5 Solid Reasons Why You Should Scrape News Articles Today
More than two million blog posts are submitted every day. That’s because people increasingly consume more and more content. Not only do they consume it, but they act upon it and if impactful enough, they share it with their friends, family, and coworkers.
That’s why, it’s no surprise that many marketers – in charge of boosting their company’s image, attracting new traffic and getting new customers – consider content marketing their top priority for 2018 and beyond.
How Scraping News Websites Can Help With Your Content Marketing Strategies
Creating high-quality content is important.
That’s because, as we said above, people consume a lot of content. Your potential customers make decisions about your business or company based on the content you create. And more importantly, they make a purchasing decision based on what kind of content there is about your products and services.
Therefore, as a company, it’s your job to build your brand image through content marketing. Only by becoming part of this phase of a customers’ journey will you succeed in getting more traffic, leads and prospects for your business.
And here, data crawling services can be of immense help.
How?
Well, for one, they can quickly cut through the ‘noise’ on the internet and scrape news articles at lightning fast speeds. This way, they’ll quickly give you relevant insights on what’s going on in your industry. And this kind of ‘big data’, collected by scraping news websites, can show you how to proceed with your own content strategy.
Every day, millions of new articles are posted every day. Here are 5 reasons why you should scrape them.
1. Keep Track of Content About Your Company
The number one thing every company should do is manage what’s being said about them. If you’re getting negative press, it’s your job to know its there and to do damage control at once. Similarly, if you’re getting good press, it’s your job to capitalize on it on time as well.
But how will you do this if you don’t know when your company, product or service is being mentioned?
By scraping news articles being posted online, of course.
Doing this will guarantee you always get alerted when your company’s name is mentioned on the internet. With this, you’ll always be alerted when you receive publicity – and what kind of publicity it is.
Plus, as we said above, data crawling services work regularly, meaning you’ll be updated every single day. You’ll know exactly which day what a publication or a website said about your brand because these services are scraping news articles every day.
2. Discover Numbers
Competition is tough. On the internet, you’ll find many established news websites which have a big following and who’s articles get solid engagement. The only way you can compete with these websites is if you analyze their content strategy.
After finding your competitors, you need to start scraping news articles that’s on their website.
This is important because this way, you’ll figure out their content marketing strategy. You’ll see how many posts they publish in a single day, week, month or even a year. You’ll get to know which of their articles is being shared the most and which is getting the most comments.
In short, you’ll uncover many important points in their marketing strategy and discover what’s working for them and what isn’t.
Thus, by web scraping news websites, you will be able to formulate your own content strategy. In addition, you’ll be able to improve upon their mistakes, thus making your content strategy even stronger.
3. Follow Trends
This first thing which matters the most is that the content you create is high quality. But the second most important thing? It’s that you pump out relevant content regularly and on-time.
But here’s the thing. Coming up with your own ideas takes time. But discovering trending ideas your competitors are writing on does not.
By scraping news articles of your competitors, you will be able to see what kind of content is being posted. That’s because web scraping services don’t just scrape one competitor website. They scrape millions. And because of this, they are able to identify – and show you what kind of content everyone is writing about.
This will make your content creation job easier. You’ll always have a fresh list of topics you can write about any time you want. It’s a great way to regularly keep pushing out great content on the latest topics while you work on original ideas as well.
4. Phrasing and Rewriting
It’s important that you speak the ‘language’ in which your target audience talks. You don’t want to give them an impression you’re new at this or an outsider. This is another area where scraping news articles and news websites can help.
By scraping your competitors’ websites and their articles, you can quickly discover what kind of phrasing they are using in their websites. You can learn how they’ve categorized their articles, what sections they’ve created and what are the common terms they’re using to address their audiences.
In addition, you can also scrape news websites to find articles which you can then use for rewriting purposes. This is especially advantageous when you don’t want to hire a writer to write the article and you also want to avoid copy-pasting content.
Scraping news articles gives you the middle ground as you don’t have to pay for expensive articles nor do you have to indulge in plagiarism. You can simply scrape the articles on the topics you want and quickly rewrite them. This way you’ll be able to quickly push out your content without much effort on topics that don’t matter a lot.
5. Fresh Ideas
In the end, scraping news articles, website and other content on the internet is all about finding fresh ideas. The internet is full of them and not taking advantage of this valuable resource is extremely unfortunate.
If you were to do all this manually, many things would slip from your attention.
But by using web scrawling services to scrape for the information you want, you can regularly get access to exciting content ideas.