Overview/
It is clear that breaking into an industry so dominated by the likes of google, yahoo, and MSN is going to be difficult, however, with resources spent in the right areas I believe that it is possible. Although television ads and other forms of offline advertising can prove to be effective at times, a site such as snap.com would do much better with an online marketing campaign.

Should not the marketing for a website so essential to a persons online experience as a search engine be done online, reaching people who are already guaranteed to be at least interested in computers and the internet? The only question is, what is the most effective way to carry out this online advertising campaign.

How To Get Them Here:

Focus on the Webmasters:
I proceed with the logic that it makes more sense to recruit one person who will in turn convert 10, 100, or even 1000 more people into snap.com users than to simply recruit 1 user who will tell nobody. It is with this logic that I propose a marketing campaign targeting webmasters.

Rather than spend money placing banner or text ads directly on the sites of these webmasters, I suggest the development of a symbiotic relationship between snap.com and the owners of the millions and billions of sites that snap plans to index. The following are my proposed methods for creating this relationship.

1. Link Directory:
Although there already exist large numbers of link directories on the internet, snap.com could benefit greatly from one. Using a webtool I have found that snap.com has a google pagerank of 7. Pagerank 7 links are very valuable to millions of webmasters out there and often very difficult or expensive to acquire. So, I propose that snap creates a directory that requires webmasters to give them a reciprocal link on their own website. Although it may not seem the best idea to flaunt the pagerank of a competing search engine, this method will be a great way to attract shortsighted webmasters who will in turn produce a great deal of traffic on snap.

2. Expedited Indexing:
Webmasters who are not impressed by a directory link alone will surely see the benefit of expedited indexing. I propose that every website submitted to the directory is by snap.com spiders immediately. This will prove a invaluable tool for webmasters who are frustrated by not getting indexed on google right away. Although this should in no way affect the placement and rank of a website in snap.com search results, it should simply be indexed right away providing the webmaster a change to get traffic.

By offering webmasters who place a link or banner for snap.com on their site high pagerank links and immediate search engine indexing, snap will receive an immense number of hits from these sites as well as from other search engines that now have snap higher in their rankings because of all these links.

In addition, expenditures on advertising could be greatly minimized here, because it would only be necessary to advertise on a few of the large webmaster sites/forums out there.

Converting Traffic to Regular Snap Users:

Although my marketing plan thus far will have created a large amount of traffic on snap.com, nothing will become of this traffic unless the website viewers are converted into regular snap users. I also have a few suggestions on how to convert these viewers into regulars.

1. Add social functions to snap:
In agreement with others who have posted, I believe that internet users are now looking for social functions on almost every site they visit. I believe that snap.com could provide users with a social experience by creating member accounts. These accounts could be associated with profiles where members could display pictures and information about themselves. It could also display favorite snap searches, etc. Other members could find these profiles of others by clicking on a link next to each search result showing others who have searched for the same things. Obviously all of these things would be opt-in and nobody would have to display any information or be shown next to any searches if they did not want to.

2. What the hell… Give away some prizes!
Although hardly an original idea, free stuff has been compelling people since the beginning of time I am sure. I believe that giving away prizes, even if they are only snap.com shirts, hats, etc. could be instrumental in turning people who just happened to find a link to the site into frequent users. Follow the lead of sites like blingo.com and give away prizes to the people who use snap. There are many options on how this could be done: give away at certain times, for certain searches, etc. Pick whichever one you think is best for snap!

With these elements combined into one marketing plan, I truly believe that snap.com can grow to the levels of other search engine giants.