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How to market your iPhone app

January 2nd, 2010

When we were building our first application “Alchemist”, we have compiled a list of useful marketing resources that helped us push it out through the door with zero additional investment for marketing purposes. Today we want to share these resources with you:

Twitter

We have compiled a list of people who work with iPhone reviews, follow them, and @ them your application name. If you are lucky, you can get a pretty nice viral effect going on. Here’s our iPhone reviewers list on Twitter.

Microsite

Make a small one page website about your app and add Google Analytics. Focus on the visual appeal, describe your app in just a few sentences, put a list of features (by version if you have updates) and a clearly visible price tag with a link to iTunes Store. Think about this site as a “press kit” so that reviewers don’t need to email you to get information about your app, app screenshots and videos, company info and developer bios – it has to have it all in one place. Here’s an example site we have built for our Alchemist game

Youtube

Create an account on YouTube (if you don’t have one already), make a video of your app gameplay using screen capture software + iPhone simulator and post it on your channel. In the description or the comments section add a short text about what your app does and a link to iTunes store. It can generate a nice and steady flow of buyers. Make sure you encode the video as H.264 so it’s playable on iPhone and iPod too. Here’s our gameplay video for Alchemist.

SEO

If your app has a similar name to competitor’s, make sure you put a unique keyword next to it that will clearly distinguish it in the search results – your company name, or author’s name will do fine, ex.: “Appname by Your Name” or “Company’s Appname”. Use a short name for application if possible and avoid common words. When posting on Twitter, use #iPhone, #iPod, #App, #AppStore or #iTunes tags to channel the information and make it more discoverable.

Apply for Reviews

Here’s a list of review sites that we have gathered ourselves.
You can apply for review through a web form:

Or send emails directly to reviewers:

Check User Reviews

Most of the app tracking sites have their own user reviews, check them out from time to time to get a more complete picture.
Here’s the biggest app tracking sites:

Self Promotion in Forums

Here’s a couple of forums with high traffic that encourage developers to announce their new applications in specific sections.

Feedback

Collect user feedback. You can set up a forum in your site, use comment section in your blog or use a 3rd party feedback service like http://getsatisfaction.com

Ranking

Use software or web services to get reports about your app ranking on iTunes:

Track app sales:

Gather and track in-app analytics:

Once a day you can also download your daily sales report and process it with special software such as App Store Sales by PositiveTeam

Impact

Experiment with search engine queries until you found the one that returns links to your app most frequently and bookmark it. Check the bookmarked search query for changes in number of results every couple of hours. This will give you a good overview of how the information about your app is spreading all over the web. Here’s an example query that to track our Alchemist game.

Analytics

Check your Google Analytics at least every 24 hours and compare your website traffic with your sales data, look for spikes in sales coinciding with spikes in website traffic. Also check traffic sources section to know who’s linking to you and from where you get most of your traffic. Use the new Intelligence feature of Google Analytics to set up alerts for when your daily site traffic spikes above 25%. This might happen if your app gets featured in one of the bigger review sites.

If you have any questions / additions / suggestions please leave them in the comment section below!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 at 8:12 pm and is filed under Actionscript 3, Applications, Apps, General, iPhone, iPod. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “How to market your iPhone app”

  1. Isabella Says:
    January 3rd, 2010 at 2:15 am

    Wow! Awesome and informative blog entry. Very helpful info that can help a new developer to get the word out.

  2. Kiril Says:
    January 5th, 2010 at 12:48 am

    Good Article!
    We also start creating such lists. But it’s not full enough. People should know more about good applications/games.

  3. Sidney de Koning Says:
    February 3rd, 2010 at 3:16 am

    Nice one, was in the process of doing this research myself, this list is very helpfull for that.

    Maybe you can add http://appify.com/ aswell to the list, its for apps but localized to your region.

    Thanks!

    Sidney de Koning

  4. Vincentius Yufentus Says:
    February 26th, 2010 at 10:37 am

    Nice article..I tell my friend to read this and bookmark..

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