I started a Photography Blog yesterday. I "stumbled" the blog and today when I woke up I already have 11 subscribers. That's the only promotion I did other than forum posts (non photography related forums).

So I was wondering, is there bots that make you think you have subscribers? Or did I really get subscribers? xD Sounds like a silly question but there's bots for everything nowadays. And I'm just skeptical because I only have one "real post" other than my introductory post.

Just looked at your blog post, and I would guess that you got legitimate readers. I guess there may be bots out there for this, but more than likely you just "stumbled" into some traffic.

Yah I doubt it's bots. I mean what would they get from being a subscriber.

It seems that there is a lot of interest in photography so now that you have some readers, conitnue to build and offer information to them. You mentioned that you haven't posted in any photography forums and this may be a good time to start in hopes of promoting your blog.

Plus, you'll learn more about your niche as you read other people's posts.

Well I guess that's a good thing. Thanks guys.

**** I lost subcribers due to changing hosts. Well at least it happened right now and not when the blog is very popular. It was worth it though because if I get dugg my blog won't go down.

Hobbit how did you get the feedburner subscriber box up on the right installed.

I'm new to all this, do I have to go in & edit the sidebar template
or is there a simpler way.

Hobbit, you should install Google Analytics to see if any traffic came from StumbleUpon. If they didn't, you would at least know that they weren't real subscribers.

Hey Hobbit,

It's time you utilised the benefits of feedburner, isn't knowing this one of the main reasons why we have Feedburner ?

To begin with, when you login to feedburner click on your Photography blog links, when you reach the "Feed Stats Dashboard", you will see the number of subscribers to your blog, and below that will be a link which reads, "See more about your subscribers »". Once you click this link, you will be taken to a page with a nice pie chart representation of your subscribers. Below that you will have a classification of your subscribers and bots.

Look for terms such as Bloglines, MagpieRSS, Google Feedfetcher, Netvibes etc. these are real readers. If you have your blogs added as a recent blog to forums like Digitalpoint or others, it will be displayed there as well. So I believe you can get a more clear picture as to what is happening!

And I fail to understand, why you would lose your feed subscribers owing to changing of hosts?

Hobbit how did you get the feedburner subscriber box up on the right installed.

Hello dude, yes you can add it directly to your sidebar by editing, but you will have to mess around and look for a pattern on which your sidebar is built.

To get the code for this, Login to Feedburner, select your blog for which you want the button generated, click on the Publicize tab and look for FeedCount in the sidebar. Once on the page, you will have the option to select if you want a static image like that or an animated image that shows your subscribers. Just get the code and copy it in your sidebar.

Hope it helps!

Thanks that was helpful. And I guess I lost subscribers because there was downtime.