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?

Websites without video are slowly becoming a dying breed. No one can dispute the fact that marketing videos produce traffic and more sales. Video has become the rule rather than the exception and our online success depends to a large extent on the marketing videos we produce and add to our sites.

The new Web 2.0 drives most internet traffic today and it’s exactly in this new environment that today’s internet marketers find themselves,

Over and above the effectiveness of video generated traffic, traditional traffic sources such as PPC, are becoming more and more expensive, to the point were campaigns need to be touching double digit CTR’s to stand any chance of being profitable.

Don’t misunderstand me, please. I believe in PPC and drive a substantial amount of traffic to my sites using this method. However, the web is changing and as internet marketers, we can either evolve or go the way of the dodo.

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.

After submission, the video hosting sites allow us to further embed these videos in our own websites, without the need for any additional conversion. This process is simple and straightforward, but not one the serious online marketer should follow.

The reason is quite simple. Taking the embed codes from the hosting sites, such as Google Video for example, also carries across embedded videos from other users.

Video hosting sites group the videos submitted to them into categories. Taking an embed code from a video site could well result in additional videos being carried across from a competitor site for example. We would then be offering free traffic and advertising to this competitor, which is not really something we should be doing.

The best way is to convert our videos to flash and to add this flash video to our websites. To do this we need effective and reliable video conversion software.

Typically, videos tend to have large files sizes, so much so, that most of the video sites now limit the videos they accept to around 100 MB size and 10 minute length. This 100 MB size, gives a good indication of the amount of information we need to convert.

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.

One of the most valuable commodities we have as internet marketers is our time. By the same token, Video is now one of the most effective weapons we have in our online arsenal. Combine video with effective use of time and we have a winner.

I’ve seen too many of my fellow marketers invest big money in the latest and most complex video production software and then skimp when it came to the converter. The result ? Great looking videos that nobody ever saw simply because their conversion software wasn’t up to the task.

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.