[General Marketing & SEO] lohith kumar.S:
Hi Fellow Developers,

A little bit about myself. I am part of a group called 'New Rich' . The NR is a group of individuals who make just enough money to fulfill their dreams by doing things that excites them with their free time . Each NR is excited by different things and I find my excitement in teaching others what I have learnt and still learn from the group. I am currently working in India and I teach a lot of youngsters the way of the new rich and enable them to be financially free by blogging, App development E-Commerce and me and my fellow NR's do a lot of free knowledge sharing on this front . I see that a lot of developers develop brilliant apps but fail to get it in front of the market and the app gets lost in oblivion. I hope that I can give my two cents here and be able to help you in promoting your apps. This is my first post and I would not be able to post links here . But will update the post if it proves popular and once I have posted 10 comments.

Warning : Post would be long and will be updated from time to time so feel free to grab a cup of coffee. :)

The post is based on two principles.

80/20 Principle (Pareto's Law) : 80% of your downloads comes from 20% of the sources.

Pareto's law on income distribution can be applied to just about anything you want . The usually accepted assumption that all the work you do will yield equal result is false. For example : Most of the blogs will have that 10 or 20 posts out of a 100 which gets them more than 80% of the traffic. Only 20 % of what you study will be asked in your examinations. 80 % of your effort on preparation for the exam is useless. So what if you can know that 20 % of your promotion effort which is giving you more than 80 % of your downloads ? Then all you will need to do is spend more time on this 20 % and not waste time on the other 80 %.

Parkinson's Law : Work expands to fill the time available for its completion

After you know that 20% which is giving you the best results. Come up with the things you should do to maximize and DO IT NOW !!! Keep a deadline of 3 hours to complete all your promotion task and call it a day. Don't fall into the trap of reading a hundred posts on promotion and not doing even one . Dont get into the habit of 'paralysis by analysis'. Another suggestion would be not to read something to its entirety. Even this post. Read the part that you really need to do now and the rest when you are ready to execute .

You must be well aware by now that more than 80% of the apps in Playstore get majority of the downloads and consequently more than 80% of the revenue. I don't want to bombard you with stats bore you to death. This is also true with marketing and sales. 80% of your sales will come from 20 % of your sources. Here I want to distinguish between sales and marketing.

Marketing : Where you let a lot of people know about your app . Promotion, Ads, Guest Post are examples for marketing.

Sales : Where you convincing a person who reaches your play store link because of marketing to download your app. Beautiful app Icon, an HD YouTube video explaining your app, screenshots explaining your app features on each screen and not just a plain screenshot are examples of sales.

Our method for app promotion is simple. Find out which 20 % of the events or actions that you do gets you 80% of your success (80/20 Principle) and Do more of that 20 % to get you the best result in the least amount of time spent(Parkinsons Law).

Finding out which 20% of the things you do is getting you 80% of your result

One of the problems is finding out from where you are getting your downloads. So the idea is to measure from which source you are getting maximum downloads. This can be done in three ways.

Whenever you are posting your playstore url ALWAYS use an url shortner(search "Google url shortner" ) and use the short link to post about your apps in forums. This will allow you to track the sources from which you are getting your clicks from and this is very important.

You can now link your app to Google Analytics. This will allow you to track how your downloads are generated. Using this you will be able to better determine the percentage of your downloads which are generated through Organic(People searching for your app or keyword in your app description through Google Search and Play Store) and InOrganic(People clicking on some link you have posted elsewhere and reaching your app) . Google on how you can add your app to google analytics page and its easy.

Another effective method to know if your app was mentioned on any blogs or news is very important to keep track of your app.

Enter your app name in quotes in Google Search(Ex : "FallToid app") and click on "google news" . At the very end of the search list you will have an option to called "Create an Alert" . Set that up once and whenever your app is mentioned on any news or blog you automatically get alerted about it by Google.

If you do the above , you can be rest assured that you are tracking almost all the sources of your downloads. Also I have noted that many people don't trust short-links so it would be better if you add something like (shortened link to play-store) to let people know that it is a play-store link.

Next up, Posting links to your app . I have a list of forums and websites on which I have had success promoting my client's apps and I will post those when I am able to do so. But basically there are two kinds of apps .

Promotion based apps : These are the apps which people don't want currently or don't know it exists but will download them when they come across it. These apps will not get much organic downloads. But can go viral based on the downloads they get. Examples for these apps are most of the games and some of the apps. User sees the link or reads about the app from some website or forum and downloads the app. These apps need more promotion channels including Social network sites.

Need based apps : These are the apps that user goes looking for. Examples of these are popular games like Chess, Crosswords, Scrabble etc or some root apps such as SuperUser, or sim unlock app like SuperSimUnlocker are examples of such apps. These apps will get organic downloads but will need some promotion and acceptance initially.

This post will talk about promotion based apps.

I love forums like XDA for promoting my apps for one main reason . You don't need permission to create a post(like this one) provided that you follow the rules and add some value to its readers. Forums are after all about user generated content and the more good content they get the better it is for them . Plus most of the forums are free. That is why I suggest you begin by writing a useful content for the users of the forums and add value first. I have also seen that many of us will just reply to a thread that talks about an app and spam it with your play store links . This is useless and does not work 80 % percent of the time . Spend most of your time here and it will be worth it .

Next up app review sites , If you can pay 100 bucks for a couple of review sites to review your app it will do wonders to your promotion . Don't look at this as an expense but as an investment. If you have faith in your app then go ahead and spend it . At worst you will at-least know what does not work :p.

Play store is not the only app market for you you know , Play-store has the highest number of users but also stiff competition . Place your app on all the alternative stores that you can find and this will get you more downloads. The main goal is to get your app in many places as possible and who knows if an influential blogger likes your app then he may spread the word around.

You have already heard it many times that your app needs to have a social presence. But Google+, You Tube is much more important than Facebook and Twitter simply because these are Google Products. Integrating Google + in your app as well as an HD video on YouTube will make Google like you very much . Also if your app is doing very well including GoogleAdMob will get you much much more promotion than using any other Ads platform simply because this is a Google product and it is in the best interest of Google to take care of the app which earns them most.

Add your app in product hunt dot com . This will get you some eyeballs.

I know press release is important but I dont want to spend all my time on it . What I do is spend 50 bucks on pitchpedgion dot com and send my app to over 120 influential bloggers at a time and call it a day.

The last promotional effort that I do is I find the app which is similar to my app. For Ex : If I am doing a calculator app I find out the competitor app and lets say the name of the app is "Calcu" . Then I search for the app on Google along with the quotes. This will give me the list of websites that this app was mentioned in and get in touch with them and use this trail to promote my app in the same places.

I have also noted that many of us just spam comments this actually works for some time . As you can see comments are sorted as latest comment first. So this means that if you add a comment earlier and don't add your comment often then you will get to the bottom of the comments and will be a futile effort.

That is it . Now sit back and analyze from where you are getting maximum downloads and spend more time on it . Don't worry about the least 10 percent since it is not worth your time .

I will post part 2 of this post shortly.

Mods, Please consider this to be a sticky post and if I have broken any of the forum rules please send me a pm allowing me to correct myself. Happy Promoting. :D:D