I realized something in this year, marketing is more precious than development. so kinda quit the freelancing and tried to reach people in numerous ways. look at the homeless people, they're living in crap but got access to people, not selling anything but even they can make money just by asking. Engineering & development can be done in shallow waters, when time comes to marketing you have to dive inside oceans with full of sharks. And you have to make sure you got proper weapons before sailing.

First Attempt
Few weeks ago, spared my dentist money and used them to advertise one of our ongoing products. first address was twitter. Designed a banner, launched a campaign and started to getting results in next couple hours. three days later their dashboard shows over 15k impressions and 1k interactions. Thing is i didn't see these interactions in server side, even a single click!

Stopped the campaign to prevent any more damage and switched to facebook. was thinking at least they're strictly disallows the bot accounts by verifying people with phone number & national identity etc. This time got 500~ impressions and around 100 clicks but all of them bounced back without any sign up's.

I think problem was fb's audience management. Around 30 people "liked" the advertising post, i checked each of them, their business titles was completely unrelated with mine.

a similar story happened at adwords, i stopped all campaigns at the total $420~ damage and decided to go oldschool. like 2000's develop an application, send bulk mails, post entries to forums.


Google's limitations
I wasn't know where i start, just typed what i want to search engine. then written few lines of php snippet by using previously posted spider class to automate it but google started to block my requests by asking captcha created a solution to solve captcha's myself by taking 10 seconds of break on script execution but still results stalled on 150~ entries.

Then realized google says "Wohoho i got billions of results" but only returning 50 pages of them. try it right now, search something and go straight to latest result page. it's mostly same in all search engines.


Final Solution
Next day developed a basic browser by using webkit based CEF library It's sending page source to crawler script while i'm browsing pages and injecting a portion of javascript to automate clicks. If we can define php based robots as the "terminator" this one is definitely the robocop. you can decide who to kill, who to save. even solve captcha's yourself.

after 2 hours, collected 7500k entries just by solving captchas on each 15 minutes, removed duplicates by using MSP utility and got link of 6900 unique digital agency websites in total. another script which i created years ago, connected to all links one by one and collected names and phone numbers from these websites. If interested, compiled binary of the project available on end of the entry.


E-mail marketing is kinda dead with new global spam policies, waste of time. Calling each of them manually and sparing few minutes can give more reliable results.

At least hearing few "no, not interested, be gone, fck you" from various voices sharpens the people's own ego.

Resources
RoboBrowser.zip

Mass String Processor

class.spider.php