Frederick Jace
The internet is buzzing with opportunities to generate sustainable income. While the majority of IT job positions would not exist without the web, the amount of information and reachability creates perfect circumstances to freelance and earn some money by working on various side projects.
Our digital landscape keeps thriving and expanding due to the free and rapid movement of data. Easy access to information gives us the potential to utilize knowledge for our success, as well as the improvement of tech products.
As the amount of data on the internet grows, the demand for efficient information extraction has grown exponentially. While everyone has access to the desirable public data, its value is immense and only keeps growing with accurate and precise analysis.
A continuous stream of information helps maintain various personal projects, but the biggest beneficiaries of web scraping in Excel are companies looking for knowledge about the market and its competition. When done right, data aggregation can improve every business strategy – from digital marketing to localized expansion.
Information extraction is made up of few crucial steps that are necessary for the successful collection and data analysis. The demand for coders that are willing to learn about web scraping and parsing errors is at an all-time high. While some companies look for programmers that can work on data parsing, extract data themselves and even build their parsers, some prefer to outsource these jobs to experienced companies or freelancers.
In this article, we will talk about data scraping as a profitable niche and a good side hustle for freelance techies. If you are a beginner and want to test yourself in this field, we recommend you to learn basic programming skills, understand data parsing errors, and complimentary tools like residential proxies. Smartproxy is a great provider that helps businesses maximize their data scraping operations with proxy servers. Check them out if you are more interested in the proper functioning of these tools, visit their website, and check out the blogs written on this topic. For now, let us focus on money-making opportunities with web scraping.
The freedom of freelancing
Depending on your knowledge, web scraping side hustle can be a great source of income if you are not sure about your level of expertise. You’re under no obligation from an employer to meet certain expectations and you can learn how to perform these tasks at your own pace. By creating a perfect level of discomfort, you build a sustainable and challenging learning experience that progressively allows you to test scraping bots, parsers, and other necessary tools.
Python is the most common programming language that is used for web scraping and data parsing. Once you learn the basics of coding, managing the libraries and tools that come with it is relatively easy. Web scraping is easy to learn, but it has a high skill ceiling. With the freedom of freelancing, you can start tackling simple tasks until you build the desired level of proficiency.
How do you earn money from web scraping
If after the last paragraph you believe that you can only earn money with decent coding skills, you are in luck. Many web scraping freelancers are barely intermediate programmers. Some use tools like Octoparse, ScrapeBox, and ParseHub to not over complicate the simple data extraction tasks. While you are on the road to building the necessary skills, you will still find many requests on Fiverr and Upwork to start earning money.
The modern world is progressing thanks to the free movement of data, and there are multiple levels of contribution you can provide. Recurring customers with simple tasks will help you generate income and develop your skills, which will give you a better chance to reach out to bigger clients for more complex tasks.
Learn web scraping with the necessary tools
If you are only starting your web scraping journey, keep it simple. You must learn to operate scraping bots without obstacles and distractions. Popular websites like Wikipedia are great targets because you will be able to extract information without interruptions. By slowly intensifying the difficulty of your scraping operations, you will encounter fewer IP bans and parsing errors, so you can see the entire process come to its fruition.
The level of complexity rises when you face various restrictions, and that’s where additional tools are necessary for a proper scraping experience. Many websites have valuable, dynamic public data that they want to display to real users and avoid scraping bot traffic. They can protect their data from scraping to sabotage competitor scraping operations or safeguard the web server from the non-human load.
While you can change your user agent and tweak other settings to minimize the pressure and recognizability, finding the right level of efficiency can be stressful. You want to create optimal circumstances for data extraction, but you can get your IP address banned.
If you believe you’ve developed the right skills for earning money with data extraction, we recommend renting out residential proxy servers. Once you move to more web scraping tasks, you will have to send data requests through a proxy to protect your IP address.
If you work with a reliable provider that supplies residential proxy servers with IPs from real devices, which are great for covering up data extraction tasks and pushing them to optimal efficiency. With this protection, you can focus on complex web scraping tasks without worrisome interruptions. With every step covered, you will start earning money with web scraping in no time!
