How To Ethically Harvest Emails For Free (Or Cheap)

HomeTutorialsHow To Ethically Harvest Emails For Free (Or Cheap)

Please note that affiliate links may be included in some posts.

In this post I'm going to walk you through some free (or cheap) ways you can scrape emails for outreach or remarketing purposes. 

As a niche site builder, outreaching to other site owners is a crucial skill if you want to build backlinks or just generally network in your niche.

It's something I'm focusing on more heavily in 2018 to improve my rankings and solidify my digital-marketing skill set. 

Now, on to the process.

The Things You’ll Need

  1. Google Search Operator guide
  2. LinkClump Chrome Extension or MultiLinks Plus Firefox Add On
  3. SupaGrowth Email Scraper*

*SupaGrowth has retired the Email Scraper, unfortunately.

How To Do It

1. Create A Footprint

The first step is you need to create a Google Search footprint to prospect the sites you want to outreach to.

For example, use the "allinurl:" operator to find sites that have certain keywords in the URL. This will help you create a niche list of prospects. Try:

"allinurl:DIY" to return a list of sites with DIY in the URL.

allinurl DIY Google Search



"intitle:" is another good operator you can experiment with. According to GoogleGuide.com,

"The query intitle:term restricts results to documents containing term in the title."

So, for example, [ orange desk intitle:diy ] will return documents that mention the word “diy” in their titles, and mention the words “orange” and “desk” anywhere on the page (title or not).

Make sure there isn't a space between the intitle: and its following word.

Check out the full list of search operators here- you can experiment with your own custom footprints to find the best sites in your niche.

2. Grab All The URLs

Make sure that you have configured Google (instructions) to allow 100 search results per page. Then use the LinkClump Chrome extension to copy all of them. 

Linkclump Chrome Web Store

The way LinkClump works, right click and hold on your mouse and drag the orange box that appears over all the URLs to copy them and release.

Then you'll ctrl-V paste them into a Google Sheet or an Excel file. Do this for as many pages of results are you want.

To clean up the URLs, use this free online tool to trim them to their root. That way you have a nice, clean-looking list to work with.

Try the "Remove Duplicates" tool in Excel under "Data" to clean up the list and remove redundant pages.

3. Get The Emails

For Free (For Remarketing)

To get the emails for free, you can use a free desktop tool provided by SupaGrowth. 

*3/20 Update: SupaGrowth has discontinued their email scraping tool.

I'll note here that you should ONLY use this list for remarketing purposes- SupaGrowth is careful to say that it could be a violation of the CAN-SPAM act to use it for cold outreach purposes.

If you want to use these site's emails for outreach, it's safer to hire a Virtual Assistant off of UpWork to manually go through the sites and find the contact information. Or you can pay for a service like Hunter.io, Buzzstream, AeroLeads or Snov.io to discover the contact information.

To use the Email Scraper, simply paste in your list of websites and click "Start".

free email scraper

You'll get a list of emails that you can export to CSV.

For Cheap (For Outreach)

If you want to do outreach to these sites, try hiring a Virtual Assistant to do it manually.

UpWork has tons of inexpensive VAs who can be trained to do the manual work of unearthing emails from a list of websites. Personally, I wouldn't risk emailing these sites using SupaGrowth's Email Scraper. 

For A Fee (For Outreach)

As I mentioned above, services like Snov.io and Hunter.io will find the emails from a list. You can outreach using these emails, as opposed to the emails SupaGrowth unearths- the reasons aren't exactly clear.

The latter 2 sites get the emails in an ethical, white-hat way, suffice it to say. You can also use Buzzstream- they will do the prospecting work for you as well as grab the emails- but it is a fairly expensive tool.

Final Thoughts

Defining a scaleable outreach process is crucial for growing your niche site. The process I've outlined above should help you figure out how to begin harvesting emails so you can grow your Domain Authority or expand your audience reach within your niche. 

Last Updated on March 21, 2020 by j3teq

Ryan Nelson
Ryan Nelsonhttp://nichefacts.com
​Ryan Nelson is a NYC-based Industrial-Organizational Psychologist and a full-stack online marketer. He created NicheFacts.com to help people discover and build profitable, content-focused online businesses.

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