DEV Community: Vikesh Tiwari

[2021] The ultimate guide to Hyperlocal lead generation

Vikesh Tiwari — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 11:27:49 +0000

In this article, we are going to see how to do hyperlocal lead generation using Google Maps and TexAu and generate hundreds of leads every week. Is your product or service targeting local businesses like restaurants, bars, hotels, grocery stores, car washing, or real estate agents? Then this is a must-read guide for you.

Make sure to grab a coffee and don’t forget to note anything that you find interesting. You must try these ideas at least once and in case if you need help with anything I will be there to help always.

Are you ready?

Total time to read this guide: 8 Minutes.

Total time to implement the strategy and generate hundreds of leads right away: 15 Mins

Let’s get started.

What is Hyperlocal lead generation?

Hyperlocal lead generation is a super targeted form of lead generation that targets local businesses, services in a local area or a city.

If you are into B2B lead generation, marketing services or your product offers services to local businesses, you must learn how to target local businesses using the data present on the web. Every local service provider wants to grow their business and if you can know the exact technique to reach out to local businesses and show how you can help them, you and the service provider will grow together. 🙂

Lead generation strategy is all about reaching out to high-quality leads with the right data. The problem is, all the data like email address, contact information, website links, and other important data is scattered at multiple places, like Google maps, business websites, and social media pages.

What is TexAu?

TexAu is a growth automation platform that can collect, automate, extract data from the web and other social media platforms. The best part is you can also create cross-platform automations using TexAu. We are going to use this tool to automate most of our work in this lead generation process.

You hire a VA to find all the businesses in your area which are a good fit for your services and spend countless hours collecting, filtering, and cleaning your data to start your cold email or call outreach.

Well, there is a better way to do this work and get a final CSV with all the email and phone numbers at the end. This whole work will take just 15–20 minutes of your time and the only work for your VA at the end is going to be

TexAu is what you need 🙂

Are you ready to see how?

This is going to be a four-step process, the total time to complete — 15 minutes.

How to use Google Maps listing to find all the local services
How to enrich the data collected from Google Maps listing
How to validate the email and phone numbers
How to start cold call and outreach to close deals faster

Let’s see the first step

How to use Google Maps listing to find all local services?

When you search “Restaurants in Beverly Hills CA”, Google maps shows you all the restaurants available in that area. One page contains 20 listings and depending on how many restaurants are available, Google maps shows you up to 200 listings for each location. As you can see in the image below:

Listings on Google Maps

Now, when you click on any listed restaurant, you will see all the details about that restaurant which include, name, description, rating, address, website, and phone number.

Complete data present on each listing

All these details are very important for us to target the right restaurants which may show interest in our services. You can target high-rated restaurants in a different way (getting more traction, ads, new goal) and restaurants with low ratings with a different purpose (building their brand, growing business, etc).

This applies to all other types of businesses as well. The trick that I will be showing you here, will work for all kinds of local businesses. Now let’s see how to extract all the listings quickly and effortlessly using TexAu

Step 1: Preparing a Google sheet with all the search terms

As we need to find the listings in our area, the first very thing we need to do is, prepare a list of search links in a Google sheet.

Just open and paste search links, for example — restaurants in Los Angeles, Hotels in San Francisco, real estate agent in New York, car washing in Miami.

Copy the search URL and paste that into the Google sheet.

Here is a template that you can use: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XwiVpUJIpuNReRXMfLuQS1RGxeolCXUeBfbNdi9YXH8/edit?usp=sharing

You can add up to 20 search terms in your Google sheet. Each search will bring up to 200 listings depending on how many listings are present for the search terms on Google maps.

Once your Google sheet is ready, we have completed Step 1.

📣 Total time for this work: 5 Mins

Step 2: Extracting all the listings from Google Maps

Now, we are going to use simple automation and extract all the listings present for each search term on Google maps. We are going to use TexAu for it.

If you don’t have an account, signup and create an account on TexAu. You get 2 weeks of free trial with access to all the features.

Login to TexAu and select “Google Maps extractor”, you can also click on this direct link — https://app.texau.com/api/google-maps-search-extractor

Click on the Google sheet icon and paste your Google sheet. Map the column which contains the search term and if you have headers, then check this box.

Click submit and it will start the automation.

In just a few minutes, TexAu will extract all the listings available on Google maps for each search term and you will be able to view results on the results page.

Most of the businesses mention their phone numbers, address, website, and email address as well. You can directly make use of this data and start your lead generation work.

With this, in one run, you will get up to 20*200 = 4000 listings which means 4000+ business owners' details with phone numbers, addresses, and all other details.

📣 Total time for this work: 8 Mins

In case, if you are interested in getting more data then let’s do step 3.

Enriching Google Maps data further using TexAu

Now that we have all the details from Google Maps listing that includes website and phone numbers, let’s see what we can do further to enrich this data and get more details about the businesses. We will be using a Website URL to enrich all the other details about the business.

Here is how the flow can look like, you can decide what you want to find and run that automation.

TexAu has separate guides and videos on how to run these automations so you can watch that. Here I will cover why this is important and how it will help us in segmenting our leads.

You have phone numbers from Google Maps listing but it is not enough to categorize and filter potential leads depending on how big or small they are. Using website domain URL, we can take the enrichment work further and collect lots of details about a business.

Let’s go over these automations quickly and understand their meanings.

Meta tags Extractor

Meta tags are very important on any website, it shows what the website is about. Meta title and description show how text and title will be shown when the website URL is shared on any social media platform.

This is how meta tags look like when you view the source code of a website.

Using a Meta tags extractor we can find all the basic details about a business. The description is very important here and it will have keywords that they want to focus on — Run Meta Tags Extractor On TexAu

Extract Emails from the website

This is very important as phone numbers may not be always enough unless you are only cold calling. Cold calling works well in the case of local lead generation but you can also do cold emails. Big clients may not respond to your calls but emails will work in this case.

Extract emails automation opens the website and tries to find any email present on the website. This is extremely powerful and useful automation, not just for hyperlocal lead generation but even if you just have a domain for any particular work, you can enrich that data using this.

Let’s see how to run this automation.

Visit this page and open Extract Emails from Website automation – https://app.texau.com/api/extract-emails-from-website

Click on Google Sheet, paste the sheet URL and click run. You can check this guide on how to use CSV or Google Sheet on TexAu – https://texau.app/help/getting-started/how-to-use-google-sheet-with-texau-spices

Upload Google Sheet on TexAu

That’s all, keep it running, you can come back later and see all the emails it grabbed from all the websites 😉

You don’t need to keep the browser open, TexAu Cloud runs on the server.

Most of these emails are verified and valid as we got these from the websites, but you can also verify emails using TexAu Email verifier. Just to be sure all the emails are valid.

Extract Social Media Links from Websites

This is the last part of our website enrichment work but a very important one.

It is nice to see how active and big a potential lead is. You can create different segments on all the factors including their social media presence – likes, followers, company size, and total employees. So the idea here is, we first find all the social media links present on the website and later using other automations to scrape the About us page from Facebook, Instagram Profile, YouTube channel, or LinkedIn Company page. Depending on what kind of businesses you are targeting they may or may not be present on LinkedIn and YouTube.

I hope you understood the logic here, it’s all about collecting more data and segmenting our leads here 🙂

Running this automation is simple, I showed you how to use Google Sheet already. Visit this URL and run this automation — https://app.texau.com/api/extract-social-media-links-from-website

Once you get social media links, you can use the following automations to scrape Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, and YouTube.

Facebook About Us Page Scraper – https://app.texau.com/api/extract-company-facebook-about-page
Instagram Profile Scraper – https://app.texau.com/api/scrape-an-instagram-profile
LinkedIn Company Page Scraper – https://app.texau.com/api/scrape-a-linkedin-company-page
YouTube Channel Details Extractor – https://app.texau.com/api/scrape-a-youtube-channel

You may need a proxy when you are running social media automations on TexAu Cloud. You can use the TexAu Desktop app to run automation on your computer, it does not require a proxy 🙂

This covers our enrichment work.

After all this work you will have tons of data about businesses in your area, their email address, phone numbers, social media pages, and how big or small they are.

How to do cold outreach to close deals faster

I have already prepared a few cold email and cold calling templates for you. You can use any cold outreach platform you like, Reply.io is a good cold outreach tool that offers both email and phone. You can find many other tools including Reply.io at cheaper prices on AppSumo ( Deal may have expired if you're reading this later)

What can I do more?

One last thing, before you reach out to leads, you can create some engagement by liking, commenting on their posts on Facebook and Instagram. You can also send connection requests on LinkedIn and connect with the owner there.

Automations for all these activities are available on TexAu. It is one of the most beneficial tools for all agencies and SaaS products for lead generation. Don’t forget to give it a try and automate all your work.

Thank you for reading this article. I hope you found this useful.

I share new automation threads every day on Twitter, make sure to follow me on Twitter 🙂

@iamvikeshtiwari on Twitter

Community for Dev Jobs and Internships

Vikesh Tiwari — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 06:17:32 +0000

Back in 2015, I had started Eulercoder, one of the developers community to build projects, do open source development, participate in Competitive Programming and discuss jobs.

But, due to time constraints I decided to shutdown the community.

Since 2017, I’m building on my startup and it is growing quite well, here I am, coming back to the place where it all started, it’s true we come back to the origin again and again from where it all started, and history rewinds itself back.

Today, I’m happy to announce that we are launching the Coder’s Club, a place for developers and students to come together and discuss all things related to hiring, internships, programming, hackathon, and Open Source projects.

We are also going to launch Monthly contests with prizes up to $1000 to the top 3 performers.
It also includes monthly Open Source projects as well.
We are also going to organize Grand Hackathon every year with prize up to $10,000 and full-time offers from multiple companies.

More details can be found here: The Coder's Club on Facebook [ No Fee, No extra steps, all dev.to members can get in ASAP]

Let’s bring a community of devs at one place and work together in growing everyone together 🙂

Any questions?

Please drop comments and I will be happy to answer all your questions.

~
Vikesh

Launching a product? See how we made $450K in the first two months

Vikesh Tiwari — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 04:45:00 +0000

It’s been almost a year now and I still get questions on how was the launch of TexAu on AppSumo, why did I decide to do a lifetime deal of TexAu, how to make a successful product launch and what problems did I face.

In this guide, I’m going to share everything that I have learned in the past 10 months after launching our first product and generating $450K in total revenue and over 5000+ customers in just 2 months. Make sure to grab a coffee and open your notebook to write the points or simply bookmark this page right away to come back and refer to the content when you’re launching your product.

So…

How to make a successful product launch

We are going to divide this guide into three sections,

what we should do 3-4 months before the launch,
what we should be doing during the launch, and,
what we should do after the launch to retain the customers.

Let’s start with the pre-launch preparation

The most important Google Sheet functions I use every day

Vikesh Tiwari — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 13:52:00 +0000

Google sheet is the most powerful, flexible, and possibly the best cloud CRM you can use. By using different add-ons and functions in Google sheet, you can achieve basically everything that you want to with your data.

I’m going to write a series of articles on Google sheets and how to expand it further with all the powerful add-ons and functions it supports. We are also going to automate a lot of work using App Scripts and other automation tools that connect with Google sheet. So let’s get started 🎉

As the title says, one of the most important functions that I use frequently, almost every day is the CONCATENATE function in Google sheet, which is used to combine two cells together. Let’s see all the things it can do:

What is the CONCATENATE function?

CONCATENATE function is used to join two strings together. For example, if you want to join words and make "Welcome to That Automation Guy!" you can do that using CONCATENATE like this:

CONCATENATE("Welcome"," ", "to", " ", "That Automation", " ", "Guy!")

When you can run this function in Google Sheets, you can see the output in the cell as shown below,

You can also join cells together, like =CONCATENATE(A1, A2, A3) and it will join these cells together.

Before I show you a more advanced part with CONCATENATE, you should know how to add new lines with the CONCATENATE function.

How to add a new line with CONCATENATE function

When using the CONCATENATE function, at places you will need to add new lines and you can do that using CHAR(10) function.

Something like this:

Why we use CHAR(10) to add new lines with CONCATENATE?

A new line is also known as Line Feed. The Decimal for a Line Feed is 10 as shown in the image. You can read more about this Unicode Control Code here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters#Control_codes

CHAR( ) function converts a number into a character according to the current Unicode table. That’s the reason we use CHAR(10) to add news lines in Google Sheets.

We are using to use these two messages to dynamically prepare messages or emails based on keywords in other cells. Using a Simple Google Sheet, you can personalize your messages and emails for lead generation.

INDIRECT will make your life a lot easier

The INDIRECT function returns a reference to a range. The INDIRECT function does not evaluate logical tests or conditions. This function helps lock the specified cell in a formula. The benefit of this is, we can change a cell reference within a formula without changing the formula itself.

One advantage of this function is that the indirect references won’t change even when new rows or columns are inserted in our Google Sheet.

Let’s see a few examples to understand INDIRECT:

Suppose A1 = 43 and using the INDIRECT function, we give reference A1 as shown below to C1 using INDIRECT(“A1”)
When I write the formula INDIRECT(“D”&4) it gets converted to D4, as you can see in the attached Google Sheet, the D4 value is 90, so the value in the formula is shown as 40.
When I write the formula INDIRECT(“C” & ROW( ) ) we are referencing to the column and using the ROW( ) function, it returns the current ROW value which is 5, so the value becomes C5.

You can use INDIRECT in multiple ways, to read more about INDIRECT function, refer to this guide - https://infoinspired.com/google-docs/spreadsheet/google-sheets-indirect-function-examples-usage/

REGEXMATCH helps you easily match values

REGEXMATCH is used to match any plain text in word, sentence, or phrase.

Let’s see a few examples to easily understand this formula:

Say, a Text in Cell A1 is — That Automation Guy! Formula: =REGEXMATCH(A1, "Guy") And it will return TRUE.
Now let’s change our formula to this — =REGEXMATCH(A1, "[a-z]") Now it checks whether A1 cell contains any small characters from a to z. And as our text contains a few small characters, it will return TRUE.

You can use this Regex maker website to easily make complex Regex functions – https://regexr.com/

Now, it is time to combine all these three functions and make a powerful Google Sheet template which will help us dynamically generate personalized messages.

Personalized Email and LinkedIn Messages using a simple Google Sheet and Formulas

Ian from Hyperise helped me build this Sheet, all credits to Ian for his awesome work.

As you can see in the image above, the first section of the Google Sheet, helps you modify the text and also add condition-based text for example, if the location for someone is Mumbai the message will say “a fellow Mumbaikar” and if the headline says “Growth” then the message will be personalized to “someone responsible for growth”.

There is a total of 3 sheets, the first sheet helps you prepare your message, the send sheet contains sample data and the third one contains the final sheet of all the data you can extract from TexAu.

Watch this video to understand all the parts of this template:

Email and LinkedIn Message Template - Google Sheets — Watch Video

You can use TexAu — https://www.texau.com to extract profiles from LinkedIn or Sales Navigator Search and paste everything to this Google Sheet.

I hope you found this post interesting and useful.

In the next post, I will learn how to use Google Sheet as your central CRM to store all your contacts automatically, including from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Email.

Before that guide, I will also share Behind the scenes of what was happening last week at my apartment and how I moved all my stuff to a new apartment including all the Furniture 🪑, 🛌 in just $75 USD 😉

Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to receive all new guides, hacks, and behind the scenes of — That Automation Guy! We are running a discount for early adopters and it is only $100 / year.

📣 Lastly, if you need that Google sheet template, join the “That Automation Guy!” group and comment “interested” on the pinned post. 📣

That Automation Guy on Facebook

Any questions, feedback, and thoughts on this guide?

Drop your comment and let’s talk 🙏

The Ultimate Internship Guide

Vikesh Tiwari — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 02:45:56 +0000

Originally published at my [Eulercoder.me] blog, blog is no long active.

Hola!

As a student, each one of us has a dream. Dream of doing a great internship and landing a job in a company that you really love and want to work for! There are jazillion websites, articles, blog posts and videos available on how to land an internship. Chances are, you already read or know 98 percent of this advice: edit and proofread your resume and cover letters, dress appropriately for an interview, be on time or 15 minutes early to an interview, send thank you notes etc. You won't get any such advice here. This post will take you from zero to one. Get a notebook and pen, this is going to be a long post. Grab some snacks and start making a note of points that you think would be helpful for you in the future.

I'm assuming you are currently in the second year and you'll be applying for your dream internship in the third year. You already know C/C++ or any object-oriented programming knowledge and basics data structures like Linked List, Stack, Queues, etc.

Let's divide this post into three sections.

Things you need to do before applying for an internship.

Most of the US-based companies start their summer internship interview process very early, in December. After your fourth semester that is the completion of the second year, you'll have 1.5-2 months of vacation (depends on your college) and that's the perfect time to improve your basics of computer science and coding skills.

I interviewed with 5-6 companies and from my experience here is the list of topics you should know (if you haven't decided your field).

Data Structure	Algorithms	Networking	Operating System	Database
Linked List	Complexity Analysis	Network Layer	Process and Threads	SQL Query
Doubly Linked List	Searching (Linear and Binary)	HTTP Protocol	Memory Organization	Indexing
Queue	Sorting Algorithms	TCP & UDP Protocol	Booting Process	Normalization
Stack	Basics of Graphs	Subnetting	Paging	ACID Property
Hash Table	BFS and DFS	Masking	Deadlock	SQL Injection and Prevention
Binary Tree	KMP Algorithm	SMTP and POP3	Starvation
Binary Search Tree	Robin-Karp Algorithm	Working of PING	Critical Section
Priority Queue	Dijkstra's Algorithm	TCP Handshake	IPC
Trie	Prim's Algorithm		Inode
Suffix Tree	Divide & Conquer and DP

But Vicky, I would be applying for position specific internship. Where is my list?

Here you go!

Frontend Devs	Backend Stuff	Android Devs	iOS Devs (I don't know much)
HTML5	HTML	Java	Objective C
CSS3	CSS	Android Versions and changes	Swift
JavaScript	Server configs	Working with Android Studio	App Store Guidelines
JQuery	Working with APIs	Android UI and UX	Common App Rejections
Saas	Chrome Dev Tools	Best Practices
React	Python, PHP or Ruby
Angular
Chrome Dev Tools

I'm not listing here very basic stuff like Working with Ubuntu, Curl and telnet command, etc.

Note: You don't need to do know everything mentioned in the table above. Algorithm and Data structure is very important to crack any interview so you should spend most of the time learning and practicing problems.

Vicky, That's a huge list! Are there any good resources available?

Yes! All the useful websites, PDFs and article links are mentioned at the end of the post.

Getting shortlisted for the interviews is the toughest part and for that, your resume should be very strong and of very high quality. So what are the different factors that the recruiter would love to see on your resume?

College
Projects

Yes, before applying for an internship make sure that you have some good quality projects to mention in your resume. Upload your code on Github, make it open source and add links to code in your resume. If you're searching for project ideas, I have a list of more than 500 projects.
Open Source Contributions

Search for good projects to contribute on Github improve documentation and fix bugs and do some enhancements. Companies really love it! If you don't have a good GPA then projects and open source contributions really add value to your resume.
Past internships (If any)

Before applying to top companies in US or India, you should do at least one internship in any startup. Startup internships are really a great place to learn a lot of things in a very short time. Don't think of stipend, if you really love their idea just mail and ask them about internship positions. There are many websites available for startup internships list of websites can be found at the bottom of the post.
Leadership Qualities

Volunteer in a non-profit organization and be a part of college committees.
Programming Skills
GPA (rare)

Things you need to do while applying

Ok, now you have some good quality projects, you know basics of CS fundamentals and you have a good knowledge of data structure and algorithms. This is time to write a good resume!

Your resume should have the following sections.

Education
Degree and stream, College Name, Current year and graduation year. Don't include your GPA if it's less than 7/10.
Skills
Be honest here and mention languages and framework only if you really know. Once you get shortlisted for the interviews, a recruiter may ask any questions on that and you'll be messed up badly.
Technical Experience (If you have any)
Write sentences in past tense. Use words like 'created', 'implemented', 'designed', 'fixed'.
Implemented X using Y or Implemented X using Y to fix Z. Where X = any new feature, Y = language or framework, and Z = issue.
Projects
Same points apply to project as well. Don't forget to add links of code or websites if you have any.
Open Source Contributions (If you have any)
Mention what projects you have contributed to, what your contribution was and provide links to your commits so that recruiters can easily verify your contributions and have a look at your code.
Leadership Experience
Add your volunteering or committee work in this section.
Extra-Curricular
All your competitive programming rankings, awards and hackathon related stuff goes here.
Work Authorization
You'll be applying to US-based companies so don't forget to add this line.

This is my resume (Oct'17), have a look at it once. You can use cls code to create similar resume.

Once you created your resume, proofread it 2-3 times. Ask your friends and employees to go through your resume and finally post your resume here. This subreddit is awesome and people are very helpful. It'll be brutal but they'll critique your resume brilliantly.

Now you have a very good resume and you know all the basics of CS. The time has come to apply for the best of the best internships!

This is the right time!

Yes! This is December and the Internship process for the next summer has just started. I have already created a sheet for you! Open this sheet and make a copy for yourself. Edit companies as per your preferences.

Apply everywhere! Don't think that you don't have a perfect resume, just visit their career website or LinkedIn internship posts and fill the form. I applied to more than 20 companies in Summer 16 and interviewed with 12. I'll write that story in a separate post. :)

Once you get shortlisted for the interviews search everywhere about past internship interview process, questions on Glassdoor, Geeksforgeeks and reddit. When I got shortlisted for the internship at Slack, I searched everywhere about interview process and questions asked. I couldn't find any except a post on reddit. If you don't find anything and just goto this sub and post questions or search for past interns on LinkedIn add them in your profile and message them directly. Three out of ten people will give you perfect reply and this is enough for you!

Some tips from my side:

Read emails properly and search for keywords.
Be prepared for technical questions which don't require programming knowledge.
Be polite while responding to emails. (Search how to send emails to recruiters :p)
Before interviews read the email properly and make a list of all the questions that can be asked.
Make a list of all the behavioral questions and their answers.

Resources

Intern Supply

Intern.supply

For startup internships

Algorithms and Data Structure

Geeksforgeeks (Website).
The Algorithm Design Manual (Book - PDF)
LeetCode (For Practice)
TopCoder (For Practice)
Elements of Programming Interviews (Book) Amazon
Coding Interview Questions by Narasimha Karumanchi Amazon

Networking

Operating System

Operating system concepts (Book - PDF)

Web Stuff

FreeCodeCamp
Best JavaScript tutorial (It's a Russian website use Chrome to translate)
W3Schools

Interview preparation

Other

Awesome (This contains everything you need!)

Last thing:

Keep talking and asking to people who have more knowledge than you, networking is really important.

P.S. : Please post suggestions or any questions regarding internship, interview or resume here, that will help everyone!

Disclaimer: I am not a recruiter or a brilliant coder who works in your dream company. I am a student just like you and I have spent last two months searching for the internship blogs, articles and interview experiences. I applied to more than twenty companies for summer internship and interviewed with some top companies and I interned at Slack in S'16. Read and follow things mentioned in this post at your own risk!

Have questions or anything related to this post 👉🏻 Join the conversation on Twitter!