Hi I am wondering if there is any software available that will scrape forums. For example if you put in keywords of your niche - it then crawls forums and comes back with results of people asking particular question. This way, you are able to then go through and answer them and perhaps, if appropriate, offer a freebie or your product. I have done some research and have only found programs which spam forums so as to create backlinks. This is not what I am after. If there isn't anything like this on the market, then is this something that you feel would fill a need? Thanks Kate
You could use XPath (http://php.net/manual/en/class.domxpath.php) to parse the sites with php for example, downsides of this is that the sites could change causing your script to stop working. Of course you could always make it adapt or manually update the script. There is a tool called scrapebox (http://www.scrapebox.com/) that can obviously be used for spamming but you can adapt it for your purpose as well. Type in your niche/keyword and a keyword related to your forum like "powered by phpBB" or something similar. Depending on what questions you are looking for you could match phrases like "this is a question...". This will give you a list of urls to questions that you would like to answer. The same principles work for XPath. Hope that helps