By Shawna Armstrong

My favorite personal sourcing success stories are the ones I pieced together by following the crumbs through a combination of trails.  Like that time I went from a LinkedIn email bounce-back for an inactive work address, to a Facebook profile showing new City, State and employer, to the company website locations tab, to Google Maps to see which branch was closest to his home, to the company directory, to cold calling the branch and asking for him.

Or the time I found local competitors on Google Maps and found employee names in the company reviews, on the company website About Us page, and in company key word searches on multiple platforms, and then sourced contact info on truepeoplesearch.com or thatsthem.com.

There are strategies to narrow down search results when you get too many, and here’s a combo to try if you need more results because you’re not getting enough.  Try expanding your search strings with key word generators like SourceHub or http://booleansearch.nl/ and then expanding your Google search results using the images option, which is an entirely different database.  Happy searching.