If your goal is building connections fast you’ll need people to invite, a lot of people!  You have a number of sources to use for this.  You can use a site like TopLinked.com to get a list of people or you can harvest your own bigger list from an open networkers comment thread.  It’s the latter option I’ll now explain.

Building your own has a few advantages, the biggest of which is you can control the source, so if you find a thread of people related to your career goals you can invite exactly the right people.

We’ll show you how to harvest the emails from an open networkers comment thread, but don’t worry if you get lost we also give you a pre-harvested email list at the bottom.

You can also use this approach for an open endorsers comment thread.

If you need more page views, to improve your rank among your peers, don’t forget to check out this post on becoming one of the top 1%.

Step 1: Find an Open Networking Comment Thread

Find a post which encourages people to share their email for the purpose of networking.  Make sure the post requests people to never IDK those who contact them!  Otherwise you might get flagged as a spammer and banned by LinkedIn.

One example of an open networking comment thread is: Open Networkers Alliance: Email List ONLY!!!! Let’s Connect!

We’ll show you how to harvest it now, and if you get confused we’ll share with you a recent harvested version of it at the bottom.

Step 2: Expand the Entire Comment Thread

Use this bit of code to expand the entire comment thread (it continually clicks the “show more” button until there is no more).

I use the large 5 second delay between expansions to simulate human behavior, to reduce the likelihood of being detected.  The process will take quite a few minutes to run if it’s a large thread.

Do you know how to access your browser’s JavaScript (JS) console (we recommend using Google’s free Chrome browser)?

Run this in the browser’s JavaSscript console after the comment thread page is loaded:

var script = document.createElement("script"); script.src = "https://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.10.2.min.js"; document.body.appendChild(script);
setInterval(function() { $('span[class="show-more-text"]').click(); }, 5000);

Warning: All sites try and discourage the use of automated tools, so if you’ve recently used any other automation which would load a lot of LinkedIn pages, you might want to wait a day to use this script. 

Step 3: Harvest Time

This next script will go through all the comments pulling out email addresses.

It also does one thing to be safer, it ignores any comment which includes more than 2 email addresses.  Why?  Quite a few people in an effort to be helpful comment with a big list of email addresses they found somewhere else and since we don’t know where those email addresses originated we ignore them.  Also we de-dupe the addresses we do get, as many people re-add themselves multiple times to the thread (often months apart) in the hopes of having more people see their comment and add them.

Run this in the same browser JS console as above, without having reloaded or navigated off the page:

var script = document.createElement("script"); script.src = "https://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.10.2.min.js"; document.body.appendChild(script);

function extractEmails (text)
{
    return text.match(/([a-zA-Z0-9._-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9._-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9._-]+)/gi);
}

function eliminateDuplicates (arr) {
    var i;
    var len=arr.length;
    var out=[];
    var obj={};

    for (i=0;i<len;i++) {
        obj[arr[i]]=0;
    }
    for (i in obj) {
        out.push(i);
    }
    return out;
}

var emailsFullList = [];

$('.comment-content').each(function( index ) {
    var emails = extractEmails($(this).text());

    if (!emails) {
        console.log('** No emails in comment');
    } else if (emails.length < 3) {
        emailsFullList = emailsFullList.concat(emails);
    } else {
        console.log('** Ignoring comment, too many email addresses ('+emails.length+').');
    }
});

emailsFullList = eliminateDuplicates(emailsFullList);

console.log('**************************************\nAll emails:\n'+emailsFullList.join('\n'));

And voila, shown in the JavaScript console will be a list of thousands of emails of people who want to be invited to your LinkedIn party!  Just highlight and copy to the clipboard then paste into a text file for loading into LinkedIn.

Step X

Too hard?  Don’t feel confident about your JavaScript cut and paste?  Well, here’s a recent harvesting.

Download Open Networkers E-mail List (2,300 LinkedIn users 7/8/2014) (Password is “on”)

Step 4: Import and Invite Contacts

Now, if you didn’t already know what to do, follow the instructions to import them into your LinkedIn contact list and invite them!