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How to Market Your iPhone App: A Developer’s Guide

Summary:

The iTunes App Store has more than 250,000 active apps for sale. How will you get yours get noticed? After you’ve spent significant time and resources on developing and releasing it, you can’t simply wait for it to be “discovered.” In today’s crowded marketplace, you need a strategic and savvy marketing approach to sell your app — or you risk it getting lost in an ever-expanding deluge of sub-par offerings. Navigating the nuances of app marketing involves many steps, from knowing the finer points of search engine optimization to understanding Apple’s ranking policies and how to use social networks to your advantage. This guide offers strategies for all of those topics and countless others, including app design; choosing a release date; Facebook, Twitter and YouTube marketing ideas; what makes or breaks a press release; and tips on how to win the approval of the ever-influential app blogger.

  1. Table of Contents
  2. About Aaron Watkins
  3. Introduction
  4. Pre-Release: Preparing Yourself For the App Store
    1. Competitive Analysis
    2. iTunes SEO or “How the Heck Do People Find My App”
    3. Choosing Your App Name / Keywords
      1. Your App Name
      2. The Invisible Keywords
    4. Writing Your App Description
    5. Representing Yourself Visually
      1. App Icon
      2. Screenshots
  5. Staging Your Release
    1. Choosing a Release Date
    2. Application Download Codes
    3. App Reviews
      1. Tool Time: Rate My App
      2. Ethics 101 – The Practice of Astroturffing
    4. Switching Your App to Free
    5. Getting Featured by Apple (How and What to do if You Are)
  6. Using Social Networks to Market iPhone Applications
    1. Twitter
      1. Your Twitter Presence OR What to Say and How to Look:
      2. One Channel or Many Channels?
      3. Who, Why and How to Follow — Building Your Twitter Community
      4. Your Fans
      5. Influencers
      6. Other Developers
      7. Tool Time: Social Oomph
      8. A note on Twitter Limits, Follower Ratios, and SPAM in General
      9. Tool Time: The Twit Cleaner
      10. Twitter Tagging
    2. Facebook
      1. Personal Pages
      2. Facebook Groups
      3. Facebook Fan Pages
      4. A Facebook Strategy
      5. Followers
      6. Content
      7. Tool Time: Involver
      8. Tool Time: Facebook Connect
      9. Advertising In Facebook
    3. Online Forums
    4. YouTube
  7. Promotions, Sweepstakes and Contests
  8. Advertising Your iPhone Application
    1. Why Buy Ads?
  9. Rankings and the App Store Ladder Points
  10. Media Buying
    1. Understanding Media Buying
    2. Planning and Buying Effective Media
    3. Creating a Media Plan
    4. Getting a Little Kickback From Apple
  11. Getting Press – The Art and Science of PR
    1. Contacting the Media
    2. Using a Press Release
      1. Release Information or Embargo Notice
      2. The Headline
      3. The Sub-Headline
      4. The Lead
      5. The Body
      6. The Summation Paragraph
      7. The Boilerplate
      8. The Close
      9. The Press Contact Information
      10. Distributing the Press Release
      11. Tool Time: prMac
    3. The Pitch Letter
    4. Dealing with Bloggers
  12. Monitoring Buzz
    1. Google Alerts
    2. Scout Labs
    3. Tool Time: Viral Heat
  13. Why Use a PR Agency?
  14. Wr(app)ing it Up
  15. Further Reading

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