LinkedIn Business Niches Actor

This Actor is a production-ready template built on Apify's platform for automated web crawling using Puppeteer. It's designed for developers who need to scrape data from JavaScript-heavy websites, such as LinkedIn, for lead generation and automation tasks. The core of the Actor is the PuppeteerCrawler from Crawlee, which manages parallel page processing in headless Chrome.

Key Features

• Puppeteer Crawler: Handles navigation and data extraction from dynamic web pages that require JavaScript execution.
• Configurable Proxy Support: Integrates with Apify Proxy or custom proxy servers to manage IP rotation and avoid blocking.
• Structured Input/Output: Uses an input schema for validation and stores results in a structured Apify Dataset.
• Custom Request Routing: A handler-based system (routes.js) lets you define specific logic for different URL patterns.
• Built on Apify SDK: Provides the necessary toolkit for building, running, and scaling Actors on the Apify platform.

How to Use

The Actor follows a standard flow for web crawling:

1. Input: The Actor reads its starting URLs and configuration from the provided INPUT.json file.
2. Setup: It creates a proxy configuration and initializes the PuppeteerCrawler.
3. Handling: Page requests are routed to custom handlers defined in routes.js. You define the scraping logic here (e.g., extracting profile data, company info).
4. Execution: The crawler runs through the queue of requests, processes pages, and stores the extracted data.
5. Output: Results are saved to an Apify Dataset, which can be exported in formats like JSON, CSV, or Excel.

To customize it for LinkedIn niches:
* Modify the handlers in routes.js to target specific LinkedIn pages (e.g., search results, company pages, profile lists).
* Implement your data extraction logic using Puppeteer's API within the handlers.
* Configure the input schema to accept parameters like search queries, filters, or pagination limits.

Input/Output

Input (INPUT.json):
The Actor expects a JSON input containing at minimum the startUrls. You can extend the input schema to include custom parameters for your niche targeting.

{
  "startUrls": [
    { "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/companies/?keywords=software" }
  ]
}

Output:
Extracted data is pushed to the Actor's Dataset. The structure is defined by your custom code. For a LinkedIn scraper, output might look like:

{
  "companyName": "Example Tech Inc.",
  "profileUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/example-tech",
  "niche": "SaaS",
  "followerCount": "5000"
}

Resources

• Crawlee + Apify Platform guide
• PuppeteerCrawler Documentation and Examples
• Apify Actor Input Schema
• Apify SDK Documentation