extracting Blog Related Websites

As you may have guessed by reading the previous entry on Extracting Forum Related Websites the same formula can be applied to blogs. Popular blogs generally have a lot of comments. Within those comments users like to leave their email addresses. The idea here is that we want to search for the most popular bogs relating to your target niche. In this example we'll change it to "Monster Trucks". Again, by shear popularity, the two blogs we'll focus will be as follows:

http://www.blogger.com
http://www.wordpress.com

Again, we'll use our keyword with the blog name (not the blog URL) but in this case we'll want to include quotations around our keyword:

"Monster Trucks" Blogger
"Monster Trucks" Wordpress

Why include quotes? If you recall in a previous section on keywords wrapping a keyword phrase in quotes will provide for more accurate results compared to without. IMG

With this method you'll also want to review your results to ensure the relevance against your keyword. In most cases there will be a direct relevance.

Other URL Extraction Techniques

Above are two examples of simple yet effective ways to extract URL's from forums and blogs. You can experiment with accompanying phrases with your keywords in an attempt to scrape emails from more websites. Here's a short list (where the word "Keyword" would be replaced with your target niche keyword or keyword phrase):

Keyword Discussion
Keyword Videos
Keyword Chat
Keyword Images
Keyword News
Keyword Newsgroup
Keyword Locations
Keyword Articles
etc. etc.

While every entry in the above list may not apply to every niche it will hopefully give you some additional ideas for thinking outside the box.

Summary

While some users will find that using the default websites listed will provide for more than enough emails for their purposes others will want to take advantage of the Custom URL List box. Using the URL Extractor in an effective manner can only assist in developing your highly-targeted list of emails.