Online business owners sometimes complain that their competitors are gaining more custom, yet their products and services are not as good. Indeed, that’s not a complaint restricted to online businesses. At a networking lunch the other day one business owner was complaining that his competition seemed to get more attention, more customers and more money, yet that company’s products and services were inferior to his own.

Being the best is not always equated with success, particularly in business. Yet many online entrepreneurs or would be online business owners I meet seem to be trying constantly to make their products and services “the best” in their field. Indeed, I met one chap recently who was still “tweaking” his web site and “after a year, it’s almost finished” he said proudly. That’s a year of missed sales, a year where his competition has stolen market share and a year of stress and frustration as he witnessed his competitors marching past him.

Successful businesses are frequently the most well known in their marketplace. The more people who know you, know what you do and know what you stand for, the more business you do. Simple. But how can online businesses become the best known in their particular niche or sector?

It’s all about “noise”; you just need more pages on the web that refer to you, link to you, and talk about you. You need to be in the business of creating page, after page, after page of good material that is about you, your business and your products and services. But the problem for many online businesses is how do they generate such material and distribute it. Luckily, there is a service that does both for you. It’s called Article Marketer and not only will they distribute information about your online business to millions of readers, they will also help you create the right material as well. Well worth looking into.

Online business owners have been targeting computer users and techno-friendly people for the past decade. Now it seems that the dominance of computing and technology for online shoppers has been toppled. According to a survey run by Foresters Research, online business has become “mainstream” shifting computing from its Number One slot in the Internet sales league.

Last year online businesses sold $17.2 billion of computer hardware and software online. However, clothing sales rose dramatically to $18.3 billion. Excluding travel, some $146.5 billion was spent online last year.

What these figures reveal is that online business has become “normal”. Consumers now see the Internet as a sensible place to do their shopping; in the past few years online shopping was dominated by computer geeks.

But what’s interesting in the report is how the traditional retailers have had to change their online business model in order to achieve their sales. Importantly, online sales do best if there are no shipping charges and if there is no cost to return unwanted goods. More significantly, the retailers point out that the best way of conducting business online is to create an online community of customers and potential customers.

So, if you are running an online business strategically focusing your efforts on building your community of shoppers seems to be a fundamental step in your success.

Shoppers across the UK will descend on out of town stores today in a bid to get the bargains. That’s because today is a public holiday – called a “bank holiday” in the UK. However, even though it’s officially a “day off” many of the stores will be open and most will be having some kind of promotion.

It’s something of a tradition in the UK to have a “bank holiday sale”, but retailers also try other tactics like prize draws, only available to shoppers on a bank holiday, or the selling of products only available on these holidays. In other words, retailers in the UK use bank holidays as some kind of excuse to drive people towards their shops.

So what can online businesses learn from the success of the “bank holiday retailer”? What it means is that we can drive people to our web sites with special offers and sales linked to specific events. One online business I know has an “owner’s birthday sale”. Every year, on the owner’s birthday, a sale is announced to celebrate. The result is an extra $10,000 of sales each year.

Just like bricks and mortars retailers in the UK, the online sale only needs some kind of weak excuse. A “bank holiday” is nothing special that signifies the need for a sale; there is no retail reason, such as the need to shift stock. The “event” is just an excuse – and it works.

Online businesses do not seem to follow the offline world’s example enough. You will not find many “special event” sales. Yet these could trigger additional income for anyone running an online business.

If you look through any of the online news sources, such as Google News, you will notice that there are few business stories that have surfaced in the last 24 – 48 hours. That is not surprising in some ways, after all we have just been through the weekend. The problem is that today’s news pages need filling.

Any journalist working on a Sunday, producing news pages for a Monday edition, knows the problem only too well. There is little material to choose from – and all of your contacts are out of the office. There are very few people you can call to help you fill the space; plus no-one seems to send out press releases over the weekend.

Some PR companies and businesses are switched on to this problem, though. They produce “Sundays for Mondays” – stories that are only provided during Sunday so that they can make the Monday editions. There’s a good example in this morning’s Times newspaper. The Priory clinic is launching a service for stressed lawyers. That information could have been released any time last week, or even today. But with it being available over the weekend, the clinic has probably achieved more publicity than it might have done if the story had been released on a weekday when there is more competition for space.

Journalists who work at the weekend are crying out for good stories to cover. There is clearly a gap here you can fill. Your online business is likely to get more publicity if you issue news items on a Sunday, rather than any other day of the week.