This guest post is by Fritz Guinn

First of all, note that while you can and should have a blog for advertising your business, it is not meant to replace a website. Rather, it will be a complementary tool that promotes both your business and the website behind it.

A study of 1,531 HubSpot small and medium scale customers showed that those who blogged got about 55% more visitors on average than the non-bloggers.

The companies that blogged got 97% more incoming links, and 434% more indexed pages in the search engines.

Way it works is that a blog at its core is meant to be a visitor engagement and community building tool. This means that it attracts people who like the content and are interested in the subject. They read the posts, and contribute by posting comments and replying to other comments.

A static website, on the other hand, is more of an informative or product copy page. It does not ask for any engagement, except for a call to action to purchase a product or contact the company for more information.

The blog is also a good SEO tool. It creates new content when posts get comments, and the search engines come back again and again to index the changed content. This increases the frequency, number and freshness of indexed pages. Blog posts get ranked higher in search results, and it boosts traffic from the search engines.

A blog post also triggers natural or organic links from the community, which triggers a snowballing traffic boom from these other blogs and the search engines. For example, if a particular post is well received and linked to by two or three popular blogs or websites, the post is instantly pushed higher up in the search rankings for relevant keywords.

This in turn puts the post in front of even more people and other webmasters, some of whom will link to it now. The cycle continues like this, with more incoming links and increasing search traffic until it hits a ceiling and then the traffic slowly starts dropping. But a post like this will continue to get some amount of traffic indefinitely.

It sounds very delicious, yes? But it is not so easy to do in practice. You have to hammer away at a hundred posts before one suddenly attracts organic links and starts snowballing. The point here is that your business can get a huge number of extra customers if you have a website and a blog, as opposed to only having a static website.