IE Business Daily Business news for the Inland Empire.
iebusinessdaily.com is the first site that comes up on the global search engine if you’re looking for business news in the Inland Empire. Making that happen involved finding solid news content, the correct search term and designing a site people wanted to use, according to the man who put it all together.
Nearly two years after its launch, iebusinessdaily.com has reached the top of the Internet’s most popular search engine.
The website, which started with a soft launch in the summer of 2013, is now listed first by Google under the search name “Inland Empire business news” and is third under the search name “IE business news,” said Daniel Hickey, founder and owner of Hickey Marketing Group in Redlands.
That designation began early this month, after Google issued a regular update of its most popular search engine keywords, said Hickey, who created www.iebusinessdaily.com.
Google far outranks all other search engines, receiving an estimated 3.5 billion search requests per day worldwide, according to internetlivestats.com. Being positioned at or near the top of one of its search lists has become essential to the success of any business website, and not just because of the corporation’s market dominance.
“They’re impossible to fool,” Hickey said of Google. “There is no way to get your domain name to the top of their list unless you have the most popular content, and that’s not true of other search engines. You can also access Google anywhere, on your phone, your computer, wherever.”
Google’s dominance, which Hickey compared to the Yellow Pages 30 to 40 years ago, isn’t likely to go away anytime soon.
“I don’t see anyone competing with them in the foreseeable feature,” he said. “They have too much market share and they invest too much back into the company for that to happen.”
The first step in bringing IE Business Daily to life was determining which keywords people were using most often when they searched for news about Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
“We narrowed it down to ‘Inland Empire business news,’ which was important,” said Hickey, who said he tested 143 potential search terms before settling on that one and, later in the search, ‘IE business news.’ “It does you no good to be at the top of the list with a term no one is using.”
Next, the website had to develop content that would attract readers.
From the day it began, IE Business Daily had one goal: to fill the void left created by the absence of two weekly business publications: The Business Press, published by The Press-Enterprise, which folded in 2011 after 16 years in business, and the Inland Empire Business Journal, which shut down last December after its longtime publisher, Bill Anthony, died.
When Lou Desmond, president of Desmond & Louis, Inc., approached Hickey about starting a business news website devoted exclusively to the Inland Empire, Hickey was immediately interested.
“Lou knew the local market,” Hickey said. “He felt like it was hurt badly because it didn’t have a regular business publication anymore, and I agreed with him. I’m a business owner, and I knew how much it was hurting me not having a business publication to read.”
The loss of The Business Press and the Inland Empire Business Journal wasn’t the only reason for the lack of local business news in the Inland Empire. The Press-Enterprise, the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin its sister publication, the San Bernardino County Sun, had cut back on their editorial staffs, and their local business coverage, during the past few years.
“It’s like they’re more interested in what’s happening in Los Angeles and Orange County than they are in what’s happening here,” Hickey said.
Desmond helped assemble a small group team of reporters and contributing writers to get the project started. Ed Hoffman, president of Wholesale Capital Corp. in Moreno Valley and the website’s primary advertiser, provided much of the initial financial backing.
Hickey compared establishing news content to owning a restaurant and figuring out which meals people want to eat.
“You start with a big menu and then you pare it down once you start to find out what your customers like and don’t like,” Hickey said. “It’s the same process with content on a website. What news will drive them to the site?”
Desmond laments the end of The Business Press, which was founded and published by The Press-Enterprise Co. and later was published by Belo Corp. in Dallas when it bought The Press Enterprise Co. in 1998.
“When the Business Press folded it created a gaping hole in the Inland Empire business community,” Desmond said. “The Business Press was considered the business publication of record, and it was a business-to-business publication. When it folded we didn’t have anything to take its place.”
The absence of such a publication is difficult for a public relations firm, which relies greatly on making contacts and getting clients placed in news stories.
“Having a place where people can share their success stories is an important part of staying in business,” Desmond said. “Why don’t we have that here? Fresno and Sacramento both have good business journals. Why don’t we have one?”
The Inland Empire, which is the 13th largest metropolitan area in the United States, will be helped by having a solid business publication that concentrates on local news, said Mike Stull, business professor at Cal State San Bernardino and director of the Inland Empire Center for Entrepreneurship.
Other than IE Business Daily, nothing on the Internet is devoted exclusively to business news in the Inland Empire, Stull said.
“I do miss having a good business journal,” Stull said. “From my perspective it’s been a pretty big loss.”
Stull called The Business Press “a good read when it was going well,” but said the decision by the three local dailies to scale back their business coverage has also damaged the local business community.
“After that there wasn’t any way to keep up with regional trends,” Stull said. “Figuring out what was happening and who was making deals became a real challenge.”
