How do they do it?

I needed to start doing an email campaign to get the word out about a new website that I built. I started thinking on how in the world do I collect all the emails to start this campaign. I researched buying an email list, but quickly swept that idea under the rug - jumping-jo-ho-sa-fats those lists are expensive! I then started going to websites and began to manually write down emails and create my email list by hand. After 20 emails and about 300 websites I was exhausted. I thought this was madness and I was a moron.

I couldn’t let this get me down. I know I’m new to this type of stuff, but I’m a reasonably smart and experienced techy person and I should be able to figure it out. I started thinking about how spammers get emails.

hmmmm……

Here are some key terms that I knew and probably should have been at the tip of my tongue before I started the endeavor of manually collecting emails. I’ve just never had a reason to spam….I mean market something online. The definitions are my definitions as I see them.

Email Scraping: the process of automatically gathering email addresses from a webpage.

Website Spidering: the process of recursively searching a website based off the links on that website.

Okay, two key terms and if I entered them into Google, what would the results be? The results turned out to be about 382,000 sites. I thought I hit pay dirt. I clicked on a few links and I found programs that were designed to do exactly what I wanted. I also found that these programs came with a pretty big price; not as much as already built lists, but big enough. It costs a lot to be a spammer I suppose, but I am no spammer. I am an Internet Marketer wanting to market my new website that doesn’t sell anything.

I found some programs that were about $25, but I really didn’t want to pay for anything. If you call me cheap, or a miser then you would be completely wrong. I’m neither. There is a term for a person like me; “broke.” I’m trying to market a free service. There’s a lot of money making potential in that….oops, I think a little cynicism splashed up on your arm…sorry, it shouldn’t stain.

I guess I searched for about 3 or 4 hours for a free program that would do what I wanted. As I was about to call it a night, I got on download.com and did a quick scan. At the end of my search results was a program called Macrosoft Email Spider with a free license listing. The screen shots looked good. Didn’t look cheap, except the green color the programmer used.

The description of the scanner sounded great. It would use Google and yahoo search to collect the url’s I needed based off keywords that I entered. Pretty nifty. I could target my results and only scrape those pages that were relevant to my cause. I downloaded the program, and installed it. Pretty straight forward installation, no gimmicks at all. The interface was easy. I selected my method of searching from Google Search, Yahoo Search, Single URL, or Starting URL - I went with the Google Search, and limited my search to only 200 domains. Then I clicked the giant start button. I let the program run over night. When I woke up it was still going - about 6 hours. It had found 83,9444 web pages, and had scanned 4101 of those pages. From there it had found 1153 emails or email like instances.

I’m not sure, but this program appears to look for emails in regular expression as well as doing a mailto search on pages. This is good if it does, because it will have much better results on collecting emails. Anyhow, After my scan was complete I was able to export my email list to a cvs file that I could import into excel. With a little bit of cleanup, I had my mail list of about 800 emails.

I’m not saying this is the best free program of its kind out there, but if you are a beginner like me then this little program is a great starting point. It will do exactly what you need it to do and will get you started well on your way with an email list of your very own.

My next post will be about the program I use to send to my newly created mail list for my not spam marketing campaign.