“Yesterday’s failures are today’s seeds.” – Martha McCormick

I Con Do It!

For the past 6 months and for the next 200 months, I plan on uncovering as much information as I possibly can about the abyss of the iTunes store and app marketplace. There is seemingly no clear path to success the way there is on the web (yet) and I am going to continue to experiment until I find out what the hell is going on. This latest project was designed to see what the delta on an icon and screenshots were for downloads and conversion rates.

Quick Background

I built the Oscar app using the exact same gaming engine as Alpha Combat but with a completely new look and feel. Cartooney, retro, and simple – but used virtually the same meta description (not keywords). It’s actually a lot of fun to play and I thought for sure it would get me some good downloads and revenue. I did none of the external marketing I did for Alpha Combat, including a dedicated website, YouTube video, paid reviews on app review sites, and a handful of other things.

The app launched as a free app and I was giddy to see how it performed. Take a look:

Um – yeah, not that great. Like – horrible actually. So, instead of getting down, I made a list of what could possibly be causing such an epic failure which what is seemingly a fun spin on a winning business model. Things that could cause this problem, controlling for the Alpha Combat elements:

1. Icon
2. Screen shots (essentially the graphics)
3. Keywords
4. Name
5. External marketing

The keywords and name change would require a deletion of the app and the external marketing is much larger test than what I was willing to put in, so the obvious answer was to update the icon and screen shots.

Make Me Beautiful So People Love Me

I hired my go-to designer out of Eastern Europe to whip up some hot new graphics for me. I needed a new icon and screen shots. I sent him a bunch of examples, explicit instructions, and let him run with it for a week. Here’s what we came back with:

A definite improvement, at least for $150. I was stoked. Next step was to release an update with this new found aweseomeness and start booking tickets to Hong Kong for a long weekend celebration. Umm….yeah not quite. Here’s what happened when I released the update:

On that first day I took a big sigh of relief – finally! I was going to back in Alpha Combat world where the money poured like candy and the schnozberries tasted like schnozberries. The problem, however, is that this new improved conversion rate didn’t trickle down beyond those that already had the app. The new icon and screen shots were appealing to people who saw them, but no one was seeing them. Ugh.

Remember the Titans – Keywords Crush It In App Land

After a few weeks of depression and retro induced panic, I snapped out of it all and gave the app a serious audit. What is going on? Why does Alpha Combat bury this app on raw downloads and eyeballs? I was looking through my iTunes Connect dashboard and reviewing all the data I had put in for the Oscar app and had a jaw dropping moment – there was only one keyword there: “arcade”

Well, great. At least now I have a better idea of why this is not doing anything for me. So here’s what I did to get going on that.

I deleted the app from the app store (which is why you probably can’t find it if you’re searching right now) and erased all it’s data. I took the Xcode project and updated all the necessary data, graphics, GameCenter, and in-app purchase data to reflect a new binary upload. I changed the name to Alien Combat – Galactic Space Invasion for two reasons – keywords and the fact that it starts with the letter “A.” Then I added the following keywords (you’re allowed 100 characters):

alien invaders,space wars,space invaders,super laser,alien,atari,space ace,cows in space,mr space

Notice that all those keywords are HIGH VOLUME GAMES and not generic keywords. I have a theory that one of the biggest reasons why Alpha Combat is killing it is because I put in MetalStorm as the primary keyword – type that in to the app store search and you’ll see why I get so many downloads – the icon looks just like MetalStorm and I just ride all their marketing horsepower. Who knows if this is the truth, but you’ll see that in Alpha Combat, the second highest “Customers also bought” game is MetalStorm. Go figure.

Waiting Is The Hardest Part

Now I wait a week to see what this sort of update will do for the overall volume of the game. In summary, here are the biggest takeaways from this experiment:

1. Icons and screenshots INCREASE CONVERSION – a greater percentage of people that see the app will download the app
2. Icons and screenshots do NOTHING FOR INCREASING EYEBALLS – they do very little for getting more visits to your page and getting in front of people

So, this experiment is slowly turning into a question of how to get lots of people looking at the app, then converting them with awesome graphics. I’ll definitely report on this as the info comes in.

Don’t forget to sign up for the email newsletter to get the first look at the outcome of this experiment!

See ya!

Carter

“Sell the steak, not the sizzle.” – Larry Ellison

Don’t You Forget About Me

I mentioned in one of my previous posts that I would be telling everyone about my experience with updates. I had heard from multiple sources, developers and marketers alike, that updating your app is one of the best ways to put yourself on next level of downloads. Not only do you re-engage your user base, your app gets recycled in the midas touch-esque Apple feed.

I decided to give it a shot with Alpha Combat by providing a new icon (cleaned up design and retina compatible) and increased the value of my most lucrative in-app purchase. I wanted to find out a few things:

1. How many people would update and are thus still interested in Alpha Combat?
2. How does it translate into downloads and revenue?
3. How does it affect rankings?

The short answer is – it was a BIG success. It’s almost as powerful as a free promotion in terms of revenue and skyrocketed the app on the charts.

How Updates Work

For anyone who doesn’t know how the update process it’s pretty simple: you create an updated version of your app in Xcode, change the .plist file to reflect your new version number (literally one line that changes to 1.1 or whatever), then head over to iTunes Connect and upload the new version with a description of what the new update features are. The new project gets put into the Review process which takes about a week, then gets approved. As a developer, you have control over the update being released automatically or if you want to release it on your own time.

When the update is released, the information is sent out to everyone who has your app and they have the option of downloading it. You know that little “1″ in the red circle on your app store icon? That’s the indicator that there are app updates ready to go. Your users either update the app or not. Thus, thus great update process is complete.

You’ll start to see numbers streaming into your iTunes Connect account (see image above) that show you how many people updated.

Alpha Combat’s Update Performance

REVENUE

SALES

NUMBER OF UPDATES

So, after you have a chance to digest those charts, you’ll see how updates affect app sales and revenue. The best news was the spike in revenue – it was almost comparable to the Openfeint Free App the of the Day promotion in terms of raw dollars from in-app purchases. Granted, the two of these are not mutually exclusive and the promotion probably still had some juice coming in when I lit off this update, but that’s marketing.

What’s even more interesting is that the sales spike wasn’t even close to the promotion spike, proving to me that many times your existing users are your best source of income. This is pretty much exactly how old school RFM marketing works, so I’m not surprised. On the backside, I can tell you that the sales spike put me on the charts for Italy and Japan for a few different reasons and thus increased my daily average nicely.

The number of updates continues to amaze me – even two weeks after releasing the update, I’m getting 500+ people updating their app every day. I think this will tail off nicely and follow the “one update every two months (or one month if you are digging it)” dogma I’ve heard. This has also translated into a solid increase in average daily revenue coming in from PlayHaven because people are using the game again and liking it.

Baby, I Need Your Lovin’

The takeaway from this exercise is that updates are awesome for increasing revenue, re-activating daily sales, and strengthening your overall app strategy. Your users took the time to download your app and want to feel like that’s worth something, so make it worth something. There is nothing more powerful than making a customer feel like you really care about them and updates are the ultimate way to do that.

Granted, you don’t want to update just for the sake of it and begin putting out garbage. Look at what happens when someone on Twitter tweets 25 times a day – it’s just kind of….lame. But, you can have an update that is not time intensive and get a good overall effect. Update your design a bit, tweak a few things here and there, and listen to your reviewers. Always make sure you are giving the users attention and making them part of your community – you would be nowhere without your customers and you need to remember that.

Data Driven Strategy Is The Bluecloud Rhapsody

There is nothing better than doing an experiment like the one above and, instead of stepping back and saying “wow, that’s cool,” saying, “Yes, let’s take this and get to the next level FAST.” So, I’ll be updating Alpha Combat again in about a month and include some serious features – mostly 3-4 new levels that are packed with bonuses and upgrades. This has been the top request in my reviews and think it will be a big success.

Until next time, keep rockin!

Carter

“Your best? Losers always whine about their best. Winners come home and **date** the prom queen.” – Sean Connery, The Rock

An SEO love story

When I build websites for people, one of the most common comments is “This needs to be optimized for search engines.”

Duh.

When I’m working with someone who knows their stuff, they’ll ask some more advanced questions like “Which wordpress themes are the best for SEO?” and the like. Now we’re talking. This is something that I’ve been working to pinpoint for a while now and finally pulled the trigger on what is easily the most marketed, highly publicized WordPress theme out there – Thesis Theme. From their website, Thesis is described as:

“The Thesis Theme framework is a premium template system for WordPress that is designed to serve as the rock-solid foundation beneath any kind of website.”

And right they are – this framework packs in an insane amount of customization and flexibility for anyone looking to drive huge traffic to a website. One of my goals for 2012 is to have 1,000 visitors a day by the end of the year and I knew I needed to make some changes to the architecture to make that happen. Here’s what I did.

The New Kid on the Block

Here’s a side by side of what my website used to look like versus what it looks like now:

The old website, built on a more traditional corporate framework, did a great job getting my business started – it was very linear and navigation driven, allowing me to showcase services and portfolios very well. It did a great job at looking professional and being a static experience. The new website is much more focused on the information my company is learning about every day – it is dynamic and integrated with social media, and is designed to really promote the articles.

It has all the same professionalism and service showcasing, but my credibility is sold in my ability to share. This is very important to me, because I think the best marketing is proving that you know what you’re talking about, not just saying who you’ve worked for in the past.

The best way to describe the re-design is that the old website was great at showcasing what Bluecloud is, the new design illustrates where Bluecloud is going.

Freshly Shaven – The Ecstasy of Clean Code

In SEO, there are three major buckets – site architecture (how it’s built, tags, etc), content, and links. I’ve got a good handle on content and have a solid link building network (Contact me if you’re interested in a link exchange ) and realized that I needed to give my site structure a face lift. I had all the title tags, meta descriptions, and keywords dialed in, but there was SO much garbage javascript and CSS in the old framework that wouldn’t minimize the way I needed it to. It was slowing down my site and causing the Google spider to index things that I didn’t want it to. That’s one of the most attractive elements of the Thesis Theme - the source code is simple and clean. Here’s a side by side of both websites’ source code as seen in FireFox (without any plugins):

If you’re the Google spider looking to index a page, which would your prefer? Not only do you have less to load with Thesis, you get to the content much faster. Similarly, browsers love Thesis more than my old template because they can load it about 40% faster (negligible javascript rendering) and and parse the CSS at lightning speed. The old site required a 75K image per page to act as a “header” image that was great for illustrating the theme of the page, but terrible for SEO factors. Bottom line – the new code slays the way all minimalist programming does. Steve Jobs was known for locking his design team in a room for a days on end not to come up with new ideas, but to strip down a product to it’s core necessary functionality. Touchdown.

Hooking Up – The Bluecloud Website Makes Out With Custom Functions

I’ll admit it – the custom hooks/custom functions area of Thesis was a turn off at the beginning. I wanted to control the style.css file the way I usually do and do all my editing the PHP editor area of the site. But, the more I explored Thesis, the more I realized how the custom functions editor was really the most remarkable part of the entire thing – I could essentially make it do anything just by adding to this box instead of re-writing the whole framework. Better yet – if anything went awry, the reset is a simple delete. Thesis can update to new versions seamlessly and every piece of custom CSS, font replace, javascript, and custom hooks will be untouched. This liberation felt amazing.

I’m going to keep this section short because of the geekiness of it, but my goodness does this get me going!

Traffic Cialis – The Numbers Just Keep Going Up

In the grand scheme of things, the content is what’s gotten me to the next level in traffic, without question. But the metrics I’m seeing on a day to day basis with the new Thesis theme are incredible – the long tail keywords are expanding rapidly, the metrics are increasing, and the site is overall just flying in growth. It’s been about 2 weeks and I just saw the  latest Google ranking updates which is why the traffic spiked so much. It’s on track to continue this growth as I focus on internet marketing and iPhone application marketing topics that genuinely interest and help people.

I could go on and on about the different parts of the Thesis theme and how you can literally do anything you want with it, but I’ll stop here. I definitely recommend this theme if you’re in the blog world or even if you just want to get on one of the most powerful platforms out there. Hell – that’s why I’m using it! If you want to learn more, you can click here for pricing and more information.

Keep rocking,

Carter

“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” – John Cage

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Ryan Merket, CEO of AppStores, and find out about what these guys are up to. In a nutshell, this is what they’re offering.

“Appstores provides relevant and targeted app distribution by partnering with mobile website publishers.”

Their “How It Works” gives a bit more detail, saying:

“We are partnering with companies who have mobile websites. We determine based on the content of the website, the user, and the device type, which application to show (AdSense for apps). We have a number of different HTML5 ad units available and decide which to show based on device type and which is performing best for the publisher.”

What I liked most about my conversation with Ryan was his clear value proposition and obvious energy. The Appstores platform provides some very defined benefits:

• Lower than industry average CPA
• HTML5 to leverage mobile websites (as opposed to strictly other mobile apps)

To the first point, this is very important because as it currently stands, it is extremely hard to make the CPA model work for apps. I spent a long time wrestling with different models and could never make them work – they are designed for the larger players who invested into a deep long tail revenue model and can afford to pay up front. Appstores is liberalizing this market and bringing the price down by appealing to a greater pool and using better technology. Kudos.

Mobile Advertising is Big Business

It seems that everyone is talking about how big mobile is going to be in 2012 and beyond. What’s great about the Appstores model is that it’s built dynamically and can target mobile websites much more effectively than trying to ballpark the content of a native app. This is going to drive higher conversion and lower costs to the developers.

All in all, I like what these guys are doing and will look to integrate this into some of the larger projects I do as they become viable. If you’re looking to get into the mobile marketing, definitely keep these guys in mind.

To Ryan and team – Good luck!

Carter

“When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.” Warren Buffett

Gimme Fuel, Gimme Fire! No, just gimme downloads.

I’ve been working with the guys over at Openfeint for a while now and they’ve got a great thing going. Their company is blowing up and they are making huge moves to get into the global market of social gaming. Openfeint is a social gaming network, much like GameCenter, with a few hundred million users and an awesome business model. I’m fired up to work with these guys and wish them the best.

We worked out a deal to feature Alpha Combat as a free game of the day in order to find out the total impact of this kind of promotion on an arcade game as such. The game is featured on the website (seen above) and in their app, along with a few other distribution channels. The market reach is enormous, and forecasts for download numbers have been anywhere from 15,000 to 200,000 in the weeks following the promotion. And for good reason – the price tag on this gives you reason enough to be serious about making something happen.

I spent a few days creating all the necessary promotion graphics and PSD files, updating meta copy and getting ready to see what happened. I followed my own app pricing strategy and changed the app to paid right before the promotion in order to maximize the lift of the free promotion. Everything was all set and I was watching the charts through my AppViz software.

Here’s what happened.

User base increase of 60%

Sorry if you can’t read the text on this graphic – if you follow it left to right, the boxes read

• Red – Free
• Blue – Paid ($0.99)
• Red – Switch to Free 10AM EST
• Black – OF Promotion Goes Live
• Blue – Switch back to paid ($0.99)

On the day of the Openfeint promotion, I received my biggest one day total to date – 14,303. The next day was 12,254, then 10,793. Beyond the Openfeint networks, I had a major lift into the Italy iTunes market and enjoyed a top 10 Free Games spot for about four days. Before the promotion, I had about 90,000 users in a little under 3 months. In the week following the promotion, I now have 150,000. That’s good stuff.

Daily Revenue Increase of 75%

You’ll see that the shape is relatively similar to the sales graph – the days after the promotion, the app was pulling in about $80-100 a day. My usual daily revenue hovers between $30-40 off the app. It is important to remember, however, that I actually make MORE money from the Playhaven cross promotion widget in the app than I do off the sales and in-app purchases of Alpha Combat.

Collectively, I made about $220-250 a day for the week following the promotion until I made it paid again (last blue box).

Back to where it all began….yeah right.

So now that the Openfeint magic has essentially worn off, I’m back to my regular life of marketing the hell out of this app with traditional marketing. Or am I? I stepped back and realized that I now have an ocean of users using my app, about 40 new positive reviews, and above average metrics across the board.

A good analogy is to being a builder – you can work on houses and make 15% margins and live a comfortable life or you can work on corporate buildings and make 15% margins and retire when you’re 40.

This promotion gave me a big step from building houses towards building corporate structures – I’m doing all the same things but with a leverage arm that is 50% more powerful. And, as the obsessive marketer I am, I immediately wanted to capitalize that.

Making Money with Apps – Status Updates on Steroids

So this promotion is great and it made me a nice chunk of change, but you should never look at promotions as a way to make your money back – all they do is provide users that you can deepen your leverage with. The number one way to do this? Updates.

I released a Version 1.1 update in tandem with the Openfeint promotion that I held for developer release so that I could time it with the next weekend and with a second price cycle. Now I have 60,000 users that I am going to engage in the first week of being a client (See RFM modeling for more info on this) and 150,000 total that I can re-engage. New icon for retina displays (makes a big difference) and increasing the value of my best performing in-app purchase to incentivize people to pull the trigger.

My developer friend just did an update on a basic hotel booking app and this is what happened when he released an update to 500 people:

I’ll be sure to update this post when I get some data from the Alpha Combat update (which went out 1/14/12 at 9:30AM EST).

Would I recommend the Openfeint promotion to someone? Absolutely – but they need to be aggressive marketers with a 100 day plan if they want to make their money back (unless, of course, your daily numbers dwarf Alpha Combat, which many do).

No matter what, it’s a hell of a lot more fun to work with big numbers than it is to work with small ones!

See ya!

Carter

“There will always be a frontier where there is an open mind and a willing hand” – Charles Franklin Kettering

Money For Nothing and Trips For Free

Before I write anything, I want to make it very clear that I think the team over at Points North Heli Adventures are top notch. They’ve got an awesome thing going and are professional in everything they do. More than anything, I’m just sorry that this didn’t work out because it would have been awesome…on so many levels.

I cold called (cold-emailed?) a handful of heli ski operations all over the USA and Canada pitching them on a trade – iOS app for a one of kind experience. I built an Xcode framework a few months ago that is one of best content display apps I’ve ever seen and have been sitting on it ever since, the biggest reason being I just don’t have access to or time to generate the content necessary to populate this thing.

So – I figured I should team up with someone who has content, or at least someone who sells an experience that I could turn into content.

The pitch was pretty straight forward: I fly out to the destination on my own dime with a high end camera and video setup, spend a week aggregating the most mind blowing content for every part of the experience, then come home and build out an iPhone and iPad version. FOR FREE.

Zero cost out of pocket for the client.

Not only that, I take all existing content on their website and re-purpose and package it all for the app. The entire project takes their experience and web assets and centralizes it into the ultimate visual engagement platform. On top of that, there are in-app purchasing capabilities in this framework, high definition videos, social network integrations – the list goes on. A $15-20,000 package all delivered right to them, all the way up through publishing and design.

Without question, I’m getting the raw end of this deal, but I could not be more fired up about this sort of barter, especially for a product that gets me this sort of experience. I’m young, healthy, and hungry for adventure – this is what I want to do with my time. I dream of creating apps that reflect this kind of content and want to partner with someone who has an equal amount of energy.

Dumped before the first date

Long story short here’s how the whole episode between me and PNHA went down:

• Send intro email
• Receive very nice reply from Jessica from the PNHA team that says “yeah, this sounds great, send us some info.”
• Put together a bangin’ proposal
• Get a call from Kevin, the top dog
• 15 minute conversation about how cool this would be and how much we enjoyed each other’s excitement
• Him asking me “Can you fly out Feb 25-March 3?”
• I say Yes.
• I send follow up email with a basic overview of the project.
• Get this response:

Hi Carter,

My apologies for the delay in getting back to you!

Unfortunately, we are not going to be able to move forward with a PNH app. As much as both Kevin and I love the idea, there are other avenues we are going to focus on that reach a broader market.

Thanks so much again for thinking of us and please keep in touch.

End of story.

I’ll give anyone the same offer that I made these guys – Free iPhone and iPad app for a killer experience.

Whatever – I completely understand why Points North Heli Adventures decided not to go forward and no harm done. I wish I could have talked to them a bit more to explain why this is going to be a slam dunk in the long term (did I mention that there are no heli skiing apps in the entire iTunes store? Only one app comes up when you type in “heli ski”) but hey, such is life and I’ve got other things to focus on. Resorts like Whistler and Aspen are furiously dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars to get in the app game….maybe the PNHA guys know something they don’t?

Anyway, I’m reaching out to anyone out there with the same offer I pitched the heli ski operations:

My iPhone and iPad app, fully designed, built, published, everything, in exchange for a trip where I come and gather the content.

Examples include:

• Heli Skiing
• Fly Fishing
• Surfing
• Adventure Travel
• Sailing/Boating
• Snorkeling
• Hiking
• Food/Restaurant
• Any other rich experience that you consider life changing

Below are some screen shots of what that app can do (these are for the iPad version). I’m happy to send over the full proposal if you’re interested, but please only reach out if you’re serious. Send this to anyone you think might be interested – because I can only do this for a few. I’ve already got a gig lined up with SwimVacation, which is exactly the kind of experience I’m talking out.

In the meantime, keep rocking. Send me an email if you want to run any ideas by me.

Carter

Once we rid ourselves of traditional thinking we can get on with creating the future. – James Bertrand

To Free or Not To Free

As many of you know, I developed my own iPhone app in order to gain data to share with everyone out there who wants to know how the app store works. It’s been about 2 months now and I’m starting to learn a few trends that I think are pretty cool and can really power the marketing behind apps. This is going to be an ongoing series about how to break the app store market, much the way SEO was an open market around 2004. With any luck, you’ll be able to use my experience for your own research or as inspiration to get in the game.

This post is about how price cycling can really accelerate your download numbers. Price cycling means you switch from paid to free over and over again. I’m going to do my best to explain every aspect of this process so that you see where I’m coming from and why this is an imperfection in the market.

A few key assumptions

Before I get into this, I want to be clear that this is not the best strategy for everyone. It hinges on linear revenue relative to number of active users. So – to get the max bang for your buck, this is what you should have:

1. Revenue models beyond downloads – this can be iAds, Admob, or cross promotion widgets. I use Playhaven and it totally kicks ass. They’ve done a great job and I’m really happy about their customer service. I’ll talk about this more later on.

2. You don’t have a product that is price sensitive – some products can get slammed if you go from $2.99 to Free then back to $0.99 via reviews. Customers can get pissed off if they feel like they got ripped off. Luckily, I’m not concerned about this (not in a mean way), but it’s something to think about if you have a brand or fragile product.

3. You’re in a high volume category - my game is in the Arcade and Action subcategories of Games which both have huge download numbers. I have another app that’s in Lifestyle and is very simple and this model did NOT work for that. It’s a bit of apples and oranges because of the product quality, but it’s also just that certain categories get bigger numbers.

Free vs. Paid Apps Snapshot

OK – here are the screen shots that you all want to see. The first is the download numbers and the second is the revenue numbers. PS this is from AppViz – which is a great software tool for tracking app data.

In the first graph you see raw download numbers – the first was my first switch to Free and I was picked up by all the app aggregator sites. The second was when I went free I went to the top 10 in Japan for my sub categories. The third time I was picked up by Korea’s top 25. Who knows what will happen next time, but every time I’ve made it onto most country’s top 100 free lists.

In the second graph you can see the breakdown of revenue. The blue represents actual app download revenue (when it was paid). The first was when it was $0.99, the second was at $1.99, the third at $2.99. The fact that I sell just as many apps when it’s $1.99 and $2.99 is another blog post entirely, but I need WAY more data to prove that. The rest of the colors represent the different in-app purchases from the app which are upgrades for planes, currency, etc.

You can see in the top that there is a HUGE swing in download numbers when I make the app free, but there isn’t a huge swing in revenue. If I had nothing in the app that could benefit from a large user base (Playhaven, iAds), I probably wouldn’t care much about making it free vs keeping it paid.

BUT – here’s a third graph taken from Playhaven to paint the full picture:

Boom! You see what I’m saying? The raw number of people engaged in my app is directly proportional to the paycheck I get every month. Beyond the app revenue, there is huge incentive for me to jack up the user base as big as possible. I can’t really draw any solid conclusions between the in-app purchases and the size of the user base yet, but I think I’ll be able to in a few more months.

How the $*(#_@ Does This Happen?

Ah, yes, good question. The title of this post “Hacking the App Store” was not just catchy – it’s literally what’s happening. If you Google “latest free apps” or anything similar to that, you’ll see thousands of websites that are aggregating all the apps that went free or dropped price today. These websites stream the RSS and XML feeds from Apple that says what’s new and what’s changing in the iTunes store, which the websites parse out through their website and apps with a deep-linked affiliate code. The websites make 5% off every purchase you make in the next 48 hours. They are making SERIOUS money doing this.

This is exactly why the Apple market is going to always be the little brother of the internet (Google, mostly). It’s nearly impossible to control this type of behavior, at least for now, and thus creates an opportunity to capitalize on it. And, since the market is growing so quickly, the numbers are always going to be there.

Size Matters, Baby

For my game, the size of my user base is very important. Currently I have about 81,000 downloads in under two months which I think is OK – other games that have not done this cycling are about 20,000 in the same time frame. Similarly, there are apps that have over a million in a month.

I think there’s a lot to be said for graphics and copy writing – icon, screenshots, and your iTunes description – when you’re trying to jack your downloads. This is essentially conversion optimization. I think there is also a lot to be said for spacing out your price cycles if you want to hit the top charts as opposed to just getting nice pops here and there.

Bottom line is that I still need to test this more thoroughly, but it’s looking pretty causal as opposed to correlated. Some developer friends have seen similar trends when they do it. If you have any insights yourself, please leave a comment or shoot me an email and I’ll hook it up.

Keep rocking,

Carter

Google Email Marketing To Promote Mobile Websites

I literally just received this email and I had to blog about it. Google has consistently taken personalization to new levels – first with their individual YouTube ads to celebrate their 10th anniversary, now this as the first push to get everyone into mobile. Check out the visual for my music blog TGIF Jams.

As you can see, the hand is holding up exactly what my website looks like on a phone (Android in this case). This is incredible marketing for a few key reasons:

1. It’s highly personalized.

This is my exact website in a visual format. This isn’t my first name in the subject line or every other played out personalization tactic – it’s a real and tangible asset.

2. It exposes my faults.

Call it whatever you want, a powerful tactic in marketing is to effectively illustrate what you are missing or why you’re behind the 8 ball. This does that very well. Let’s get real…my website looks terrible there.

3. It’s the classic problem/solution format.

Think of infomercials and how they start everything off by explaining how terrible something is – mopping, chopping, hair cutting, etc. Then they bring in the whistles and drop everyone’s jaw with some amazing showmanship. This email is doing a similar message by showing me that my website looks terrible….but there is an easy way to fix it. No brainer, right?

4. Targeted offer

If telling me my site is mobile-ugly (mo-ugly) wasn’t enough to get me to stop playing Amazing Breaker, they’ve given me a way to get a free personalized site report. I’d be an idiot not to click on that. It ties together an extremely powerful visual with an easy solution. Google…I don’t care what Steve Jobs says – let’s party.

Email Marketing Is Making A Comeback

I’ve spent the last few months architecting a plan for blog marketing and I cannot stress enough how important email marketing is.The biggest reason is that email marketing is one of the only ways to create a positive ROI on customers on the long term. This means you can eat margins on affiliate sales, AdWords spends, and other CPA models and STILL make money. Mark my words, long tail marketing like this is going to be what separates the winners from the losers in the next 10 years of internet marketing.

Did anyone else get this email? What did you think?

Carter

Free vs Paid Apps – Which Makes More Money?

One of the largest parts of iPhone app marketing is the pricing strategy. Do you move in at $0.99? $1.99? Free? The decision can be a tough one, especially when you are launching. My app has been in the store for about 11 days now and I’ve banked about $400 off the app (after Apple’s 30% cut) and about $400 off of my Playhaven integration (partnership program that sells cost per install). This is only the very beginning of my findings, but am starting to see some trends that hold value.

I launched with a $0.99 and let that run for about 9 days with the intention of having it paid and then marketing the absolute hell out to of it, selling quality and sizzle. It wasn’t going to be a volume move, but it would maintain the value. I figured this would be longer term strategy so that I could increase the value of my marketing.

Well, I was wrong. At least as far as I can tell from the first two weeks. Here’s why.

Volume Buries Price

This means that the bottom line of my app being free is dwarfing the results I got from having it be paid. Assumptions:

1. Your app has a strong in-app purchase functionality
2. Your app has a monetization program beyond in-apps and cost of app (Playhaven, iAds, etc)
3. You value things like reviews as much as price (typically true during a launch period of 3 months)

Here are two snapshots of the life cycle of the app. First is my Sales data chart:

And here is my PlayHaven account:

The Playhaven chart is a more accurate representation of download numbers (about 8,000 a day when free) but is measured by Clicks which follow the same trend. The dip at the end is because that’s real time data and it’s only half way through today.

Reviews = Value = Money

Do not underestimate the power of positive reviews. The rankings climbed because I hit top 50 in Free Games for a few days, but the biggest difference is that I added about 10 five star reviews. The download numbers on the 29th and the 30th were about the same, but I made about 70% more money on the second day. The only variable that changed was the number of positive reviews.

This shows people that the game is credible and makes them more likely to engage. That usually means more in-app purchasing. As I add more reviews and the download numbers even out, I will find out what my average income will be.

My Recommendation

If you are looking to get in the app game to make money, here are my recommendations:

1. Create a fun and engaging game (the download numbers on games are 5-10x higher than other categories)
2. Create a easy and viable in-app purchasing model
3. Integrate various paths to make money on the user, not just through Apple
4. Cycle your pricing to understand where your sweet spot is (but know the Free is where you want to be)

Sidenote – a lot of people are tempted to leverage the Free app download numbers with iAds to create revenue. I suggest against this. Most people find the ads very annoying and the payout is really, really low. It’s kind of a chicken and egg too bc you need users to use the app multiple times, but if they find the ads annoying they won’t. I don’t have proof for this, just my two cents from talking to lots of developers and their experience.

I need to do more testing with promotions vs Free release vs price cycling, but I am creating a theory that the best way to market an app is not over the long term, but to put all your eggs in one basket a few times a year. Timing 5-10 promotions and your free release all at the same time could potentially get you into the top 10 of your category, which will then feed you 100K organic users, etc. I’m going to test all this and report back with proof.

If you have any questions about pricing and how to make more money on an app, let me know!

Carter

If you want to be successful, double your rate of failure.” – Tom Watson

The Art of Publishing an iPhone App

I apologize for my lack of correspondence this past month – I’ve been going full throttle on developing my first real iPhone game. I decided to do this for two reasons:

1. I love doing it
2. I want to have a data mine that I can relay information to everyone

During this project I went through literally every different aspect of iPhone development on a level that I had previously never appreciated – long nights working through Xcode, iOS simulator de-bugging, provisioning profiles, the works. I began to feel joy when seeing the words “Starting Build” or “Compiling” at which point I knew I needed to (ahem) get a life. I’m by no means a great Objective-C programmer, but can understand it well. It’s helped my HTML and CSS grow indirectly, which is nice.

If you’re interested in seeing the app, check it out here:

http://itunes.apple.com/app/alpha-combat-defend-your-country/id467315152?mt=8

I’m going to write a monster post in a few weeks when I get some marketing data behind this, but for now, I wanted to give everyone a quick list of things to be aware of when creating an app.

Testing on your device (iPhone, iPad)

Assuming you want to be part of the testing process, you’re going to want to have Xcode installed on your computer. This will come with the iOS simulator (a mock device on your computer) so you can see what the app looks like when exported from Xcode. This is really easy to do when you have a bug free project.

When you’re ready to incorporate your device to the process, the real fun starts. Apple makes the process pretty confusing if you’re not used to it, the same way setting up hosting or a DNS for a website can be if you don’t know where to start. Basically, this process validates your device with your developer account so that Apple knows you have approved this device. It goes something like this:

Generate a set of keys and request for Certificate on your computer -> Upload to your provisioning profile (in the developer.apple.com account -> Generate a development certificate -> Download that to your computer -> Setup a provisioning profile for your device -> Validate that profile with the new certificate

WOW that sounds geeky. But it’s how it works. Apple walks through the process with a good Wizard program so you should be able to get most of it done yourself. I would recommend doing this a few times just to understand how it goes. I can almost guarantee this will make you want to pull your hair out for the first few hours, but it’s great experience. Being able to set this up allows you to do much more exciting testing.

LESSON I LEARNED: If you are working with a developer somewhere else, make sure the certificate is built off the private keys you make on your own computer, then send them the private keys. Otherwise you’re going to do everything right and still get the “No match for provisioning profile” error message which is easily the most infuriating thing you’ll ever see.

Icons and Screen Shots Are Worth Their Weight in Gold

After researching the app store for hundreds of hours and talking to dozens of developers, the biggest game changer I have seen aside from outbound marketing is the design of the app store page. This includes the icon, screen shots (up to 5) and the description. Take a look at the top 25 in any category – notice that they all look like a million bucks. Icons and screen shots that are done well convey that you spent a lot of time thinking of the user experience.

I went as far as to hire three different designers to get the icon and splash screens done the way I wanted them, and I still think they could be better (for version 2). On a few of my development apps that I put out earlier this year, I updated the screen shots with Photoshopped versions of the app and had a 30% increase in downloads.

LESSON I LEARNED: Do whatever you need to do to make the icon and screen shots awesome. Ask 20 people what they think every time you get a design and ask them to be brutally honest. Your ego doesn’t make you money, good design does. Keep pushing until you get something that looks like it’s worth the price.

Power Trio: Openfeint, Game Center, In-App Purchases

To clarify – the first two are only applicable to games. Similarly, if you are looking to make money in the app store, you better be in the game business. The numbers CRUSH everything else in terms of downloads and revenue. Let me explain.

Openfeint: (www.openfeint.com) This is a gaming network with over 120 Million people. You can incorporate leader boards, achievements, and marketing through this explosive channel. The exposure is pretty incredible and allows for app users to track their play and compete against people in the community. The best part is that the integration is VERY easy to do. If you have the option, integrate this with your game app at all costs.

Game Center: This is Apple’s gaming community and works very much the same way as Openfeint. This allows gamers to do the same sort of competition, which always helps. Similarly, it adds credibility to have the Game Center icon next to your icon in the store.

In-App Purchases: I’ve written about this before, but I want to stress this point now that I’ve gone through the process and am seeing what works and what doesn’t - create in-app purchasing into your app. There are three major reasons for this:

1. It is not very difficult to do
2. It can increase your revenue by 2-3x
3. It gives you the flexibility to monetize free app promotions and free app download numbers (nearly 100x paid downloads)

LESSON I LEARNED: All three of these are wildly easy to integrate and provide huge upside value. I cannot stress these enough. The first two are only for games, but the third needs to be in every app you make. You will dwarf any revenue you make on iAds, I guarantee it.

Next time: Breaking the App Store

In a few weeks I’m going to do a much deeper dive into the analytics of the app store and prove that marketing, design, and clever development can make the your app a money machine. See you then!

Carter