Unsponsored: Unbiased Reviews of Digital Marketing Tools (Phantom Buster)

Edition 7: Phantom Buster

Mind-blowing data extraction to build your audience and generate leads.

If you want to improve your profitability, automation is, of course, one of the best ways of doing that. Carefully constructed workflows can save so much time and money, even replacing entire roles, if you set them up well. But they're time-consuming and confusing to set up (I'm still working on Zapier).

But this tool isn't time consuming. It's delightfully simple.

I was first introduced to Phantom Buster by the guys at Maverrik, the LinkedIn legends who run the accelerator that taught me (and continues to teach me) everything I know.

How does it work?

As you've probably gathered, the more simple the tool, the more I like it. I'm a busy business owner, I just haven't got time to faff around doing hours of courses to learn how to do something. However much I'd like to.

Phantom Buster runs hundreds of different mini workflows automatically for you - scraping data from various websites and creating super useful sales and marketing spreadsheets.

At the time of writing, they have "Phantoms" for 21 different sites, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Quora, Medium, Slack, Pinterest and loads more.

Their best offering is in the LinkedIn category. We all know if you put the time and effort into LinkedIn, it can reap massive benefits. In fact, my entire business is built on my personal profile. I've acquired all of our biggest clients through my LinkedIn work. But it takes a tremendous amount of time to get anywhere. These Phantoms will take a lot of the legwork out of that for you.

They have 48 different LinkedIn-based Phantoms available, including:

LinkedIn search export - Scrape and export the results of a LinkedIn search into a spreadsheet

LinkedIn profile scraper - Scrape all of the avauilable data from LinkedIn profiles, including emails

LinkedIn profile URL finder - Find LinkedIn profiles from a list of full names

...and that's just the start. Here's a video of me giving you a quick tour of what it all looks like.

To use it, you simply follow the instructions on screen for each Phantom:

1. Connect to your LinkedIn profile (using your session cookie) - just a button click
2. Provide the info the Phantom needs (usually in G sheet or .csv format)
3. Pick the volume you're looking to scrape (tip: go with the recommended amounts)
4. Choose how to launch - I generally go for Manual
5. Then - and this bit isn't intuitive - on the final screen, don't forget to hit 'Launch', or it won't start.
6. Your final file will become available on the bottom right when it's complete

A word of warning.

The days of using LinkedIn automation for everything are long gone. They don't like it.

This tool is most definitely not for daily use, and is more for the odd project here and there that requires a lot of data. Overuse it, and you'll risk LinkedIn putting you into "LinkedIn Jail" and then deleting your profile completely.

I would also advise against using the 'auto-connect' features, as that means you're sending the same connection message out to everyone. The way to win on LinkedIn is by being personal and bespoke at every step of the journey. If that message could be sent to someone else, then you're probably doing it wrong.

What's the damage?

I've been using this for a while, so I'm on a legacy plan - which costs me about ￡28 per month. For this, I get:

• 1 hour/day
• I can run 5 Phantoms at a time (not that I ever do this)
• 20 email credits/day (the email scraping quality is a little mixed - often people use old personal emails to sign up to LinkedIn, not their professional ones)

Their current offering is:

Starter - $59/mo (20 hours execution time, 5 slots, 500 email credits)

Pro - $139/mo (80 hours execution time, 15 slots, 2500 email credits and priority support)

Team - $399/mo (300 hours execution time, 50 slots, 10k email credits, priority support and a 'dedicated expert', whatever that is) - I don't understand how this much use would ever be tolerated by LinkedIn, but there you go.

Overview

Use this clever programme with caution. Get greedy and you'll jeopardise your accounts, but use it wisely and you'll give your sales and marketing activity a real Phantom-Booster.

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Note:?This newsletter is, as it says on the tin, completely unsponsored. It conveys my own opinion, as the owner of a (reliably brilliant)?copywriting and SEO agency?based in Birmingham.