You’ve heard before that eyes are the window to the soul, I’m sure, but did you know that eyes can actually be important indicators of your health? Many general health conditions appear with symptoms that are visible on the eyes. I’ve gathered up some tips below for what to watch for.

Yellow eyes

This occurs when your sclera gets yellow. Yellow eyes are generally not an eye problem; rather, they tend to indicate a liver problem, such as hepatitis, or the result of alcoholism. It is important to go see an internist.

Bulging eyes

Bulging eyes indicate thyroid problems, and occur when inflammation of muscles around the eyes pushes the eyes forward. In rare instances, it may be even more serious, with a tumor existing behind the eyes.

Double vision

Double vision generally occurs when eyes are misaligned, so that one eye is looking straight and the other isn’t looking in the same direction. However, it could also be a symptom of stroke or the onset of glaucoma. It is advised to see a doctor immediately.

Cataracts

A fogging up of the lens on the eye. It may interfere with your vision, but won’t actually damage the eye. Therefore, it should be removed only if it is interfering with your daily life.

Blood Vessels

Your eyes have the only exposed blood vessels in your body, and therefore they can a pretty good indicator of health. For instance, problems with your blood vessels in your eye can hint at hypertension or even diabetes. This is one major reason not to skip your eye exam - it can save your life.

Blogging is hard work, and I’m not just talking about the writing part. Keeping your blog looking good and running smoothly is a real challenge, and I thought I would share some improvements you can make to your blog to make it more effective and easier to read.

1) Make sure to use paragraph headings, and just being bold isn’t enough

Headlines need to be darker and larger to stand out - people jump from section header to section header.

2) Show your best posts

Most bloggers show their best posts (if at all) on the sidebar navigation or on top. this is the wrong place, it should be at the bottom of your posts. Reason: whatever brought the visitor to your page in the first place, is why he is there. He first wants to deal with that, then he can turn attention to other things (but he doesn’t want to have to remember that you had some good posts up top and therefore scroll back up. Your best posts have proven to overall get you the best engagement with visitors, so you should always bet on them (would you bet on the horse that never ran a race yet you like? Or, on the horse that ran 50 races and won 35 of them?)

3) Timely relevance is key

Group similar posts for various occasions (e.x. - holidays, winter, breast cancer awareness day), put them in a table with an outline, add an image which delivers immediate understanding, and urge visitors to prepare themselves for the occasion by reading some of those posts.

4) Call to action

When you link to other posts within your post, try to use action words (such as “learn about blogging”) instead of just plain nouns. You’ll get a higher click-through rate, since the reader knows what to expect to receive from clicking the link.

5) Get a custom wordpress theme

Let’s face it - Ferraris are memorable because they are rare. In my testing, the default theme had an 80% bounce rate, while my custom theme instantly lowered my bounce rate to 50%, gave me 15% higher pageviews per visitor, and increased the amount of time spent on the blog by a whopping 98%.

6) Show them your good side

Add a photo of yourself on the main page or the about us page. People are reading your blog. People like looking at people a lot more than at text. Make people happy. It lets them attach a face to the name and the writing, and they will remember you better.

Please feel free to add additional tips in the comments below.

Marketers have always wanted to know what you are thinking, and thanks to several tech companies, they may have just gotten a step closer to having their wishes fulfilled. In December of last year, the Wall Street Journal reported on how Emsense sensors were being used to extract feelings toward candidates in the political race.

That same company, Emsense Corporation, has used their technology to give marketers a step up on the competition (such as other advertisers - and you, the consumer).

By reading the EEG brainwaves from a light-weight portable headband, Emsense can derive meaning from the frequency, spikes and valleys, and translate it into quantitative scores on attention, and positive and negative emtional reaction.

This whole sub-industry of marketing, often called “neuromarketing”, is one of the hottest trends in the marketing world today, and it will likely have some positive and negative effects on the industry as time goes on.

Positive Outcomes

• Marketers will spend less money to get more impact for their clients, which means better efficiency.
• Marketers will learn how to segment the population in new ways, aside from just demographics and basic behavior.
• Marketers will be able to test new products and services in a more reliable manner, meaning lower costs to bring them to market, and a higher chance of them being successes.

Negative Outcomes

• The general public will become very wary of marketers and the marketing industry will suffer a backlash.
• New laws may be put in place to control how marketers use personal emotional information gleaned from peering into their emotions.
• This will only worsen privacy concerns.

Surely, this technology won’t only be used for marketing, and I can see psychologists using it to treat patients, as well as video games that reward you for “staying cool” despite scary situations showing up on a screen - a way to lower stress.

One of the major challenges neuromarketing still has to deal with is convincing the marketing mainstream of the strength of the correlation between recognizing the emotion and certain action (such as a purchase) taking place as a result of it.

Want to See More?

Fox News had a segment today about Emsense, and I thought you might enjoy watching this short clip:

A while ago, I attended a networking event for business owners organized using Meetup.com. I always enjoy meeting new people, and if they are business owners it is an additional bonus.

The topic of the day happened to be a marketing one, and a common question I found myself fielding was, “everybody always says networking is important, but I don’t really get anything out of it, got any tips for me?”

Networking events can help you meet potential clients, but they can also help you meet partners, thought leaders, and other people who can help refine your business ideas into focused plans. Regardless of whether you are at a networking event or at a friend’s holiday party, there are some standard steps you can take to squeeze the most out of any setting.

Before the event

Bring a stack of your business cards. Even if there are only 20 people at your event, they may each ask for 10 or more cards to share with their colleagues. The last thing you want to happen is to run out of cards at these events.

Look presentable. Don’t forget, first impressions count. Dressing nicely makes you approachable and appear professional, a necessity to getting recommended to attendees contacts.

Practice your introduction. Typically, these events start off with an ice breaker and everyone introduces themselves. This is likely the first time these people are hearing you speak, so be prepared to give a 30 second description of who you are, what you do, and what you are looking to find out. This will help other participants make introductiosn that are helpful to you.

Listen

Know thy customer. Ask about the services he provides, and who he considers the perfect client - then listen. It will help you find the right person to introduce him to.

Let your ears absorb as much knowledge as possible. There tends to be a lot of smart people at these types of events, and there is much to learn about various industries from first hand accounts.

Make your rounds

Share. If you find someone interesting, don’t monopolize access to him, it is considered rude. Ask for his card, and make a note to yourself to catch up with him near the end, or during a lunch in the future.

It’s a numbers game. The more people you meet, the better chance you have of meeting the perfect person for your particular current need. Try to introduce yourself to everybody, and make a mental list of the most useful people for you to keep in touch with.

After the event

Strike while the iron is hot. Right after the event, make a chart with all of the collected business cards info, and a list of what services you might be able to offer each person from the event. The longer you wait, the less you will remember about each participant.

Get personal. Follow up with a personalized email about 24 hours later, with a specific call to action that will increase your credibility and name recognition. In my case, it might be to visit and subscribe to my blog.

You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. In your email, offer to explain anything there wasn’t time to expand on at the event, and make it clear you want to help the other person succeed in any way you can (with expertise, or with contacts).

It takes some practice, but you are bound to find these events useful over time. Think of it this way, by going to just one event per month, you can likely meet 250-500 new people each year, all enthusiastic about improving their business. That’s a lot of potential business…

A study, titled the Online Journalism Credibility Study, has just come out that shows a gap in how newspaper editors and readers feel about anonymous comments being posted on news articles.

The Results

The editors, overwhelmingly (70%) felt that anonymous comments harmed proper journalism, most likely due to the flood of factual corrections and emotional rants they get in these comments, neither of which seem to make them smile. Only 45% of readers, on the other hand, felt that allowing anonymous comments was bad journalism.

Even more telling, 58% of editors were against journalists adding comments in news stories which may give away personal views, while only 36% of the readers felt that way. That tells me that readers are very interested in hearing responses from the writers of an article after they comment.

The Allure of Responding to Newspaper Articles

I have felt many times during reading an article this sentiment - “I disagree, I only wish there was a way to explain why this article is wrong”. The ability to post comments on stories online now provide an outlet to voice my opinion. Given the amount of comments I see in the average news story these days, I’d say many other people have had the same feelings.

A common complaint of many newspaper readers in the past has been that there is a lack of objectivity to news, and the selection of what is given the most attention shows a certain lack of objectivity as well. The solution that occurred was largely due to blogs popping up all over the internet, preparing readers to interact with news stories, instead of just reading them.

Blogs were unique in that they relished reader comments, and openly asked readers to contribute to a story with their thoughts, opinions, criticism. Pretty soon, online newspaper sites, such as the NY Times, were forced into accepting comments on many of their news articles, in order to keep readers on their sites.

Newspapers Are Losing Relevance (and Profits)

As I mentioned in the past, newspapers are losing advertisers, readers, subscribers, and importance. Editors’ and news organizations’ long held beliefs about the world “needing them” has made them slow to adopt features like open conversations on articles. Basically, there is no more marketplace interest left in pure facts, devoid of emotion or a particular personal view. It is no coincidence that blogs are so popular - they usually have strong views in a particular direction, and openly invite dialogue.

News Cycle

Newspapers are also having trouble keeping up with the pace of the news cycle these days. Between two issues of the NY Times, most online news sites have had 8-10 different “headline stories”. This promotes more interest and visits, due to the visitors’ expectations of getting fresh materials frequently.

Editors’ Value is Dropping

It sounds to me like the editors are worried. Very worried. You see, they suddenly have a LOT more competition for your eyes. There is only so much time one can spend reading in a given day, and between millions of blogs and comments being posted on newspaper sites, they are losing their “market share of voice”. And, don’t forget, people are producing much more relevant “local news”, in the way of social news. Sites like Facebook, MySpace, provide an easy way to hear about social news in your community and social circle.

Is it fair to say edited news is dying out?

Most of us are not lucky enough to know what career we want to go into until quite late in the game. With everyone talking about a bad economy coming our way, that choice never seemed more important. Want to narrow down your choices based on the job market conditions? There are quite a few ways to do this.

Last time I posted about jobs, I mentioned the value of search optimizing your resume, and gave you an easy way to discover the most recruiter-searched resume keyword terms. I also discussed the reason many people end up hating their job, and how to avoid it.

Today, I wanted to show you a tool to find out the trend for a particular keyword in job descriptions posted by employers. Seeing a trend can be an incredibly powerful visual aid in ascertaining the demand for certain skills. To find out this useful information, I use a nifty site called Indeed.com’s job trend tool. I show you some uses, below.

Research a Job Sector

Let’s use the term “Photoshop”, (a popular graphic design software) for example. As you can see in the graph below, the recent demand for photoshop skills appears to have dropped off dramatically.

My guess is the design market has reached saturation, and many workers in non-design positions have sufficient Adobe Photoshop skills to pitch in with moderate levels of design work when necessary, eliminating the need for full time designers at many companies.

The fascination with posting our digital photos everywhere likely increased general interest in Photoshop skills, and the industry workers seem to have gotten hit by that.

Determine Which Skills to Learn

You can also use this tool to consider which particular skills are worth your time to learn, based on their trend. For example, I plotted different nursing qualifications to find out which are most in demand, and the growth of each. You can see below that some qualifications appear to be much better bets for a student to spend time on.

There’s Safety In Portability

No matter what industry you are in, there always seems to be the same foundation. This foundation is the group of positions which exists regardless of the economy’s situation, and weathers any storm. Some examples of foundation positions are marketing positions, executive leadership, public relations, management, secretarial work, accounting, and legal.

These positions must exist for the company to function, and can largely be transferred from industry to industry and company to company. Indeed, many of the top CEOs of our time have held the post in completely unrelated industries. James McNerny, for instance, was CEO of 3M before he assumed the top position at Boeing. I hope planes have nothing to do with tape!

During bad economies you can protect your career, even if you get laid off, by being in a foundation position. There will always be another company that needs a foundation employee, and often will see your outside industry experience as valuable.

If you have already chosen your career, you can still take steps to improve your odds in a bad economy. Here are some great tips to recession-proof your job search.

Seth Godin put up a great post about how Borders Books has cut inventory yet increased sales. Borders accomplished this by carrying less titles, but showing them in a more creative way. Essentially, Borders quit trying to show you what you can buy, and started helping you make that decision by showing you the books it was most likely to convince you to buy.

It was a smart move by Borders (not just because of my fabulous 20/20 hindsight), because they realized that their brick n’ mortar store could never compete on the dimension of variety with online bookstores like Amazon. Instead of chasing a dream, they decided to use one of the huge advantages a brick n’ mortar store has over the internet - better control over what you see.

Brick vs. Click

When you visit a site, you are limited to your screen size, and then there is the space for navigation, and all the other content. So, while you may have an endless selection, you can’t really see that many purchase options clearly (with a beautiful cover that some marketer did a focus group for) - it’s usually a tiny image and some text. On top of this, you can’t feel the book. I’m seeing more and more creative book cover textures these days.

It’s funny, but walk around a Barnes & Noble when you get a chance - you’ll notice people aren’t just picking up the book to read the inside cover or the back…they need the texture. Indeed, if you have picked up a copy of Made To Stick, you know what I’m talking about. You can actually feel the duct tape on the cover. It’s neat. You would have missed that part online.

Blockbuster Thinks (For You)

Borders Books certainly isn’t alone in realizing this, and a while back Blockbuster reviewed their own psychology textbook to help them compete with online DVD sales. One of my favorite companies to follow is Blockbuster, so I noticed this right when they made the change. They employ a very shrewd two-tier strategy:

On the outer walls of the store, they stock current movies with the front covers showing, and have up to a dozen or so placements (all right beside each other). One might think “what a waste of space - I saw they had this already”. However, in reality it actually aids them in making the sale - any sale.