Tag Archives: TheWebMiner

2015 retrospective

Only now at the end of 2015 we can realize the magnitude of a whole year and what we managed to accomplish in this time. For us, at TheWebMiner this year was a full one, marked by new experiences, connections, and most important, successful data extractions.

More than that, 2015 was a productive year. After doing an internship with several students from Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies we managed to expand our team with one member, a devoted programmer just as passionate about this science as any of us.

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How to get the best leads using landing pages part II

It’s been a while since our last post but now vacation is over and getting back to work is mandatory.

Now, where we were at? right, we’ve got our readers engaged and interested, but are we ready to sell them what we want? Probably not, and that from various reasons, because planets rarely align to create a perfect business and so we have to make smaller and more secure steps.

It’s very important to remember that even though readers are interested (we observe that by watching the bounce rate, the smaller the bounce, the more interesting the content ) we need to get them hooked and because it’s very unlikely that a large number of visitors to contact you it’s important to get an email address from each of them to deliver news and upgrades to your product. One can use Email providing services like MailChimp  or Aweber to establish a connection between viewers and poster. In this way you can get direct feedback right from the users.

perfect-landing-page-design

source: http://websites.wiredpinecone.com/

 

 

 

Another simple way of getting constructive feedback is through a third party. Just use someone your public trusts, and because public figures tend to be a little over budget for young entrepreneurs you can contact influential people like group admins or owners of other small businesses that don’t directly compete with yours. Other than interesting and documented opinions they can also direct some of the attention they get towards your company. It’s important to remember however that they will get involved and scratch your back only if you scratch theirs so it’s important not to get too uptight when negotiating.

At this point if you centralize all the feedback that you got, polish your product around it and direct it to the people that requested it you should have a starting point for your business. All I can say is good luck and never be afraid to ask for feedback!

 

 

How to get the best leads using landing pages

Unconventional growth ways are more and more popular because of their power to either surprise viewers and make a statement or to collect data and guesstimate customer wishes using non formal techniques. Recently a company has shocked many readers claiming it can grow a start-up to wonder page views by using such techniques.

Because everything can be understood better when put as a list we choose the most simple and effective tricks to generate leads for a certain product.

The main idea of this business is to attract people to a certain landing page using various tricks. The first part, not very complicated is to create a landing page, attractive in design and perform various AB tests on traffic coming from the same sources. AB testing tools can be found all over the internet but for consistency of data we recommend the Analytics tool from Google, delivering a number of many other parameters which can be used for further research.

The second part is the media expert part, that you, having a start-up can’t actually afford. Because of this many small businesses fail to correctly evaluate a social-media report and therefore fail to comply with customer’s needs. You will need to lay down a target audience, isolating a specific group, as a certain department in a company, or people with specific habits. Because there are many social media platforms and some contain data that is easier to analyze (for instance we found it easier to contain opinions facebook groups over twitter) and if you are doing this for the first time you should try a more structured and professional environment like technical forums or LinkedIn. What you need to make your job easier is to spot the biggest communities on that platform: you can observe the behavior of the people you want as customers and promote your landing page in a manner agreeable to them. Now what you’ll want to do is to find an old piece of content written by yourself or your team or write a new piece of content. This content must really engage the people in your target group. I’m talking about something that stirs folks up, gets them to reply and upvote and read at least 80 percent of what you’ve written.

-This is the first part of a two part article. The second part will be published on TheWebMiner’s blog on Friday 29th of May-

Raising a Startup is easier when you have Data

You might thing that this statement is a given but you can’t imagine how many enthusiastic new managers enroll in creating and developing new business ideas only based on passions and personal hunches. in no way I’m saying that they are going to fail because doing What you love is a great bonus in a business but a more pragmatic approach would be recommended. Such way of doing things is based on facts, and facts are very hard to be obtained at the beginning of something new. This period is considered to be the most unstable because of all the possible directions and turn-arounds that can be made.

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PriceAlert a new sheriff in town!

If you ever tried to use a tool for price comparison between two or more products of different online shops you definitely came in contact with the limitations that were imposed by such platforms. Usually this kind of apps work by periodically crawling a number of sites and periodically updating a certain product/price table. This is not very useful for users who want to choose products from various shops  in different geographical areas or from smaller sites that haven’t been crawled by that certain app.

Now, maybe it’s a bit early to talk about the capabilities of this next product but it’s rounding up nice and can be a real help for finite consumers around the world and even for  market analysts, and the best part is that it’s completely free, and with no commercials either. PriceAlert wants to be a new solution for measuring prices from various sites. Until now there’s nothing amazing but the technology behind allows users to compare prices on any ecommerce platform all over the world, because unlike other similar platforms limited to a number of well defined shops it uses an algorithm that automatically extracts data like specifications of that certain product or of course price and availability.

For now, only a beta version is available but new features are programmed to come up starting very soon. Useful proprieties like an email alert when a certain price has changed or statistics over the change in price for a period of time will be available, not to mention the capability of exporting the data gathered into various useful formats like excel or CSV.

So we think there’s no reason for you not to check out this interesting new toy and maybe leave a review in case that you feel so. You can find it here at the address //thewebminer.com/pricealert/ and we hope that together we can bring one more interesting tool to the use of people who need it.

Latest mobile app trends

Mobile app market has changed over the years in many unexpected ways, but if there is something that everyone expected is that it is continuously growing. This rather new industry has expanded in every direction forcing the limits of creators imagination and of mobile physical capabilities.

TheWebMiner team has set up a series of graphics showing not only the evolution of mobile apps market for Android and iOS but also the most important trends to follow. The presentation can also be viewed here.

As a conclusion we can certainly say that app market has a steady position over mobile web market, always searching for new possibilities and expand areas few of which will go mainstream soon accustoming users with concepts like Internet of Things, or Mobile Payments in everyday situations.

TheWebMiner.com offers now structured list of all apps of Google Play and iTunes in any format suits your needs, with respect to any indicators on the site (you can find data here)!

TheWebMiner in French

Good day everyone, or should i say better bonjour, because along this week we have launched the french version of TheWebMiner.com.

It is a certitude that the need for data increases every day in every possible direction and we want to keep up with this trend. Although English is the language of the internet we want to reach also to other users from smaller environments that might need our services, and because French is the official language in 29 countries it seemed as an obvious choice.

So, from now on along with the English version and the Romanian, which is the base country of our company a third version is available to choose in the language menu from the upper right corner of  our site.

french

We hope you will enjoy your experience and will provide a good feedback on our expansion.

 

Why do you need Facebook for your business?

This might be a relatively simple question but the complexity of the answer might surprise you!

First of all, if you have a business and you don’t have a Facebook page for it, well, i’m sorry to tell you that you might be among the last ones which doesn’t. Forgotten are the times when not everyone were on this social platform and now, user concentrate on adding everything, from everywhere to it; this includes businesses, places, currents, events, personalities and many other daily-life aspects, all with the purpose of simplifying our actions.

People tend to be skeptical about the success of a business page but what they fail to understand is that even a small page with a small audience can make a difference. A research shows that merely six percent of all Facebook pages have more than ten thousand likes and that is not a problem. If given time the popularity of a page will grow and more and more users will be interested in the information provided by you. Another reason why people tend to avoid having a social media page for their business is that because it’s hard to keep it updated all the time. Although constant posts will keep your fans happy there is not a direct correlation between the posting span and the growth of the page.

On the other side there are plenty of different reasons that your business needs Facebook. What it boils down to, though, is that this is a free opportunity to reach out to your audience in their preferred environment, improve your SEO rankings and visibility, and show off your business in a way that people can relate to. This being said we want to familiarize you with TheWebMiner Facebook page were we constantly post technical news, updates about our tool or tips for our field of activity.

Experimentation is a Must

word cloud

 

This word cloud represents the answer to the question of which areas are you going to be experimenting most heavily in the coming year, given by more than 600 representatives of different online companies.

Experimenting is one of the key tools of marketing engineering, and although the results of test-and-learn approaches are more widely appreciated, establishing the most appropriate culture is what holds most companies back, if we neglect the fear of failure.

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What are the most exciting opportunities for companies this year?

Hello everybody. Today I want to share with you a new research conducted by Adobe that we got our hands on these days. It’s actually a perspective view over the digital world and a briefing of what to expect from this field in 2014.If last year was about recognizing the importance of customer experience, this one is about actually doing something. For an optimal customer experience, various business functions and customer-facing touch points need to be working in harmony, from customer service and advertising to online user experience, content management and email messaging. For the question of which one area is the single most exciting opportunity for your organization (or for your client) in 2014 the responses were diverse but following a well defined pattern.

the webWe know the number of company respondents (980) and the one of Agency respondents (1202) and from this we conclude that organizations need to ensure they have the right data, technology and culture to act as the foundation for a great customer experience, with a focus on multichannel marketing and campaign management also required to underpin a successful approach.

The mobile part, the second most exciting opportunity in the eyes of client-side respondents and first on the list for supply-side participants has a well earned position. About this we’ve already written in another post few weeks ago and is no surprise at all.  Despite the importance of mobile and prominence of smartphones and tablets in our lives, many companies are still trying to work out how they optimize their websites for mobile, for example, whether they should go down the ‘responsive’ route or not.

A second figure that i’d like to discuss is not so much about the big picture and more about specific disciplines. The question is which three digital-related areas are the top priorities for your organization (or for your clients) in 2014?

miner

It seems that marketers and digital professionals are clear on what the priorities are, and this has not changed markedly in the last year, knowing that the top five options are in exactly the same order as for last year’s survey, respectively content marketing, social media engagement, targeting and personalization, conversion rate optimization and mobile optimization.