Did You Know Archives - Leads 2 Business Blog

21 Feb 2024

Tips for Vendors & Suppliers using L2B

by Lola Govender | posted in: Did You Know | 1

You have to be in it to win it!

Why wait for business? As an Open Quotes subscriber, a Vendor or a Supplier listed on our database, you have the opportunity to engage with Contractors who are looking for services or products that are within your scope of work, allowing you to submit your pricing directly.

Once registered you will receive a Username and a Password via email. Log in frequently to see what is available to you, so you do not miss out on any opportunities.

If you are an Open Quotes subscriber:

You can receive the award information for all the Requests For Quotations that were sent to you, regardless of whether you priced or not, this gives you a second chance to price, for the successful bidder. These will display in the Purple block on your Vendor page.

Access to bills that contractors are currently pricing that have not been sent to directly, you choose whether you want to price on these or not. These will display in the Red block on your Vendor page.

For All Vendors:

View a history of all your requests for quotations. These will display in the Blue block on your Vendor page.

Manage your company details online: i.e CIBD, BEE, Description, Serviceable Regions, Trades, Contacts, etc.

Send emails with your logo and/or profile attached from our directory to market your business.

View and interact with the icons and functionality on your Vendor Home Page. Respond to requests for quotations online and improve your indicator so that you maintain a high indicator in order to have the highest visibility on the Buyers search results.

Price online, this saves you time and money.

Take advantage of the options to download full BOQ’s, drawings, and specifications, as well as upload documents to the buyers.

Ensure that you respond to the contractor timeously, take heed of the respond-by-date which is stipulated on the request for quote, thereby increasing your chances of having your prices included in the tender in turn increasing your opportunity to secure work if the contractor is a successful bidder.

For our Vendor Quick Guide see below.

Vendor

For more on Full Vendor Functionality see Open Quotes Vendors

To view more Articles, please visit our Leads 2 Business Blog.
If you are interested in becoming one of our subscribers, please visit Leads 2 Business.
To view notes with screenshots on how to use our website, please visit Leads 2 Business Wiki.

About Lola Govender

My name is Lola Govender. I have been working at L2B for 14 years and am very passionate about our business.

8 Nov 2022

5 Signs You need to Paint your Home

by Nikita-Michell Louw | posted in: Did You Know | 1

…and how to choose the right paint

Painting your home is not a thought that we have very often, but did you know that the interior and exterior of your home should be painted more often than you think. The exterior should be painted every 5 to 10 years, and the interior should be painted every 3 to 5 years. There are also other elements that could play a role in your decision to paint your home, and they are as follows:

1. Mold, Peeling and Cracking of paint – For many people, this is the first sign that your home needs a fresh coat of paint. Not only is peeling paint or mould visually unappealing, but your home also no longer has that layer of protection from the elements. Mould could also cause a variety of health effects, as well as damage infrastructure in the long run, if not attended to.

2. Fading of paint – The most common reason for fading of paint is sun bleaching, as the ultraviolet rays break down chemical bonds and fade the colour. That is why most bright colours, such as yellow, orange and red, have a lesser tendency to stay vibrant, and most people opt for white or neutral-coloured paint, due to it being fade-resistant. So if your walls are looking dull, maybe its time for a fresh coat of paint.

3. Selling your home – If you are planning on selling your home, then there is no doubt that a fresh coat of paint will be a great investment, as this is usually the very first thing buyers see. As they say, “The first impressions are the lasting impressions”

4. Renovations – The definition of house renovation, as defined in the Cambridge English Dictionary is:” the process of repairing and improving a building so that it is in good condition again.”Some of us can’t afford to do a full home renovation to our home, therefore a small improvement such as painting our home can make a huge difference. As Five Star painting.com says:” 88% of people have more desire to be at home after painting an interior room.”

5. Trends – As time goes on people change, fashion changes and so do home trends. The home interior colour schemes were popular in the ’60s, for example. neon blue is not that in trend today, nor are the doilies. Maybe your home is stuck in the past, but I’m sure that a fresh new coat of paint could transport your home into modern times.

Choosing the right paint can be a daunting task and there are many factors that must be taken into consideration, such as:

1. Colours and spaces – Light-coloured walls can make a space seem bigger, and darker-coloured walls can make a space seem smaller.

2. Types of paint – Water-based paint, which typically gets used for internal walls, and Oil-based paint which gets used for external walls.

3. Prices – Paint can be an expensive product to purchase, but if you want a long-lasting finish, the price is worth the pay.

Not only will painting your home be a great investment, but a change in your home scenery will also be just as good as a holiday.

Sources:
Cambridge English Dictionary
Five Star Painting.com
Certapro.com
Paintritepros.com

About Nikita-Michell Louw

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5 Oct 2022

Why your Company profile listing Matters

by Janine Bryden | posted in: Did You Know | 0

Business directories have been around for more than a hundred years, traditionally offering companies a platform on which to market themselves by helping them promote their business by activity, location and size, ensuring directory users find the right companies to do business with.

Business directories (also known as business listings or local listings) aren’t just a digital version of the Yellow Pages where users have to drag the book out of the cabinet and flip through thousands of pages to find what they’re looking for. They’re comprehensive platforms that enable potential customers to instantly identify, learn about, and contact businesses relevant to them.

Online business directories can take the form of a website, app, and/or other platforms. They exist on the web, social media platforms, smartphones, and even on specific devices.

You can see your company profile as the Curriculum Vitae of your business. Just like a Curriculum Vitae gives a brief description of a person’s education, qualifications, and previous occupations, so your company profile informs the reader of your business’s history, resources, service offering, expertise, contact information and location.

There are multiple benefits of using local listings for local businesses. Not only do they increase the business’ online visibility – and the business’s chances of getting found online by potential customers – but they are also a way for the business to reach a broader audience.

Benefits of Online Business Directories

1. Amplify Your Online Presence: If you search for your business name on the internet, you will likely see your business show up in directories for which you never submitted a listing. This is because many business directories today pull from other larger directories and automatically create listings.

2. Improve Your Local Visibility: Though they are massive, online business directories have advanced filtering and suggesting capabilities, and serve to connect you with your target audience. As a local business, directories are beneficial because they make your business visible to your local community.

3. Get Discovered More: The typical online business directory allows users to search by specific criteria, such as service, location, and category. By simply entering complete and accurate information in your listing, the directory will then connect your business to the people searching for it, even if they don’t search your business name explicitly. This is highly beneficial because often people don’t know to search for a specific business name or the specific service they need.

4. Use Word of Mouth: Most online business directories have a customer review component, as word of mouth has always been a trusted source for consumers. With the real time and sharing capabilities of mobile devices, customers can now publish reviews more quickly—even during their experience. People seek out and trust online customer reviews today more than ever, so get listed in online business directories and you’ll be placed in a direct channel to your target audience.

5. Strengthen Your Business Reputation: The fear of negative reviews prevents many businesses from getting listed online, but this shuts them off from getting positive reviews too, which are essential for a good reputation. As long as you know how to properly handle one, the cost of one negative review is outweighed by the benefit of many positive reviews. Plus, a mix of reviews can even strengthen your reputation, as it shows that you are a genuine and healthy company that has nothing to hide.

6. Increase Brand Awareness: When a user performs a search in an online business directory, it will display a list of relevant results, each with a brief snapshot so that you can decide which one to click on to learn more. This means that even if a user doesn’t click on your listing, they still see your business. Every encounter a person has with your business increases their awareness and familiarity with your brand, which warms them up for further engagement.

7. Boost Your SEO: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of providing your web content in such a way that search engines will favor it and rank it higher in results for applicable searches. A search engine wants to be trusted by its users, so the more information it can obtain about your website, and the more consistent that information is, the better you will rank. Online business listings are a great way to support and supplement your already existing information to give it that extra validation.

8. Show Up on Google: It is possible to get on the first page of Google through SEO practices, but it can take a few months to start seeing results. Online business directory sites, on the other hand, have been around for a while, have high amounts of traffic, and are for the most part trusted by search engines. Since Google likes these characteristics, its first page of search results regularly contains pages from online directories. If you get listed in an online business directory, you have a chance of benefiting from their well-established SEO and showing up on the first page of Google.

Having an online presence for your business is essential nowadays, as it will help your business get found online.

Sources:
Techwyse
Checkout Media
Localiq

About Janine Bryden

I started at Leads 2 Business in May 2022 as part of the L2Q Department, working in Directory specifically. I am lucky enough to be working with a group of wonderful people and look forward to growing in and with the company.

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27 Jul 2022

Why does IT ask you to clear your cache?

by Andile Shange | posted in: Did You Know | 0

Have you ever called into L2B with a website functionality query and our staff ask you to clear your cache? Ever wondered why we, or IT, ask you to do this?
Caching helps with data retrieval from websites that you have visited on a web browser. Cached data assist web pages to load faster, as a portion of its content gets saved on your hard drive when loading it for the first time. Depending on your web browser settings and the number of websites that you have visited, cached data can potentially use up a lot of your computer memory. Clearing your cache protects your personal information from being picked up by a hacker and helps your web browser to run expeditiously.

In many instances when troubleshooting a website issue, caching is usually the culprit that prevents a web page from loading correctly. For example, when a new version of a website is rolled out, the cached data from the old version can cause the new version not to load up correctly. In most cases just clearing your cache would resolve the issue as this action forces the web browser to pull down a new instance of the website.

Like many things, it’s about finding the right balance. Clearing your cache frequently is not recommended, as you lose all the data acquired from all the websites that you have visited. This is not exactly ideal because when visiting any of these websites again your web browser will re-download all the data again, hence increasing your web page loading time and probably using more of your data. So, it’s best to clear your cache when there is an issue or if you have not done so in a month.

Sources:
Viteom
Ionos

About Andile Shange

I'm a Software Developer at Leads 2 Business since 02 June 2014.

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6 Apr 2022

How Google Search Works

by Sasha Anderson | posted in: Did You Know | 0

There’s A LOT of information on the internet. Currently, there are around 1.18 billion websites in the World (01 Jan 2022). Search Engines make this info easier to find and are essential ‘answer machines’. Google isn’t the only search engine — there’s Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo and more so why the focus on Google? Simply put – no one does search better. In fact, Google is so iconic that it is often used in place of the word ‘search’, think of the phrases, “just google it” or “let me google it”. With a 92.47% market share as of 01 March 2022, Google dominates the search engine industry and with it’s bold mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

So how does Google Search work? Is it magic? Rocket science?

Google Search works in (basically) three stages:

Crawling: automated programs called crawlers search the web regularly looking for pages that are new or updated. The page addresses (or page URLs) are stored on a database for later.

Indexing: pages previously learned about during crawling are analysed to determine what the page is about this includes the content, images, and video files in/on the page. This info is stored in the index. Google’s Index contains over 130 trillion web pages.

After a page has been indexed and crawled, it is ready to appear on a search engine results page (SERP).

Results/Ranking: When a user performs a Google Search, Google tries to determine the highest quality results to display on the SERP. The “best” results have many factors, including things such as location, language, device, previous search history page quality and relevance and is done algorithmically.

Google uses an algorithm for determining results, like all other search engines, and shares some information about the algorithm, but the specifics are a company secret to reduce abuse of the system and stay competitive.

Search engines and all their beautiful complexity have completely changed how we access information – you can even list Googling as a skill on your CV. Don’t believe me? Google it.

Ps. Did you know “L2B’s search is a distributed, full-text search engine, or search and analytics database. Unlike traditional relational databases that store data in tables, Our search uses a key-value store for objects and is a lot more versatile. It can run queries much more complicated than traditional databases and do this at a petabyte-scale.” L2B’s Search was developed by our senior IT Dev Barry West.

For more on How Google Search works watch the below video.

Sources: Google

About Sasha Anderson

Millennial Mom + wife living the hash-tag life. Remember: If You Fail - Fail Forward

31 Mar 2022

L2B Opportunities created in the last 30 Days – March 2022

by Sasha Anderson | posted in: Did You Know | 0

Our comprehensive, online, resource platform delivers daily leads to help you make informed business decisions. Find construction Tenders and Projects within the building, infrastructure, mining, and industrial sectors. Opportunities are researched throughout South Africa and Africa. We put new business prospect leads within your reach.

Leads 2 Business Opportunities we have created in the last 30 Days: for more information check out our Pricing Page.

About Sasha Anderson

Millennial Mom + wife living the hash-tag life. Remember: If You Fail - Fail Forward

17 Feb 2022

Leads 2 Business is Mobile Friendly

by Sasha Anderson | posted in: Did You Know, Frequently Asked Questions | 0

Did you know Leads 2 Business has a Mobile Optimized Website?

What this means is that www.L2B.co.za has a dynamic mobile-friendly layout, accessing it from your Home screen can even become an app-like experience.

Whatever mobile device you’re using, you can pin a shortcut of L2B to your home screen for quick and easy access. The icon will appear on your home screen like any other app shortcut or widget, so you can drag it around and put it wherever you like. Creating a bookmark on your Homescreen lets you use it as a one-tap portal to access L2B content.

So what does this mean for you? It means you can access our site on all your devices.

Follow the steps below if you want to take advantage of L2B’s Mobile-Friendly website on your device.

For screenshots view our Wiki.

1. Open your Mobile Browser. This may be Chrome, Firefox or a built-in Browser.

2. Go to the website you want to save. You can either search for the website or enter its URL directly into the search bar.

3. Tap the three-dot menu ⋮. It’s at the top-right corner of Chrome.
4. Tap Add to Home screen. It’s toward the bottom of the menu. A pop-up window will appear.
Edit the shortcut title (if needed). This is the text that will appear under your shortcut’s icon on the home screen.
5. Tap Add. The shortcut is now on your home screen.
6. One-tap. And you can access L2B instantly, anytime.

If you are interested in becoming one of our subscribers, please visit our website.
To view notes with screenshots on how to use our website, please visit our Wiki site.
To view more articles, please visit our blog.

About Sasha Anderson

Millennial Mom + wife living the hash-tag life. Remember: If You Fail - Fail Forward

10 Nov 2021

Insurance: Do you have R20 million laying around?

by Antonette Claassens | posted in: Did You Know | 0

Would you buy a new car without taking out insurance?

Would you buy a house and not insure your asset or the contents of your home?

With that in mind, when you own your own business, you would need comprehensive insurance. You need to make sure that every aspect of your company is covered to prevent major financial loss should an incident occur.

Here are some policy sections to consider:

The building you are based at (owned or rented, add subsidence and landslip cover if needed)
The contents of the building (furniture, electronic equipment, all risks for laptops, tablets & phones. Fixtures and fittings fall under the building insurance. Be sure to look out of any exclusions or limitations like a power surge or accidental damage cover)
Your employees (workman’s compensation)
The equipment and plant used on site
Comprehensive vehicle insurance which allows for staff to drive (it would be beneficial to look at car hire cover & excess waiver as well)
The work itself (construction/performance guarantee)
Liability insurance should an unexpected incident occur

Making sure every aspect is covered, will ensure that you are at ease and under less stress when you are working on a project. Ask your broker to do a comprehensive inspection at your premises that way leaving no stone unturned.

This will give you peace of mind allowing you to focus on your projects and deadlines and not on all that can possibly go wrong.

The majority of tenders require proof of liability upfront. This usually equates to 30 -70% of the contract value. In some cases, it is 2 – 3 times the value of the contract.

If you do not have a comprehensive commercial insurance policy, do you have at least R20 million gathering dust? In today’s economic climate, you can’t afford the risk.

It is usually easier, safer and much more sensible to have liability cover in place. Give it some thought, as this all might save your company huge amounts of time, money and stress in the future.

May you invest in your own company, to better your future and the lives of those you employ.

Not sure where to go from here? Click this option on your tender to obtain a no-obligation quote today.

Image Source: Pexels

About Antonette Claassens

I am a fanatical researcher who takes immense pride in the information I publish and those all-important finer details. When I'm not "researching up a storm", I love the ocean, fab music, and fine dining.

7 Oct 2021

Quick Fact – What is an API?

by Sasha Anderson | posted in: Did You Know | 0

What exactly is an API? You make mention of this at a dinner party and you are likely to hear a pin drop! This is strongly contrasted in tech circles and management meetings where APIs are valuable and possess a positive impact for businesses. So, what is the real definition of an API?

An API stands for Application Programming Interface.

An API is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other. Think of the API as a messenger that delivers your request to the provider that you’re requesting it from. Then it delivers the reply back to you. What is important about this process is that the API defines functionalities that are independent of their respective implementations. This allows those implementations and definitions to vary without compromising each other.