Hey there. I'm about to release my first app, and I'm pretty excited. I only have about 300$ to spend on promotion, but I figured that after getting just a little bit of exposure, if the app is good enough it should begin to sell itself without having to keep on promoting it.
So, what do you guys think is the best way to spend the 300$? I was thinking about just a PR with prMac, and then spend the rest on quality reviewers with a lot of traffic. Is that better than putting all the money into iAd or Admob?
Hey there. I'm about to release my first app, and I'm pretty excited. I only have about 300$ to spend on promotion, but I figured that after getting just a little bit of exposure, if the app is good enough it should begin to sell itself without having to keep on promoting it.
So, what do you guys think is the best way to spend the 300$? I was thinking about just a PR with prMac, and then spend the rest on quality reviewers with a lot of traffic. Is that better than putting all the money into iAd or Admob?
Thanks in advance.
When I contacted iAd back in October they quoted me "This program is done on one flat CPC rate of $0.25. Normal starting budgets have been between $5k - $10k." Not very encouraging for an indie developer on a budget...
I had a terrible experience with admob, promoting a free app, I spent @$20 had @200 clicks...and 0 resulting downloads. For a FREE app!
PRmac gave me a 1 day 20% boost in sales for the two apps I used it with paying $19.95 for an extended release. Your release IS disseminated far and wide and and gets 100's of tweets and results in google news, although I doubt many people actually read the press releases. Its more of a "hope it gets picked up by a big media outlet" kind of thing. I do recommend it.
Check out some iphone app related gigs on fiverr.com. You can get alot of exposure for just $5 (check the reviews and ratings before buying though, lots of scammy types there too)
I would use it on PR Mac and then try to get some reviews. The idea is to get as many of these done in one or two days to get a higher ranking on the charts.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Oral B
Hey there. I'm about to release my first app, and I'm pretty excited. I only have about 300$ to spend on promotion, but I figured that after getting just a little bit of exposure, if the app is good enough it should begin to sell itself without having to keep on promoting it.
So, what do you guys think is the best way to spend the 300$? I was thinking about just a PR with prMac, and then spend the rest on quality reviewers with a lot of traffic. Is that better than putting all the money into iAd or Admob?
Cool thanks for the advice. I'll definitely use prMac and try to get reviews done as quick as possible. I'll try and get as many free ones as I can, and pay a couple of high traffic sites that require a small fee for reviews. Would you guys recommend paying some high traffic sites to have a banner of your app, or would you recommend just using all the money for as many reviews as possible?
Ah, that's a bummer. I figured that if the app is really good, I would just have to spend a few hundred on promotion to get my name out there and generate the first couple hundred sales, then it will begin selling itself. If I do put down a lot more money, what would you recommend putting it towards outside of app reviews and website banners?
Ah, that's a bummer. I figured that if the app is really good, I would just have to spend a few hundred on promotion to get my name out there and generate the first couple hundred sales, then it will begin selling itself. If I do put down a lot more money, what would you recommend putting it towards outside of app reviews and website banners?
If it was that easy, everyone in here would be a millionaire
You need *creativity*, loads of it, and a good dose of luck.
Whatever app you are making, just think about some stunts you can do with it, it could be going as far as buying a very stupid costume for $300 and go around in your city's streets pulling out some stunts to sell your app, if your app is suited for it, if it's an app for accountancy or something like that maybe the costume thingie won't work that well
But yeah, traditional media won't work with low-budgets, you need to think out of the box, a few miles out of it probably these days!
As always, I conclude with my motto: buy pizza, no ads
Oral B - I agree with the previous commenters and I'd like to add two things:
- watch out for scammy review sites which will promise you a video review, and reaching 30.000k Twitter Followers. Use google trends to measure their traffic, check their twitter stream - how often do they tweet, what kinds of audience they might have (for example, advertising on a stream that has mostly free apps is pointless - people who follow are usually looking for a freebie and won't pay a buck even for a good product).
Also - keep in mind that just because someone has 30k Twitter followers, it doesn't mean these followers are real human beings. It's quite easy to buy this kinds of numbers.
Remember, that if you'll get a 0,1% conversion ratio from a Twitter stream on these kinds of sites. So if they have 30k followers, you'll get 30 purchases.
If someone wants you to pay money for any kind of promotion ask for numbers. And by numbers, I don't mean "vanity metrics" like the followers, or daily traffic, but - how many users click on a link to app store? This is very easy to track and if they don't have this kinds of numbers, it either means they're incompetent and don't know **** about promotion, or that they know these numbers tell a sad story.
- I don't know about your app, but usually $200 would be better spent on hiring a graphic designer to create an outstanding icon, and an app tutorial, or to hire a voiceover artist + video composer and to build a very good video tutorial. It's better to spend this money and hire someone, than to pay $100 to guys like Daily App Show - Daily Video Reviews of iPhone, iPad and Android Apps , who will basically click through your app and record a crappy video out of that.
- I don't know about your app, but usually $200 would be better spent on hiring a graphic designer to create an outstanding icon, and an app tutorial, or to hire a voiceover artist + video composer and to build a very good video tutorial. It's better to spend this money and hire someone, than to pay $100 to guys like Daily App Show - Daily Video Reviews of iPhone, iPad and Android Apps , who will basically click through your app and record a crappy video out of that.
This is very true! I certainly agree - hire a designer and improve your app: add more features, new screens, better graphics etc.
I cannot agree more on Daily App Show issue - they don't even bother to figure out how your app works. When you email them\post on this forum, they reply "oh well, we don't have resources to serve you well, we will charge you more anyway". No numbers, no improvements just "we will charge you more for expedite review and hire more people to charge you even more".
Following your message I actually had a long talk with the Blog writer to try and get an even deeper insight about the matter.
I think that the following sentence sort of summarizes it:
"You do not need a large marketing budget or a PR team, what you need is time, patience, and most importantly, you need to create an app that people will want to talk about. That is the best shortcut to success."
Bottom line, I believe that you have two options:
1. If you are willing to spend a few thousand dollars on a serious promotion blitz, then you can get in contact with a company like inneractive or similar.
2. If you have a small budget then basically you need to generate your own PR. Use blog posts, distribute it in the various app stores, send it to opinion leaders (bloggers) etc.
Following your message I actually had a long talk with the Blog writer to try and get an even deeper insight about the matter.
I think that the following sentence sort of summarizes it:
"You do not need a large marketing budget or a PR team, what you need is time, patience, and most importantly, you need to create an app that people will want to talk about. That is the best shortcut to success."
That blog has some nice bits & pieces, but what I'm missing:
- a high resolution of this graphic: http://blog.inner-active.com/wp-cont...b34f759f28.jpg
- some numbers perhaps? How many sales does a front page of 148apps give? Like lifewares said, some of these services are really nice for buyers, but for sellers, they give next to nothing. Sometimes it's also not "how many people will buy", but "who will buy"...
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- some numbers perhaps? How many sales does a front page of 148apps give? Like lifewares said, some of these services are really nice for buyers, but for sellers, they give next to nothing. Sometimes it's also not "how many people will buy", but "who will buy"...
As I said, you are probably right. There is no substitute for good old private PR...
1. If you are willing to spend a few thousand dollars on a serious promotion blitz, then you can get in contact with a company like inneractive or similar.
This is very funny how you put it Seriously.
Let me explain: I am willing to spend not a few thousands, but rather 10's and 100's of thousands on promotion if it has some good positive efficiency that actually brings me more money back than I spent.
It is very simple concept: lets say I send $10K on a promotion, which bring me back $12K. Why in the world I would not want to spend $100K to get back around $120K?
Do you see the point? The problem here is the efficiency of paid promotion (banners, ads etc) is negative. I spend $100 on ads and get back maybe $10. Spend $100 on banners and get back maybe $5. I send out requests for a reviews to 100 sites, and only one reply. Is it worth the effort?
Let me explain: I am willing to spend not a few thousands, but rather 10's and 100's of thousands on promotion if it has some good positive efficiency that actually brings me more money back than I spent.
It is very simple concept: lets say I send $10K on a promotion, which bring me back $12K. Why in the world I would not want to spend $100K to get back around $120K?
Have you already looked into promoting your app on Free App A Day? There right around your price range and I've heard of some pretty great results. I would try it out but it is way out of my price range.
... Free App A Day? There right around your price range and I've heard of some pretty great results.
It is not about price range. Lets says I spend $5K on Free App A Day promotion.
I will get ... maybe 10K downloads of my free app if lucky. Ok, thats fine. So how do I make money of that?
I don't think conversion from 10K free apps to paid ones will cover $5K. It would mean every other free app will get converted to paid - it will never happen.
I'd estimate a real conversion is around 1-5% from free to paid. That means I would need to get approx 200K downloads of my free app to just break even.
As you can see, it is not very efficient at all...
I don't think conversion from 10K free apps to paid ones will cover $5K. It would mean every other free app will get converted to paid - it will never happen.
I'd estimate a real conversion is around 1-5% from free to paid. That means I would need to get approx 200K downloads of my free app to just break even.
As you can see, it is not very efficient at all...
Yeah that's true, I think a lot of it depends on your in app purchases also. Also if 10k people downloaded it, that would move you way up the charts, which might generate a bunch of future downloads. I'm not sure how effective it is at all though, I haven't seen any numbers posted in other devs reviews of the process. Looks like it could go either way, and the price of their promotion might not be worth the risk.
Best way to spend 300$ on promotion?
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