Letter to the Ada community:

Greetings from The Ada Icon. The what? The Ada Icon. We are the new guy in town.  What exactly are we? And, why are we here?

Good questions. Here is the short answer: In September 2009 we launched The Bluffton Icon – a free online news source. Two and one-half years later, The Bluffton Icon, experiencing between 800 and 900 views per weekday, offers its viewers local stories and advertising from area businesses at very affordable rates.

Ada Icon creators are Fred and Mary Pannabecker Steiner, lifelong residents of Bluffton. Fred is director of the Bluffton Area Chamber of Commerce in addition to being full-time on The Icon. In addition to her work with The Icon, Mary works fulltime at Bluffton University as an adult and graduate education representative. 

Our technical director is Ryan Lowry, a 2011 Ohio Northern University graduate. Ryan has helped introduce us to much of the Ada community.

With that brief introduction and with our success in Bluffton, we turned to Ada, hoping to repeat for your community what we accomplished in Bluffton.

So, here’s the long answer:

Ada Icon will offer:
1 – Daily news updates (think of The Icon as an Ada free daily online news source)
2 – Free classified ads including garage sales (we only charge for properties for sale, for rents and vehicles for sale)
3 -  Full-color photos and graphics and full-color advertisements
4 – Emphasis on Ada businesses along with free business directory listing
5 – YouTube videos
6 – School delay information or other immediate emergency information
7–  Historical photos of Ada
8 – Events calendar of Ada

Advertisement options:
1 – Full color ads linked to your business website or to a display ad
2 – Display ads that are printer-friendly 8 ½ by 11-inch full color
3 – All stories about businesses will link to the business website
4 – We offer very affordable rates to advertise in the Ada Icon and Bluffton Icon. With a daily audience of 800-plus in Bluffton, we already offer Ada businesses a local audience for potential new customers.

Coverage will include a mix of:
1 – School news    
2 – Clubs and service organizations 
3 – Village government news  
4 – Church news    
5 – Ohio Northern University news 
6 – Sports    
7 – Obituaries (posted at no charge)
8 – Business stories
9 – Ada bloggers
10 – Historical photos and stories
11 – In other words, send us your news items. We’ll post them.

Deadlines?
We’ll post stories and classified ads within 24 hours of receiving the material. Like you, however, we take weekends off.

Our interest in Ada stems from several sources:
We hope to create an affordable Internet outlet for small-town advertisers to easily reach their markets with the ability to change ads as often as the business needs.

We want to keep the communities in the Hardin-Allen-Hancock counties connected with information through the Internet.

Most importantly: We are small-town business owners who recognize the challenges of other small-town businesses. We believe that small towns have a great-untapped strength in several areas. We intend to promote those strengths.

The Icons
We launched www.blufftonicon.com in September 2009. Since that time we’ve experienced over 400,000 views. We now have 45 advertisers. During weekdays we average between 800-900 viewers per day. Over 90 percent of our audience is within a 25- mile radius of Bluffton – which includes Lima, Findlay, Ottawa, Cory-Rawson and Ada.

Our success, along with the success of our advertisers and the support from the community encouraged us to expand to other communities to provide similar services. We proceeded to launch The Ada Icon in hopes to achieve similar results for our advertisers and the Ada community.

Finally, have some patience with us. We are learning about Ada. As we learn we’ll gain news sources and will provide more and more information. The Icon is a “small-business start up.” Come back soon – come back tomorrow and the next day. Make up your home page. Give us story ideas.

We are The Ada Icon. Contact us at: [email protected].

See you tomorrow!