Custom Services: OppAlerts

The Core of OppAlerts

OppAlerts is a comprehensive monitoring and prospecting tool that helps businesses stay informed and competitive. Our system downloads, processes, and analyzes relevant websites based on your specific needs. It’s primarily a marketing tool designed to identify valuable opportunities while keeping you updated on your industry, competitors, and brand mentions.

With our standard subscription, you can monitor:

• Keywords in news articles and blog posts
• RSS feeds from relevant sources
• Google Alerts feeds
• Social media content, including Reddit discussions
• Specific keywords across search engines
• Opportunities using keyword templates (e.g., “consumer electronics” + “guest posts”)

While our standard subscription meets the needs of most businesses, we also offer two types of advanced services for organizations with more extensive or specialized data collection requirements.

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Service #1: Enterprise-Level Subscription

For businesses that need to scale beyond the limits of our standard plans, we offer a much higher level custom service starting at $10,000 per month. This is essentially an unlimited service, removing virtually all constraints of our regular plans.

With the enterprise option, you get:

• Your own dedicated servers and custom installation
• No practical limits to the amount of data you can collect
• Customized monitoring setup tailored specifically to your business needs
• Priority support with direct access to our technical team
• Custom feature development for your specific requirements
• Ability to run far more complex and resource-intensive monitoring tasks
• Advanced data retention options beyond our standard offerings
• Customized reporting and alert systems

This level of service is ideal for large enterprises with complex monitoring needs, businesses in data-intensive industries, or organizations that consider comprehensive market intelligence a critical competitive advantage.

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Service #2: Custom Data Projects

Beyond our monthly subscriptions, we also take on specialized one-time or recurring data collection projects. OppAlerts was built to download, parse, analyze, and extract precise data from massive datasets, making it perfectly suited for custom data gathering initiatives.

If your company needs specific data collected, analyzed, and delivered in a usable format, we can build a custom solution. These projects are priced at:

• $10,000 for small projects (typically involving fewer than 1,000,000 web pages)
• $20,000 and up for large projects (starting from around 5,000,000 pages)

With these custom projects, you have complete control over:

• What kind of data you want collected (sources, keywords, criteria)
• How much information you need (scope and scale)
• How long you want to retain the data (standard is three months of online access)
• What specific data points need to be extracted from the raw content
• How the data should be organized, indexed, and made accessible
• What format the final deliverables should take

There isn’t much we can’t collect. Our systems are designed to handle virtually any public web data, regardless of format or source. However, pricing is affected by complexity:

• If we need to use full web browsers for scraping (to handle JavaScript-heavy sites), that would incur additional costs beyond the basic project price
• If the sites implement blocking measures that require specialized handling, costs may increase
• If it’s just regular downloading and parsing of HTML, RSS feeds, JSON and similar formats that don’t require browser rendering, there wouldn’t be any additional costs outside of the project scope

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Common Use Cases

Monitoring Applications

Our custom monitoring solutions are designed to keep you informed about everything relevant to your business in your industry space.

• Brand & Reputation Monitoring – Find and track all mentions of your brand or product across the web. This involves creating many different search permutations to ensure comprehensive coverage, especially when you have more than a thousand mentions. We can identify sentiment, context, and influence level of each mention.
• Competitive Analysis – Track your competitors’ online presence, content strategies, reputation, product launches, partnerships, and market positioning. Understand what’s working for them and where opportunities might exist.
• Industry Analysis – Gather comprehensive data about your industry, market trends, emerging technologies, regulatory changes, and new developments. Stay ahead of market shifts and identify opportunities before your competitors.
• Product Feedback – Monitor discussions of your products across review sites, forums, and social media to gather unfiltered customer feedback at scale.
• Crisis Monitoring – Set up specialized monitoring to detect potential PR issues or negative coverage early, allowing for rapid response.

Prospecting Applications

Beyond just monitoring, our systems excel at identifying actionable opportunities for your business. I’ve personally developed detailed systems for extracting, ranking, and valuing different kinds of opportunities across numerous nationwide and local projects.

• Sponsorship Opportunities – Identify potential sponsorship targets in specific industries that align with your brand values and marketing objectives. We can find everything from major industry events to niche community gatherings.
• Guest Post & Content Opportunities – Find websites accepting guest contributions in your industry. We can identify publications based on domain authority, relevance, audience demographics, and other factors important to your content strategy.
• Link Building – Discover large-scale nationwide or local link building opportunities that can significantly improve your SEO performance. We can find unlinked brand mentions, resource page opportunities, broken link opportunities, and other high-value linking prospects.
• Local Partnerships – Find relevant local organizations for sponsorship, partnership, or community engagement initiatives. This is especially valuable for businesses with multiple locations or those targeting specific geographic markets.
• Content Gap Research – Discover what content exists in your space and, more importantly, what doesn’t yet exist, helping you develop new and innovative content strategies that fill market needs.
• Donation & CSR Opportunities – Find organizations aligned with your corporate values for charitable giving and corporate social responsibility initiatives.
• Influencer Identification – Discover relevant influencers in your industry space for potential partnerships, ranging from major thought leaders to niche micro-influencers.

The Four Stages of Custom Projects

Every custom data project we undertake follows a systematic four-stage process to ensure comprehensive results:

1. Data Collection

The first stage involves identifying exactly what to prospect or monitor. This is a critical planning phase where we determine:

• Primary keywords and secondary keywords
• Keyword templates and permutations
• Source types and specific sources
• Search parameters and filters
• Collection frequency and depth

Our approach is fundamentally different from SEO or PPC keyword research. With data collection, we deliberately cast a wide net using a mix of broad and mid-range terms to ensure we don’t miss anything valuable. As I always tell clients: “You can filter data down later, but you can’t discover what you never collected.”

For example, if you want to find all your product mentions, you might start with the top thousand Google results, but what if you have more than a thousand mentions? Standard search engines only show a limited window of results. Our systems can go much deeper, finding mentions across multiple search engines, using multiple query variations, and scanning beyond the artificial limits of standard search results.

This stage involves creating many different search permutations, especially for reputation or brand monitoring. We might combine your brand name with industry terms, product categories, competitor names, sentiment indicators, and other relevant modifiers to ensure we’re finding everything.

Our technology and databases are designed to handle tens of millions of web pages in a single index. We’ve built systems that can efficiently process, store, and retrieve massive datasets, making it possible to be extremely thorough in the collection phase.

2. Parsing & Extraction

Once we’ve collected the raw data, we need to extract the specific information that matters to you. This stage focuses on parsing, analysis, and evaluation:

If you’re looking for brand, industry, or competitive intelligence, we can extract:

• All pages that mention your brand or specific products
• The context surrounding your brand mentions (what’s being said about you)
• Mentions of your brand alongside other specific keywords (e.g., your brand mentioned with “problem” or “amazing”)
• Content with positive or negative sentiment analysis
• Mentions in page titles or headers (which often carry more weight)
• Mentions in comments sections (capturing consumer voices)
• Authority metrics of the sites mentioning you
• Social sharing data when available
• Contact information for outreach purposes
• Custom data points specific to your business goals

For prospecting projects, we might extract:

• Contact details (names, email addresses, phone numbers)
• Social media profiles
• Publication metrics (traffic estimates, domain authority)
• Content topics and categories
• Audience demographics when available
• Specific opportunity types (guest post guidelines, sponsorship pages)
• Geographic information for local opportunities

We use a combination of pattern matching, machine learning, and custom extraction algorithms to pull precisely the data points you need from each page. This stage is about transforming raw HTML into structured, actionable information.

3. Indexing & Database Creation

After collection and extraction, we create optimized databases and search indexes for your data. This critical step makes the difference between having a pile of data and having a usable intelligence system.

We typically work with several database technologies depending on the project needs:

• SQL databases (MySQL or MariaDB) for structured relational data
• Manticore Search for creating powerful full-text search indexes (highly recommended for most projects)
• SQLite for portable data distribution

The indexing stage involves:

• Designing optimal database schemas for your specific data
• Creating appropriate indices for fast retrieval
• Setting up full-text search capabilities with proper relevance scoring
• Implementing filtering and categorization systems
• Ensuring data integrity and reliability

If you want a full archive of the raw web pages (beyond just the extracted data), we can provide that for an additional cost. This includes more storage and processing time. It’s important to understand the scale involved:

• 1 million web pages might be several gigabytes, even when highly compressed and stripped of unimportant HTML
• 10 million pages could be tens of gigabytes
• Larger datasets grow accordingly

For large datasets, we typically shard the data across multiple SQLite databases based on a hash of the URL. This gives you manageable one-gigabyte files to download rather than dealing with a single massive file that might be prone to download errors. It also makes the data more usable on standard computers without specialized hardware.

4. Analysis & Reporting

The final stage is delivering the data in a format you can actually use to drive business decisions. This involves determining:

• What kind of interface you need to access the data
• What reports would be most valuable for your team
• How the data should integrate with your existing workflows

For the interface, options include:

• A custom web search interface with filters and sorting options
• Dashboard visualizations of key metrics and trends
• Regular email reports with new findings
• API access for integration with your existing systems
• Bulk data exports in various formats

From my extensive experience, I strongly recommend a highly tunable web search interface as the primary way to interact with the data. Here’s why: once you start using the data, you’ll inevitably discover new ways to think about it that weren’t apparent before. I’ve seen this consistently even with projects in domains I’ve worked with for years – every time the data is slightly different, I get new insights the first time I interact with it.

Having a flexible search interface allows you to follow your curiosity and discover patterns that wouldn’t be apparent in static reports. It transforms the data from a one-time deliverable into an ongoing intelligence resource.

Beyond the interactive search interface, we’ll also determine what actionable exports you need:

• Contact information spreadsheets for outreach teams
• Influencer lists for social media teams doing brand building
• Opportunity lists for SEO or link building campaigns
• Structured data for sponsorship or donation initiatives
• Content analysis reports for editorial teams
• Competitive intelligence briefings for executive teams

The goal is to integrate the data seamlessly into your existing business processes so you can take maximum action from the collection. We work with you to understand exactly how the data will be used and by whom, then customize the outputs accordingly.

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Project Examples

To give you a better idea of what’s possible, here are some example projects we’ve successfully completed:

• 2,900,000,000+ Page Common Crawl Analysis – Analyzed a full common crawl web dataset, extracting key information from each page along the way. Large-scale projects like this take a particular kind of creativity and problem solving in order to do efficiently and cost-effectively. (eg: total hardware cost: $90).
• 10,000,000+ URL Local Sponsorship Database – Built a database of over 10,000,000 local sponsorship opportunities across all 50 states. Each oportunity was ranked and prioritized by location, categorized by industry, opportunity type, etc. All were added to a searchable index with a UI.
• 1,000,000+ Link Building Opportunities – Constructed a massive database of link building queries, executed the queries, gathered the results, then downloaded, parsed, analyzed, indexed, categorized, and ranked every oppotunity for the client to then use internally.

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Getting Started

If you’re interested in our custom services, the process typically follows these steps:

1. Initial Consultation – We discuss your needs, goals, and current challenges
2. Proposal Development – We create a detailed project plan including scope, methods, deliverables, and pricing
3. Project Setup – Once approved, we configure our systems for your specific requirements
4. Data Collection & Processing – We execute the data gathering and processing according to the plan
5. Delivery & Training – We provide access to the results and train your team on using the systems

Contact us today to discuss your specific data needs. We’ll work with you to design a solution that delivers exactly the information you need in a format that’s immediately actionable for your business.