Taking advantage of big data doesn't necessarily require expensive tools. With a free plugin for Excel, you can scrape what you need directly into a spreadsheet and take matters into your own hands.

Digest...

Just so you understand, here's a very brief overview of what data scraping is from Wikipedia: "Data scraping is a technique in which a computer program extracts data from human-readable output coming from another program."

Essentially, it involves crawling through a web page and gathering nuggets of information that you can use for your analysis. For example, you could search through a site like Search Engine Land and scrape the author names of each of the posts that have been published, and then you could correlate this to social share data to find who the top performing authors are on that website.

-- >  Start using actual data to inform your content campaigns instead of going on your gut feeling.

-- >  Gather intelligence around specific domains you want to target for content placement and create the perfect post for their audience.

-- >  Get clued up on XPath and JSON through using the SEO Tools plugin for Excel.

-- >  Spend more time analysing what content will get you results as opposed to what sites will give you links!

-- >  Check the website's ToS before scraping.

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