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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.