Many people think it is enough to create an app, upload it to the store and success is just a matter of time. The opposite is true! The real challenge is to promote your app after it is ready to sell. There are more than 500000 apps on Apple app-store, so the competition is tough and your chances to succeed are quite low.
Promote Your App
Good news is that there are different methods and strategies of app promotion. If you follow them, the chances that your app will become famous will rise significantly. Many of these rules are quite obvious, but it is still surprising, how many people ignore them. Don’t make the same mistake! In this article, you’ll find the basic rules, about how to promote your app to success.
App store promotion
Apps that rank higher in app stores are downloaded more often. Those of you, who have experience with search engine optimization, will find some similarities between SEO and app store promotion. First of all, you have to optimize your keywords – use only relevant terms and order them by importance.
Promote your app in the app stores; Apps that rank higher are downloaded more often.
Read the keyword guide of Apple! It is also essential, to know how many downloads and ratings your app has. It is to some a doom loop – more downloads and references lead to better rankings that lead to even more downloads. You have to break this cycle. It is much easier to promote you app, if it is related to any actual event (Olympics, football world cup, zombie apocalypses – you name it). If you have a popular blog or community, you have your first customers, who will happily download your app.
Start with free and small apps
Three factors can discourage potential users from down-loading your app – bad reviews, bulky size and price.
To download apps that are bigger than 50 MB, you need Wi-Fi; it means that a mobile internet connection isn’t enough for it. It means user can’t download the app on the move. Guess, where do the people mostly use mobile apps? Not at home or in their offices but outside, relaxing whilst on the bus, train, on their way to work, or back. The consequence is clear!
Keep your apps size below 50MB that way potential users will be able to download it at home or on the move.
It is also not surprising, that most people avoid downloading apps they have to pay for. It is a good idea to make your app available for free and earn money with advertisements, or in-app sales, or make some premium version of it. For example, there is a free version of angry birds with advertisements and there is a premium version of same app without advertisements but with additional levels.
App Blogger & App Reviews
It is necessary to place reviews about your app on well known tech blogs. Though many app developers place their apps in different app directories, it isn’t the best way of promotion. In contrast to website promotion, you promote your app for real humans and not for the search engine robots and honestly, how many people search for apps in app directories and websites, or website directories? Not many. But how many users read technology or app related blogs? Quite a lot! So go for it – let bloggers write reviews about your app!
Social Media Marketing
For those of you who don’t use social media to actively promote your business/website/app – welcome to earth! SMO or social media optimization is al-most a new science, and you have to spend some time learning it. The cool thing about social media is that it gives you free tools of promotion and an almost infinite audience (if you can manage to reach it). Create accounts on leading social media platforms, maintain them (It can be time consuming, but is worth it), add as many TRUE followers as you can and con-vert these followers to your customers.
Social media is possibly the most cost effective way to promote your app as it costs nothing to sign up to Twitter, Facebook or Google+.
No question, these ways to promote your app need a lot of effort, planning, time and some-times costs, but without them you’ll probably fail to make your app successful. The choice is up to you. Good luck!
About the author: David Arambol is an internet marketer, app developer and currently works for USB stick design company.
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