I hear about people doing it all the time to get keywords in the thousands. I have never seen anyone actually post a tutorial up on how to do it... I only have 300 keywords built up just from using my head but there is no way I am going to start up this affiliate stuff again until I have atleast 2,000 keywords built up. I just can afford to keep loosing money. So how is it done? I am guessing there is some PHP scripts for it right?
Nobody will probably ever put up a tutorial on how to scrape for #1. It's extremely dynamic... Meaning it's not a 1,2,3 process, there are so many factors and it all changes from every source you are scraping. Plus it's time consuming like no other - if you want a good scraper at least. #2. It's a competitive advantage to be able to scrape and collect user data from multiple sources. That's like having a race and you have a map that shows a shortcut while the others have a regular map. #3. It's not all that easy to explain/teach anyway, lol. #4. You can use things like spyfu.com or keycompete.com or find tools that are readily available around the net on some blogs and webmaster tool sites. If you're losing money, it won't matter if you have a scraper or not. If you're losing money than the market just sucks or you haven't done enough market research (if everyone else is profitting). There's more to PPC/Affiliate Marketing that just finding a ton of keywords and throwing them into a campaign that directs traffic to a landing page with an affiliate link. The best source for finding keywords is when users type it in. *hint*
Scraping is not reallly necessary. There are many tools on the market that will generate more keywords than you will ever need. Most people use keyworddiscovery or wordtracker.