What are the three recommendations I have for clients who wish to get the most value in their online investment?

1. Choose your partner very very carefully.
2. Invest in Strategy
3. Combine Offline with Online

Choosing an Internet Marketing & Web Development Partner
This needs to be a long post all on its own... but to summarize, while category experience can be very comforting, that should not be the number one consideration (number 3 perhaps). Instead, I'd focus on the company's creative energy, their reputation, and their process. Within that process, I'd rate the company that front-loads their projects with discovery and planning the highest.

An Internet Marketing Strategy is Essential
There are too many marketing plans out there with bullet points for "Rebuild website" and "Spend more on pay per click", and there aren't enough companies investing in the strategies that tie the online initiatives to measurable business elements. The Website, blog, social media, ppc, seo, etc are all elements that need to work in concert and all be tied by the same goals. One thing I love today is Google Analytics and the tools that allow marketers to trace the performance of campaigns through funnels that land on a conversion (hopefully). Each campaign can be tagged and tracked for performance. The controls for managing the display, spend, keywords and the ad creative itself are at our finger tips to control. Not surprisingly, this requires more time to manage.

Now this is another topic also for later, but I must just set the seed... one challenge we have is in helping clients to see that this is a new advertising model and so is the payment structure. Our goal in managing a ppc campaign for example is to reduce the spend. To that it takes more management time on our part. One a % of spend payment structure, you quickly understand how that fails the client.

Forgive my stream of consciousness style, and to try to regain the topic again, let me conclude that all of these pieces interrelate. The website is only one element of an internet marketing strategy.

Combine Offline with Online
Taking the last point to its logical next step, online doesn't live in a vacuum. Offline is important. It serves as an important vehicle to drive visitors online (snicker snicker). Of course it serves other purposes (which you can only try to measure as effectively as online), but really where is the conversion taking place today? Where do you spend the least for that conversion today? Point made.