Setting up your PBI sheet and PhantomBuster

IMPORTANT:

If you have upgraded your V8.0 to include the PBPROFILES sheet then CLICK HERE for new instructions (especially for when you need to do a new LinkedIn boolean search)

If you have not upgraded, continue using the (old) instructions below

Trouble Shooting

If you are having any problems Click Here to jump to the troubleshooting section at the bottom of this page before contacting your coach.

Following are some Quick instructions if you run out of results in your PBO because Phantombuster has processed everything (remember Pantombuster can only access a maximum of 1000 results from any LinkedIn search) or you are just not happy with the results that are coming up in your search

Change Boolean Search

Here’s a link to a video which explains what to do: https://www.loom.com/share/bf957bb0bb134e79ae99901539e94f2a 

1. Identify new boolean search based on who you want to search for. Could be other potential services in your niche either before or after you in the customer journey and they want to be collaborative and see value in it for them

• Example (technology or innovative)AND(collaborative)NOT(coast)

2. Put your new boolean search in the LinkedIn search bar

• Ensure you refine the search to People & Brisbane, 2nd connections (the area you want to connect with)
  • Note – be aware of the number of results

3. Copy the LinkedIn URL

4. Go to your PBI sheet and paste in the URL into cell A5

5. Go to Phantom Buster

• Click on My phantoms
  • Click on Edit
  • Click Get Cookie From LinkedIn
  • Click Save & Close
• Click on Console
  • Scroll down to where it has you Current Setup
  • Note what is written in the section Csv Name – (for me it is “result”)

Find the corresponding name under Files

• Right-click on results.csv (as seen in the picture above, or if your name is results1 etc.) Be sure it is the csv one.
• Click on Copy link address

6. Go to PBI sheet and paste that link into cell A6

7. Happy days – you should be good to go!

Beginners Overview

A very big part of getting great results when network building is to learn how to do some great searches on LinkedIn (your coach and the documentation will help you with this).

When you do a Search in LinkedIn it will often return in excess of 1000 results.

However, LinkedIn will only allow you to view the first 1000 of those results. So the idea is to be as selective as you can be to get close to 1000 great candidates.

The next step is to review this list and send relevant candidates on the list a “connection request”

Problem: This list does not last!

When you close your browser or shut down your computer, the list is gone!

Even if you could regenerate the list, it would difficult to page through where you were up to – especially as there will probably be new names in the list.

Solution: Save the list into a CSV and gradually work through the entries.

The Process

Note: The initial set-up of the process does take a while but you only have to do the full set-up once!

After that, the ongoing maintenance of the process is simple.

The only ongoing maintenance you should need is to either (1) do a new LinkedIn search when your last one has run out or (2) Get another LinkedIn cookie if yours becomes invalid (you can see this by looking at the log that Phantombuster emails you). Then you simply place the URL of that search in your PBI sheet as described below.

Create a LinkedIn Search URL

Click Here for some great information about constructing searches on LinkedIn which will help you find great candidates.

The following screenshot shows where you need to paste the LinkedIn Search URL (see (3) in the above screenshot)

Install the Phantombuster Chrome Extension

This Chrome Extension is used to get a “cookie” which connects Phantombuster with your LinkedIn account (you’ll see how this is used in a moment)

Create a PhantomBuster Account

Click the following link to create a free Phantombuster account (you will only need the free account)

www.phantombuster.com

You should then see a screen that looks like the following

Enter your email address and password as shown in the following screenshot

You will then be asked to enter these details

Now Make sure you choose the right Phantombuster “Agent”

Phantombuster has MANY LinkedIn, Facebook and other “agents”.

After signing up you will be taken to the Store. Search for the “LinkedIn Search Export ” agent as shown in the following screenshot

After selecting “LinkedIn Search Export”, the following will then be displayed (Step 1 of 3)

The first step is to get your LinkedIn Cookie (this will only work if you have already installed the Phantombuster Chrome extension (see above).

After pressing “Get Cookie from LinkedIn”

The cookie will appear as shown in the following screenshot

Search Input

As shown in the following screenshot, Phantombuster allows you to enter a LinkedIn Search in a number of ways

We are using the “Google Spreadsheet URL” option (see screenshot above)

Which means you need to enter the URL address of the PBI sheet from your Activity Workbook.

So you need to enter the URL of that spreadsheet in the “Search input” field shown in the above screenshot

Choose your PBI sheet and copy it’s URL as shown in the following screenshots

When you paste the URL into the “Search Input” box and you should get something that looks like this:

Number of results to scrape per launch

Make this 50 as shown in the following screenshot

Number of results to scrape per search

Leave this empty as we want all results from the search – see the following screenshot

People and Connections

These parameters are irrelevant in our case because we are not using Phantombuster to do the LinkedIn search.
We already entered these parameters in LinkedIn to get the Search URL!

However, set them as follows:

Name of resulting CSV file

Here you are entering the name of the file into which Phantombuster will put the LinkedIn profiles when it processes the Search URL

Just accept the default – but you can change this to any file name you like – or start putting results into one file and then start “with a clean slate” with another file

Here’s a screenshot:

Number max of lines of your spreadsheet to process per launch

This MUST BE 1 as shown in the following screenshot

Column name of your input spreadsheet from which to get searches

This is the column heading of the column containing the search URL
Phantombuster will search for a column with the name you put in here
When it finds that column is will take the URL from the first cell
In our case, this is Column S (Up To Page)

The URL in this column is the same as the one you got from LinkedIn and pasted into A5 except that it has a LinkedIn page number appended to the back of it (by a very complicated formula)

Having a page number allows Phantombuster to start at the page after the page it last processed.

We are collecting 50 profiles at a time, which is 5 LinkedIn pages at a time.

We go to all this trouble to make sure we don’t raise any alarm bells with LinkedIn algorithms!

This MUST BE exactly as shown in the following screenshot

To make sure you get it right just copy and paste the following string

Tick the “Remove Duplicates Box” and press Save to move to the next screen as shown in the following screenshot

The next screen looks like this (Step 2 of 3)

Every time the Phantombuster agent launches, it will collect another 50 profiles from the LinkedIn search URL specified in your PBI sheet and put them into the CSV file that you have specified.

This launch can be done manually at any time.

However, it is much better to have this done automatically so that you don’t have to keep remembering to do it!

In order to make the agent launch automatically, click “Repeatedly” (see above screenshot).

Then select “Once every other day” from the dropdown options.

This means that 50 new profiles will be collected into your CSV results file (and displayed in your PBO sheet) every second day.

Limits, Folder Management, Proxy settings

The remaining settings for “Page 2” should be as shown in the following screenshot. After you have entered them press Save

Notifications (Step 3 of 3)

First Select Advanced (as shown in the following screenshot)

Now Select Email notifications for everything as shown in the following screenshot

Slack Notifications

Unless you use Slack, leave all the boxes shown in the following screenshot unticked and then press Save

Launch!

Finally, you are ready to manually launch and extract your first lot of results!

After pressing save you should be back at the following screen

Press the Launch button!

Phantombuster should process for about 45-90 secs (you can see how long it has taken by watching the counter at the top of the screen)

While processing the screen will say “Processing”

When it’s finished, the screen will say “Inactive” (see screenshot above).

Check the log file

After the Launch has finished, it’s a good idea to check the log file to see that everything looks right. You can do this by “hovering” as indicated in the screen below.

When “View Log” does appear, click on it and you will screen that looks like the following

You can tell a lot by examining this log!
This is also the log that is emailed to you when you have the email notifications set

Paste a link to your CSV into cell A6 of your PBI sheet

When you paste your link to your CSV file into A6 of your PBI sheet, the results from the CSV file will be displayed in your PBO sheet (the place you go to send connection requests each day)

First, get the link to your CSV as shown in the following screenshots

Now paste that link into cell A6 of your PBI sheet as shown in the following screenshot

Now select your PBO sheet

The results from your CSV file should be displayed in here as shown in the following screenshot

How to force a refresh to get the latest results in your PBI

Note: This is not normally needed with automatic processing – the results show up just with a slight delay. So it’s really for when you’ve done a manual launch and you want those results to show up immediately.

The basic procedure is to delete the formula in cell C2 [ =importdata(PBI!A6) ] and then immediately press the undo button to re-instate the formula – see the following screenshots

Daily Processing using your PBO sheet

Read the instructions in your PBO sheet as shown in the following screenshot

How to edit Phantombuster after the initial set-up

Go to the Phantombuster website (www.phantombuster.com)

This will take you to the following screen

When you click on “My Phantoms” the following will be displayed

Now click Edit as shown in the following screenshot and the familiar screens will appear.

Troubleshooting Phantombuster and your PBI sheet

Things are just not working immediately after you did your first set-up

Carefully re-check your steps and make sure you have completed everything. It might take a little time but it’s worth it.

However, don’t struggle – ask for help!

The process has been working but has suddenly stopped working

(1) Check to see that your LinkedIn cookie is still valid

If you have set up Phantombuster correctly you should receive an email for each launch of your Phantombuster agent.

In that email, it will often give you a clue if something has gone wrong.
For example, it may have a message like “Linkedin Cookie no longer valid”

In this case, go into your Phantombuster console and select Edit (as described above) and in Screen 1, press the Get Cookie from the LinkedIn button – as shown in the following screenshot

Now press Save & Close as shown in the following screenshot and all should be good!

(2) Check that you have not come to the end of your LinkedIn Search results

If when you run Phantombuster you see “empty line… skipping entry” in the log file, this is a good indication that Phantombuster has come to the end of your LinkedIn search URL (Note that you can also see this in the email that Phantombuster sends you when you have it set to run automatically and have email notifications set on)

See screenshot below for a typical log entry after Phantombuster has processed all entries in your search URL.

In this case, check the page are you up to in your Search as per your PBI

Look over to the top right of your PBI sheet and see what page you are up to (see the following screenshot)

The maximum number of “pages” you can access from a LinkedIn search is 100. As there are 10 profiles per page that is 1000 profiles.

So if you are up to page 120, you know that Phantombuster has attempted to access results beyond page 100 and LinkedIn just won’t play ball! (LinkedIn won’t return any more results even though there may have been thousands of results returned in your original LinkedIn search).

In that case, it’s time to do another LinkedIn search and place the URL in A5 of your PBI, do a manual launch and you’ll be off and running again!

You have just done a manual launch of Phantombuster and the extra results are not showing at the bottom of your PBO sheet

There is often a delay in the results generated by Phantombuster appearing in your spreadsheet (lost in space!)

The solution to this is to refresh the results in your PBO by following the steps outlined just above this troubleshooting section (see above)

Clicking on the “Get LinkedIn Cookie” in PhantomBuster causes a new tab to open LinkedIn – The cookie is not loaded, and no error messages are given

Possible Cause and Resolution: This can be caused by security config which denies PhantomBuster plugin access to LinkedIn. 
Resolving this can be done by right-clicking on the PhantomBuster plugin and clicking “Manage Extensions”

Ensure the Plugin is set to “On” at the top of the screen

Scroll down to the Site Access Section, and ensure that either “Automatically Allow Access” is selected, or both LinkedIn and PhantomBuster.com are enabled.
“Automatically Allow Access”

Granular Control

After this has been done, the user can return to PhantomBuster and use the “Get Cookie” button as per normal.