Take a look at our newly updated portfolio page to see a selection of what we’ve been creating here at Green Media during October. You’ll find our debut Lamborghini and Toyota e-flyers, the website for Brenikov Training and the latest Aston Martin email marketing.

We’ll be updating the page regularly, so be sure to check it out again soon. Next month’s additions include an absolutely stunning Bentley email marketing campaign, which is our first sole branded work for the classic marque.

“Click here” is one of the most enduring terms used online, and has been around from the start. In fact, searching for “click here” on Google brings in an incredible 1.3 billion results, demonstrating how ubiquitous the term has become. It’s the second-nature anchor text choice for a lot of web developers and search copywriters, although moving away from it is so easy - and beneficial.

While “click here” still has great relevance in email marketing for obvious reasons, you’re missing an ideal SEO opportunity if you continue to use it indiscriminately on websites. From both a user accessibility and search engine indexing perspective, the term isn’t exactly the most helpful. Thinking about the search engines, if an anchor text and tag uses some of the keywords relating to the page that it’s linking to, then it’s far easier to classify - boosting the relevancy to a given topic. What’s more, your real-world users will know instantly what they’re clicking on, so you’re enhancing their visit as well. “Click here” doesn’t offer any information whatsoever, other than the presence of a link.

It’s another example that usability and creating a positive web experience should always be at the forefront of your web development and copywriting.

So, try to come out of the “click here” safe zone and you’ll soon find that SEO benefits will follow.

Today’s financial climate demands that you keep on marketing, but it also demands a more pragmatic approach to your advertising in order to continue being effective. Marketing for marketing’s sake simply won’t deliver the results you need now.

Prospective customers are resistant - even immune - to traditional hard sell advertising during an economic downturn, and you could be wasting budget to carry on with the same approach that perhaps worked for you two or three years ago. Think about what you’re offering, and how you can offer it in the most suitable way for today’s buyer.

A recent email marketing campaign for our client at Cloverleaf Honda took a direct conversational copy style, outlining Honda’s response to the credit crunch and showcasing some models with massive savings. This moved away from the typical salesy marketing that a customer might be expecting, and towards a more open tone. We combined the copy with a clearly laid-out branded design and a personalised email subject line, and as a result achieved a click-through rate of almost 30% - smashing the industry average of between 5-10%.

These results show that the customers are still out there - it just takes a different approach to successfully connect with them now.

We sent an email marketing flyer for Lancaster Cambridge Aston Martin last week which resulted in an immediate sale of a brand new DBS, continuing the fantastic performance for this client.

Talking figures, the cost of the mailing was just £212, and the Aston Martin DBS retails at around £149,000.

It’s another example of how effective our email marketing can be - delivering the phenomenal ROI that we talk so much about. As well as this, it’s a neat illustration of how continuing business marketing through the current economic downturn really does produce results, something else that we’ve mentioned recently.

It’s a rare industry that has remained unscathed throughout 2008, and there’s now a real need to evolve your promotional approach to meet with the changing day-to-day demands of the market. The first thing to consider is the be-all and end-all of your marketing - the customer. Ask yourself - do you know your customer as well as you think?

Avoid guessing what your customers are looking for, as even missing the mark slightly here will cost time and money. It is always worth doing a little research every so often to find out exactly how you should be marketing your product, and it becomes even more important during turbulent times like these. You’re likely to be surprised at how willing people are to give you the information you’re looking for, and a questionnaire on your website or a quick email flyer could be all that’s needed. Everyone’s got an opinion, and most people like the opportunity to express theirs.

It’s hardly in-depth socio-demographic analytics, but you will find out some information that is new to you - something that could help you avoid wasting your marketing budget at a time when it needs to be more effective than ever.

The marketing budget is often the first outgoing to be cut during an economic downturn, but it is almost always the case that any immediate savings will be massively overshadowed by the imminent problems that reduced marketing will cause.

Marketing is absolutely key to your company’s performance, so if anything a financial nosedive like the one that is happening right now should make your marketing budget more important than ever. Your competitors will be cutting their own marketing spend, and when that happens you’ll find voids opening up. It’s up to you to fill these voids and benefit. Cutting your marketing budget leaves the gaps for your competitors to fill, and isolates you even further from your goals.

Your customers and prospects haven’t disappeared - they still exist, they’re perhaps just more discerning than they were earlier. Again, it’s up to you to react to this.

Refocus on what you’re trying to achieve from your marketing. It’s likely that you’ll need to adapt your approach or even your offering, but giving up altogether simply cannot lead to a positive outcome.

Riding out the turbulence can empower your brand in other ways, particularly expanding and consolidating your share of voice (SOV). Eventually once the financial storm has settled, if you’ve stayed the course and been ever-present throughout then this will be abundantly clear to customers and market observers - you’re not meekly emerging from a wreckage like competitors who disappeared by cutting their marketing, you’ve never been away.

Maile Ohye followed up her outbound links article on Google’s Webmaster Blog last week with a succinct explanation on the value of good quality incoming links, and the importance of a well thought-out strategy. It’s another good example of how Google is opening up about its processes, and it also backs up what we’ve said about inbound links for a while now.

Another thing we’ve said over and over on Green Notes is that there’s no secret with this anymore. The whole point of a search engine is to enhance the user’s experience, so if you’re doing something that goes against this then you’re likely to be damaging your SEO potential.

Google Webmaster Blog’s Maile Ohye posted a really useful article this week on the subject of outgoing links on your website. It answers some common questions and worries about adding links, and explains how they can provide a reputation-boosting effect to your site.

The importance of incoming links is well-documented, as are the various processes to follow when developing a link building strategy - but outbound links haven’t been so clear-cut, until now.

Ultimately, like everything else relating to SEO and websites, outbound link strategies revolve around providing the user with the best experience possible - and employing a healthy dose of plain old common sense.

Take a look - here.