Leads 2 Business Blog

6 Feb 2024

Open Opportunities Today

by Sasha Anderson | posted in: Construction Chat | 2

Are you open to opportunities?

The Building and Construction marketplace is becoming increasingly competitive and commands that companies go the extra mile to stand out from the crowd.

“Where do I start?” The question we get so often. The best answer is really, what do you do and where do you do it? Our service offerings can be used by almost anyone in the Construction industry. Yes, Professionals, Contractors, Sub Contractors, Vendors, Suppliers and Manufacturers. Everyone fits in in a different way; depending on the size of the contracts you normally take on and the regions you work in, you will look at different types of leads.

Enter the Leads 2 Business Directory and Open Quotes

Our Directory is like the Yellow Pages of the Construction Industry. You can search Companies, Services, Products and People. Our Directory is used by people in (and out of actually) the Construction industry to source contacts. Main Contractors use this same Directory to send electronic price requests to their Preferred Suppliers and can select from a list of relevant Vendors, Suppliers and Subcontractors. On the other side Vendors/Suppliers/Subcontractors register on our Directory (for FREE) to gain exposure for their business and elect to receive e-RfQ’s to price, market and build relationships with Main Contractors. Being registered on our Directory as a Vendor, Supplier or Subcontractor enables passive marketing and when used proactively can result in a successful pipeline of leads. Businesses can also actively market through Open Quotes by seeing which Contractors are currently pricing Bills (BoQ’s) that have matching trades and regions and submit pricing directly. In addition to this, Open Quotes subscribers can actively view matching Award Notifications and submit pricing to the Main Contractor(s) that are awarded the Contract.

All of this info is viewed, submitted and stored online.

Why online you may ask? Pricing online not only improves your visibility but provides yet another opportunity to outperform your competitors as well as save time, providing centralised storage and easy accessibility. Simply put, it’s easier, faster and more reliable!

Sound like something you’d use to grow your business? Register for one of our paid Services here

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 Sasha Anderson

Millennial Mom + wife living the hash-tag life. Reach out if you want to talk: L2B, social media, construction, technology, marriage, parenting, popular culture and travel. Remember: If You Fail - Fail Forward

25 Aug 2022

How To: Price RFQ’s Now via Tenders & Projects

by Sasha Anderson | posted in: The How to Series | 0

A quick 2m 32s video tutorial from “The How-To Series”

Search for Pricing Opportunities (Projects only) and Price Now Opportunities (Projects & Tenders). For the screen-shot version view Pricing Opportunities Search Filter.

Do you have a ‘How To’ you’d like us to cover? Leave a comment and let us know.

Check out more content here

To view more from our How-To Series, please visit Leads 2 Business Blog.
If you are interested in becoming one of our subscribers, please visit Leads 2 Business.
To view our Wiki Help with screenshots and video tutorials, please visit Leads 2 Business Wiki.

About Sasha Anderson

18 Aug 2022

What can you do with Google other than Googling?

by Shanelle Naidoo | posted in: General | 0

What can you can do with Google other than googling?

Below are a few fun things you can do with Google, other than just searching.

First off, it might not be a Google App, but thought it needs an honourable mention. You know that one friend that is all was asking you how to do things and you keep telling them to google it, well there is LMGTFY – short for Let Me Google That For You, for this. Yes, It’s as the name says, except it will teach them how to google as well.

The next one is elgooG. This one is also not part of Google, but has a lot of the Easter Eggs Google has removed. This website is dedicated to keeping all the “killed” Easter Eggs by Google ‘Just for fun’ as it has been put on the website.

Need to find what you need quicker? This is more along the lines of how to search with Google.

site: l2b.co.za – add ‘site:’ and then the website URL with what you are looking for into the Google search bar and Google will only search the content for that site. l2b.co.za was used here as an example, but this would only search l2b.co.za for whatever it is that you are searching for.
“” – When you put inverted commas around one or more words in the search bar, Google will make sure it only, at a minimum, finds things that match exactly what’s between the inverted commas, for example, The “cow jumped” over the moon, Google will make sure that your search results will at least have “cow jumped” somewhere on the web page.
-(dash, minus, hyphen, whatever you would like to call it) – you put this in front of words that you don’t want to be included in your search results. Like ‘South African Rugby -Zealand’ would make it so that you don’t have to read about our recent loss to them.
~(Tilde) – This will also search for related words, like ~higher education will include university in the search.
.. (double full stop) – put this between years and it will only find things that were created that year. For example ‘2010..2020’ would find all content created between 2010 and 2020.

So that next time you are battling to find what you need try adding one or more of these little helpers to get what you are searching for.

Did you know Google has some ‘extra’ languages that you can use other than the normal English? There are 5 fun ones:

Klingon – This is a very nerdy one and is a language from Start Trek
Bork, bork, bork! – This is one from Sesame Street
Pirate – Shiver me timbers, I’m sure you can guess what this one is
Elmer Fudd – for anyone who grew up with loony toons, you will know this one
Pig Latin – If you don’t know this one, then I don’t know what you were doing in school
Hacker – The Last one is a bit more modern and one I have been having a bit of fun with lately, just be warned, I’m still trying to decipher some of these words.

These will change the language settings for google, it will not affect the language of the websites you visit, and you can find them in the language setting for your google account. The links here will just give you some help choosing which one you might want.

Want to play a board game but someone has lost the Die? not to worry, Google has you covered. Google ‘roll dice’ and you will have what you need. You can roll one or more different types of die and the family board game evening has been saved.

Feeling really stressed, don’t know where to start, need to take a breather? Don’t worry Google has something for you too. Google “breathing exercise” and Google will help with a 1-minute breathing exercise so that you are in a nice calm place before you send out all those lmgtfy’s.

Do you ever miss your DVD player screensaver? Well Google can help you to fill that void. Search ‘DVD screensaver’, wait a few seconds and your void will be filled. The Google logo in the left-hand corner will become your DVD screensaver.

Are you really jonesing for that Pacman fix? Google ‘pacman’, click play and away you go, playing Pacman around the Google logo, fixing your withdrawal symptoms outside of company working hours.

Want to watch google do the Cha Cha Slide? Search ‘Cha Cha Slide’ click the mic and then keep clicking and watch Google shake it.

Got a very important decision to make, but just can’t find the coin you need, and trust me crypto coins don’t work. Google ‘Flip a coin’ and now you and Two-Face can carry on doing what you need to do.

Lastly, an awesome one to do with Google Maps. You can see a time-lapse of the earth from 1984 until now. There are a few different types of time lapses, changing forests and warming of the planet to name a few. This will show you changes to the earth over time.

There are a lot more fun things to do on Google. Comment your favourite below.

About Shanelle Naidoo

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23 Jun 2022

How To: Search for Pricing Opportunities

by Sasha Anderson | posted in: The How to Series | 0

A quick 1m 24s video tutorial from “The How-To Series”

Search for Pricing Opportunities (Projects only) and Price Now Opportunities (Projects & Tenders). For the screen-shot version view Pricing Opportunities Search Filter.

Do you have a ‘How To’ you’d like us to cover? Leave a comment and let us know.

Check out more content here

About Sasha Anderson

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

9 Sep 2021

Infographic: How to make the most of our Tenders?

by Sasha Anderson | posted in: Infographic | 0

Get tender opportunities for your business through our extensive resource of online tender notices.

Leads 2 Business provides a cost-effective and time-saving solution that is available to you without the overhead of a research team or subscriptions to multiple tender resources. Our scalable subscription packages mean that whether you are starting out small or an industry giant, we have a solution that suits the scope of your business needs.
View our infographic on How to make the most of our Tenders and Subscribe today to take advantage of all the benefits.

About Sasha Anderson

4 Feb 2021

L2B New Search 2021

by Sasha Anderson | posted in: The How to Series | 0

Welcome to the New L2B Search that has been developed with feedback from subscribers over the past few years. In this blog, we are going to cover the new features of the Search. Most of the features on our previous search page are still available in the new L2B Search. If you have any additional questions or need further assistance please contact us via email, live support, phone or using our contact form.

(Duration 3m 15s)

To view more from our How To Series, please visit Leads 2 Business Blog.
If you are interested in becoming one of our subscribers, please visit Leads 2 Business.
To view our Wiki Help with screenshots and video tutorials, please visit Leads 2 Business Wiki.

About Sasha Anderson

9 Dec 2020

L2B New Search

by Sasha Anderson | posted in: The How to Series | 0

Welcome to the New L2B Search that has been developed with feedback from subscribers over the past few years. In this blog, we are going to cover the new features of the Search. Most of the features on our previous search page are still available in the new L2B Search. If you have any additional questions or need further assistance please contact us via email, live support, phone or using our contact form.

When you access the Search (for the first time) you will notice a pop-up requesting you to Enable/Allow Location permissions. You will need to click Allow in order to be able to use the new Location functionality correctly. If you Block this permission the search will still continue but may produce irrelevant results as the Location filter will not included in the search algorithm.
If you clear your Browser Cache, Cookies & History at any point you will be required to Allow this again as all your preferences will be disabled.

Technical Tip: When accessing L2B you need to have the latest version for browsers such as Edge, Chrome or Firefox.

Layout

The search page basic layout is as follows. Clicking the Leads 2 Business logo will take you to your Dashboard/Homepage.

Icons and Menus

indicates the Hamburger button for Search Filters. So named for its unintentional resemblance to a hamburger, its function is to toggle the search filter bar between being collapsed behind the button or displayed on the screen (expanded).

The filters display as follows if expanded:

The filters also include a new Location Filter which uses your enabled location to search for leads relevant to the radius from your location

The search icon/button which can be used in conjunction with filters and/or keyword searches

The keyword search text box where you can enter your relevant keywords

The reset icon/button which can be used at any time to clear all filters and keywords and reset your search

Search Hints assist you with additional search functionality

The subscriber menu which allows you to open your personalised pages

the page size drop-down which you can use to change the page size of results

the ordered by filter which you can use to change how your results are ordered

Your Download format shortcuts and Settings

The actions drop-down which you can use to tag, dismiss, monitor and unmonitor selected items

the found items indicator/counter

which looks as follows when doing a search, here we are also showing the keyword search which you can clear by selecting the X.

Page numbers display at the top and bottom of the search page

Selected item indicators. Items can be deselected by clicking on the relevant X.

the Select All function which allows you to select all the leads on a selected page

Performing Searches

Keywords Search Suggest or Autocomplete is an L2B search engine function that provides suggestions to users as they enter their search query into the search box. This search takes into account newest, relevance, views and will also assist if you make spelling errors.

Partial contract numbers will also provide suggested results:

When selecting an item from the list of suggested results that item will open to the relevant lead (tender, project or directory) view page thereby assisting with search efficiency.

Discover Linked Items are related to your search results and click on the items to discover more

Reminder

Less is more, for example instead of searching for “private hospital musina extension 13” try “private hospital musina”.

View Linked Items on Companies

To view linked leads on Companies (this includes company levels like Division, Branch and Contact) you need to search for the company and click on the discover icon via the search page:

Which will open on a new tab to show results for linked items:

No Results

When searching with a keyword/text and there are no results the following page will appear.

Clicking View Suggestions will remove all filters from the search in order to try and provide more results and also attempt to determine what you are looking for by expanding the criteria to include possible spelling mistakes amongst other things. If no additional results are available then it’s best to try another search using different keywords or simpler terms.

Below is another example of no results but on the second screenshot showing the View suggestion results:

Directory Tip

When searching using phone numbers all these formats should produce results if the phone number is listed on L2B: “0027 00 000 0000″,”0027000000000″,”+27 00 000 0000″,”+27000000000″,”27 00 000 0000″,”27000000000″,”000 000 0000″,”0000000000″,”000 000 0000″,”0000000000”