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. Video generates traffic. Video sells. Video has become a mainstream in any kind of online marketing. More and more surfers expect to see videos in any page they view on the internet, and when they don't see video, they tend to vote with their mouse and navigate away from the page. We have to have marketing videos on our own 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. 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. 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 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. 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. As internet marketers we should learn the value of our time and how to use this resource more effectively. Video is an equally effective resource and if we can combine efficient use of both these resources, our marketing efforts will succeed. All too often I see people investing big money in the latest and greatest video production software, without thinking about the marketing of the videos they produce. Usually they end up with amazing videos that nobody ever sees. Why? Because they didn't consider the conversion stage. The top class converters I use cost less than $100. Low quality converters come in at around $70. Does that price difference merit time and frustration? Not for me and neither should it for you.
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