Blog hops are fun and challenging and you meet many people, so participating in them may not feel much like marketing. But exactly because you meet many people - people who are actively seeking new relationships - blog hops are an excellent way to build up your followers.
Now I must state that the number of followers you have does not actually mean as much as the quality of engagement you have with your followers. You can have a thousand followers who stop by one time and never again. That's not really useful for you as an author.On the other hand, you can have one hundred followers that will tweet, facebook, and blog on your behalf at the drop of a hat. Followers become great marketing tools when you know them well enough that they stop by often, comment often, share your news/posts with others, and are happy to guest on your blog or vice versa.
Just to be real clear, followers are people not statistics. They are opportunities for engagement. If you don't engage, the number of followers you have means nothing.
But because it is an easy number to monitor, we are going to look at my follower numbers to show how much a blog hop can change the opportunities I have for engagement. As I schedule this post to run, I have 331followers. Let's see where we are at the end of the month, shall we?
How have your followers jumped since you started this blogfest?