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,

Video marketing is hugely effective at generating traffic, much more so than the traditional PPC methods, where rising click costs mean most campaigns need double digit CTR’s to stand any chance of being profitable.

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.

How we choose to market our videos though can be the cause of complications and errors. The simplest way to market a video is to submit it to the various video sites, for example Yahoo Video or Google Video or YouTube.

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.

Since all videos are in specific categories, we could well end up providing free advertising and web space to one of our competitors, which might well result in lost sales, particularly if our competitor’s video has been rated and viewed more times than our own.

The most effective way is to add our videos to our own websites, using direct conversion to a flash format and adding this flash video to our site. This is where the need for an efficient video converter comes in.

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.

This video conversion takes time and for most of us, this our computer is fully occupied for this time, meaning we can’t do any of the other tasks our online marketing requires.

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 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.

From bargain basement to top range converters, prices range from around $70 to under $100. Is the $30 difference worth lost time and effort? I don’t think so.