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 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.

I’m not knocking PCC here. It’ still a valid method to drive traffic to a site and one which I continue to see success with. The trend is however towards video, so we either go along or we get left behind.

The process of making a marketing video is quite straightforward, given the wealth of software applications available. For a few hundred dollars, we can have all the programs we need to produce our videos.

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 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 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.

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 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.

Videos generally include large volumes of information and tend to be large files. YouTube has a 10 minute and 100 MB maximum for any video submitted to the site, so this gives a good indication of the kind of file sizes I’m talking about.

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.

For the price difference between substandard converters at around $70 and real workhorses at less than $100, is it worth the frustration and lost time ? I think not.