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As you read this article, over 100 million videos are being viewed online. Over 100 million surfers watch online videos every day. The traffic generated by video marketing is huge and it’s not something your marketing can do without.

Marketing videos make sales. It’s as simple as that. From being the exception, online video has now become the norm, so much so, that today’s internet users expect to see video on the sites they visit, and if they don’t, they usually surf to another page that does include video. Our online success demands video on our websites.

Multimedia traffic has become increasingly important in the Web 2.0 environment that we, as internet marketers, find ourselves competing for.

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 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.

Making a marketing video isn’t an overly complex undertaking. The software applications required are mostly simple and reasonably priced, so much so, that a full suite of programs needn’t cost more than a few hundred dollars.

What can cause complications and expensive errors is how we choose to market our videos. One easy way is to submit our videos to the various video hosting sites, such as YouTube, Howcast or Google Video for example.

After we submit our videos to the hosting sites, we can then use the code the sites provide, to embed these videos in our own sites, without requiring any additional conversion. This is a simple process, but not one I would suggest the serious internet marketer uses.

The reason I say this is that the embed codes from the video sites, such as Revver for example, also include 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.

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.

Converting a video to flash does require time and computer resources. If we are working on a single computer system, the our hands are tied while the conversion takes place.

Time is a valuable commodity and not something we can afford to waste. Video is a valuable marketing tool and not something we can afford to ignore. Get the best combination of time and result and your online marketing efforts can be that much more profitable.

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.

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.