How do you promote your apps?

any tips anyone?

depends on the level of promotion… from private to corporal… just a handshake… but from captain to major there is more of a ceremony. :slight_smile:

sorry could not resist.

Some ways that are common:

  1. Twitter
  2. blog write up
  3. email clients (be careful with the frequency of emails)
  4. have a yearly sale with a discount on certain products
  5. make videos of what your software does and post it
  6. Facebook
  7. make something special that is written in a magazine
  8. others…?

You can also email your press releases to pr@xojo.com for some free press.

Does anyone do Google advertising or Facebook? Press releases nowadays seem to get much less traffic than a couple of years before. Getting someone in a magazine to write an article is really hard because mobile is the only interesting thing and desktop apps are boring.

  1. Clean uncluttered product website which can be indexed by search engines
  2. Blog
  3. Apple Mac Store AND Windows Download
  4. Demo- or Testversion
  5. No Facebook / Adwords / SEO Bullshit of Web! No crashlytics or other 3rd party spy trackers.
  6. Stay with your target group. Be part of their communities in forums etc. Don’t be rude in advertising but from time to time bring your blog topics into ongoing discussions or even better, let your product or blog content bring in by somebody else.
  7. Small Continuous Improvements
  8. Patience

My bunch of public available apps are mostly made from projects without NDA. Wanna have example? https://data-reader.de/

I do not make a fortune with them, but it’s enough to feed and keep my servers, Apple Developer Membership and Xojo Subscription running. That’s enough for me cause 99% of my software (and income) is non-public custom software and services.

… Just a detail, but it can mean additional traffic: don’t forget to submit your app’s URL to Google and Bing.

If you can, put your app on a CD and sell it on Amazon US. You could be surprised by the number of sales, for Windows and Mac. Preferably set it up as FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon), so Amazon’s best customers, Prime members, get one day delivery and free shipping. I usually send in 10 pieces through priority mail to Amazon warehouse, and do not have the hassle of delivering myself.

I set up the price of a packaged CD ten dollars more than the download. For instance, the download I sell on checkwriter-printer.com is $24.99, and the CD is $34.99 on Amazon. I always make sure to link to it from my site, too, so consumers that prefer a CD can buy.

I happen to admin a Facebook group for Amazon sellers, where I share my knowledge of that trade : https://www.facebook.com/groups/673668379421814/

Some marketing tips:

https://documentation.xojo.com/UserGuide:Marketing

How big and/or specialized is your market? That will affect how you market it.
I’ve developed software that has a worldwide market of about 5 customers. I can just give them a phone call or send them an email, and tell them about it.

If it’s something that is targeted to a specialized industry, then you need to find out what publications and websites that these industries frequent.

If you are releasing on the Mac App Store or iOS App Store, App Store Optimization is the key to success

What do you mean with App Store Optimization?

his presentation at recent conferences. :wink:
You can hear him talk at the next conference!

ASO is similar to SEO but applied to App Stores.

Unless your brand name is very well known, such as Waze, Spotify or any other major app, +80% of traffic to your app will come from people searching for keywords on the app store.

Optimizing keywords is very important, so is choosing a good title and subtitle.
The quality of the screenshots can also make a difference.

For B2C apps, once the app has a fair amount of downloads from one market (a country, or group of countries speaking the same language), the best way to improve downloads and revenue is to localize the app to make it available to other markets.

German, Spanish, French, Chinese and Taiwan are some of the most profitable markets.

One of my apps has a +20% month to month growth since January just by releasing one update per month with a new localization.

Thanks, Jeremie. Is this https://moz.com/blog/app-store-optimization-checklist still current?

While I was doing research I found this:
https://thetool.io/2017/how-to-optimize-google-play-aso-guide

It is for the Play Store, but soon enough Xojo will do Android. And anyway, most of the principles in there apply to the MAS.

If you send traffic to the MAS, like I do from all my sites, you also want to make sure the sale counts to rank keywords. Adding a keywords field to your link can boost your app ranking. See this article about the technique for Amazon, which can be used for the MAS and the Play Store, as well as the Windows Store.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazon-super-urls-method-side-effect-dev-tripathi

I mentioned above making sure your app listing is submitted to Google and Bing. Both send visitors to the MAS with the keywords that were used by the visitor.

Yes it is still current