Most business owners today understand that many of their customers have migrated to the Internet and use their smartphones and tablets to do most of their shopping.

Yet many continue to pour cash into traditional marketing platforms that yield lesser and lesser results. These include buying ads in newspapers, TV commercials, billboards, and other 20th Century platforms that don’t attract 21st Century consumers.

If you aren’t using online marketing to promote your business and products, you definitely should be. Here are three types of online marketing you need to know about — and invest in — right now.

Marketing  – SEO

Search engine optimization describes techniques used to boost your websites ranking on search engines like Google and all the others. One of the biggest benefits of SEO is that most of it is free to do, yet can yield you enormous results.

When the link to your website is listed at the top of the search results for the keywords that describe your business or products, you can expect an avalanche of new web-based customers.

Pay-per-Click

Pay-per-Click (PPC) are those little ads that appear in the margins of the websites and pages you visit online. The biggest benefit of this type of online marketing is that you only have to pay when somebody clicks through from the ad to your website.

That means you are already likely to make a sale which can help pay for the PPC ad: Win/win!

Marketing – Blogging 

Blogging isn’t marketing. It’s writing, right? Yes and no.

Posting blogs can help promote your business directly. But it also can help retain existing customers longer by providing them with useful content. People will come back to your blog over and over again if you keep them entertained and informed, building customer loyalty at the same time.

If you aren’t using these three types of online marketing — as well as others like social media, contextual marketing, and others — you should consider starting right away.