Did you know there are over 100 million people online right now viewing videos and that YouTube, the top Video hosting site accounts for over 100 million views per day ? Is that the kind of traffic your marketing efforts can afford to ignore?

Video generates traffic. Video sells. Video has become a mainstream in any kind of online marketing. More and more surfers expect to see videos in any page they view on the internet, and when they don’t see video, they tend to vote with their mouse and navigate away from the page. We have to have marketing videos on our own websites.

The new internet, or Web 2.0 as it’s become known, is driven by multimedia. It’s this new multimedia environment that we find ourselves in as internet marketers.

Typically a new marketing campaign would fellow the well trodden PPC path. The cost of clicks in PPC however has risen to the point were campaigns with even double digit CTR’s are no longer profitable, even without taking into account how effective video marketing is at generating traffic.

Don’t get me wrong here. I still use PPC and will continue to drive traffic to my sites using PPC for the foreseeable future. The net is changing though and if we don’t want to go the way of T-Rex, we need to evolve our marketing strategies.

Producing a marketing video isn’t in itself a complicated procedure or one that requires hugely complex and expensive software applications. The various software components required for video production shouldn’t cost more than a few hundred dollars in total.

What can be complicated and leave us open to costly errors is the way we go about marketing our videos. One way is to produce a marketing video for our product or the affiliate product we promote and simply submit this to the various video hosting sites such as Revver, YouTube or Metaface to name just a few.

We can then use the codes from the video hosting sites to add these videos to our own websites, without needing any other video conversion software. This is a cost effective and quick solution, but not one I recommend to the serious internet marketer.

The reason I don’t recommend this method is quite simple. If we take a piece of code from YouTube for example and embed this on our own website, the code also includes videos which have been submitted by other users.

As all video sites categorize the submitted videos, we could well be embedding videos from a competitor in our own website. Not always the best idea, as we end up giving free exposure and advertising to this competitor.

The safest and most efficient way to add our own videos to our own marketing websites, is to convert these to a flash format and add the resulting flash video to our site. To do this we need a reliable video converter.

By their very nature, videos are large files. Most of the video hosting sites place restrictions not only on the length of videos they accept, but also on the size. Typically, 100 MB and 10 minutes would be a good indication of an acceptable video, which also gives a good picture of the file sizes involved.

Video conversion takes time and if the converter we use hogs too much of our available computer resource, then we are effectively blocking any other activity we might need to do on our computer while the converter eats away at the video.

As internet marketers we should learn the value of our time and how to use this resource more effectively. Video is an equally effective resource and if we can combine efficient use of both these resources, our marketing efforts will succeed.

I see dozens of people buying into cutting edge production software whilst ignoring the conversion software. The result? Super looking marketing videos that nobody ever sees and never result in any sales.

The top class converters I use cost less than $100. Low quality converters come in at around $70. Does that price difference merit time and frustration? Not for me and neither should it for you.