In the time it takes you to read this article, over 100 million internet users will have watched some kind of online video, that's over 100 million page views and video views, mostly highly targeted, so you can imagine the traffic the video boom is driving.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 I say this is that the embed codes from the video sites, such as Revver for example, also include 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 safest and most efficient way to add our own videos to our own marketing websites, is to convert these to a flash format and add the resulting flash video to our site. To do this we need a reliable video converter.

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.

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.

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Are you ready to profit from the Video Traffic Boom? Make sure you watch the excellent Video Conversion and Add Video to Website tutorials from Andrew S. Paxton, an acknowledged video expert