Are you wondering who visits this site beside you? Welcome to blog post #50!!!!

Blog post number 50!

Wow - a lot of questions and answers in the past 6 months. Please join me in taking time to celebrate - something I need to get better at: celebrating the minor victories. Maybe we could all get better at this. In Podcast Episode 3, Dana offers a suggestion for us to spend a little time admiring your work and feel a little proud now an again. It certainly won't hurt. I'm trying to take his advice by offering this post:

Greetings

Hi there from the center of the U.S. I invite you to join me for just a moment and celebrate this small occasion. I'm really proud to be part of such a passionate community supporting each other with a primary goal of error-reduction for all types of situations and in any venue. I'm also a big fan of transparency, so let's remove the veil of this site's analytics and share with you what this site's statistics look like since the first blog post on May 16, 2013. THANK YOU for being part of the journey to 100 blog posts and beyond. My hope is that you find this research valuable and worthwhile in your important work. The blogging and podcasting world is still entirely new to me, but I've been having a lot of fun and learning a lot in this field I would have never considered otherwise. We could accomplish much more together if you would like to join the HU Tools team. (It's free) A blog post takes me somewhere from 30 minutes to 30 days to create, so I really appreciate everyone's patience - one of my favorite things to do is to provide enough link resources to give the conclusion more context, and that research takes a while (there are currently 15 blog posts I am working on in draft form!)

Statistically speaking

All of my research states that newly completed blogposts should be advertised mainly on FaceBook (because you should have a strong social media presence and FB is by far the strongest), and every other social media takes a back seat to FB, followed by Twitter and Pinterest. LinkedIn is lower on the totem pole, but that is where this site's blogposts primarily get advertised, and where the bulk of people have found this website. It was fortuitous that this domain was open and some people have come here directly or through Google-search. As anyone with a blog knows, domain name is key. It wasn't as important to me to have a high site visitor count as it was to make sure people that come to visit, are actually those interested in advancing Human Performance beyond where its current state in some way. (Which is why I think the bounce rate is so low) Blog posts only get advertised within LinkedIn groups that make sense, so if the goal is more site hits, I would probably need to change the format and content a bit.

At this time, this site has not been monetized in any way, but the plan is to have portions of it in 2014 - selling ebooks for award-winning Dynamic Learning Activities, and whatever other useful products our visitors may be interested in. I've even been considering designing a Human Performance Tool game!! I'm not looking at making thousands on this site, but it would be nice if it paid for itself (monthly fees), the podcast gear,  and maybe even for a trip to the New Media Expo in Vegas.

Some Numbers:

Countries visiting the most out of the 62 that have stopped in:

1. Unites States (4849)
2. United Kingdom (317)
3. Romania (241)
4. Canada (197)
5. South Africa (68)
6. India (52)

States in America who visit the most out of the 48 (What's up North and South Dakota?):

• • Greater than 200 unique visits: Kansas, Connecticut, South Carolina, California, Pennsylvania, Illinois

• Greater than 150 unique visits: Georgia, Texas, Florida, Arizona, Ohio, North Carolina, New York, Tennessee, Missouri, Virginia, Maryland

Unique visitors: 3795

Average visit duration: 2:18

Bounce Rate: 28.12%

Most unique visits per day: 128

Browsers:

• Internet Explorer: 2696
• Safari: 1192
• Chrome: 933
• Firefox: 607

Mobile Devices:

• Apple iPhone: 740
• Apple iPad: 340

"Because of my blog/podcast..."

(My podcast mentor at schoolofpodcasting.com) Dave Jackson always likes to ask this question of people with podcasts that he interviews - here is what I would say:

• • Invited by INPO to do a poster session on the blog and podcast at the INPO Human Performance Conference in September '13 which ended up being a lot of fun. Because of this, Elenco electronics now gives all of my friends and colleagues discounts on a particular device (Snap Circuit Jr.) for Dynamic Learning Activities. Email me if you'd like the contact info for the discount price!

• • Connected with other bloggers and discovered some awesome new relationships that would not have happened otherwise. You know who you are!

• • Interviewed some very interesting people and learn how HU Tools apply to the work they do outside of the nuclear power industry.

• • Learned how to use a lot of software to support the site, including how to create the HU Tools Podcast theme song, which I still love after hearing it about 300 times!

• • Got the guts to learn how to and post podcasts on iTunes.

• • Watched engaging TED talks and inspirational YouTube content I may not have otherwise seen.

• • Participated in multiple LinkedIn discussions that support or contrast my views or ideas.

• Writing/Compiling eBooks for DLAs

Easter Eggs

For anyone still reading, I want you to know two things about these blogposts and about the podcasts:Every blogpost has a picture in the upper left corner (including this one) and they all take you to linkable content if you click on them - most of the time, it's a related video- sometimes serious, and sometimes amusing. Except for the first one, every podcast has a special something after the outro music at the end. I thought it would be fun to include these - I hope you enjoy.

Conclusion

The late nights of research and composition have been worth it! 50 blogposts now to check out with 50 more on the horizon. If you feel like you want to learn more about whatever subject you are passionate about, I advise you to start or support a blog and a podcast! It will challenge you in a completely new way - not only do you need to have some decent content, but you need to make it look and sound nice, which is a journey itself!

A lot of time and effort goes into each post, so when someone gives constructive or supportive feedback, the content and the motivation continues to improve; I appreciate your feedback. I have watched a lot of YouTube videos (from tremendous to horrible) and read a lot of internet articles (from poorly written to scholarly) to produce relatable content for this community, and I've even laughed and cried because of some amazing inspirational work of others. There has been a lot of learning on my end with all of this research now under my belt. I feel like I am a lot better at what I do because of it.

Is there a "Human Performance Tool" book in the making here? I hope so. Is that something you'd be interested in? Should I try to build a bigger presence for this field on Facebook? I'd be interested in your opinion. Keep in touch, and thank you sincerely for stopping by,

James D. Newman - site author