So That I Can Make iOS apps for the iPad & iPhone?

…so let’s a talk about how I can help you get started right now…

Here Is How To Program in C, Objective-C and Cocoa-Touch

Click here or the box to the right to access to your online workshop now…

Each lesson comes packed with comprehensive video, source code and text. When appropriate I include hands-on exercises. Check out the list below to see what is specifically covered in each lesson:

Module 1 – Getting Started With iPhone App Development

- Lesson 1 – Overview of iPhone OS
- Lesson 2 – Introduction to Tools: XCode, Interface Builder & iPhone Simulator
- Lesson 3 – Your First App
- Lesson 4 – Super-Charge XCode

Module 2 – Learn How to Program in C

- Lesson 1 – What is Programming?
- Lesson 2 – C Programming Basics and Specifics
- Lesson 3 – Functions
- Lesson 4 – Variables and Arrays
- Lesson 5 – Program Flow
- Lesson 6 – Loops
- Lesson 7 – Complex Data with Struct
- Lesson 8 – Putting It All Together

Module 3 – Master Object Oriented Programming With Objective-C

- Lesson 1 – What is Object Oriented Programming?
- Lesson 2 – Objects
- Lesson 3 – More Strings, Lists and the For Each Loop
- Lesson 4 – Memory Management
- Lesson 5 – Designing Your Own Classes
- Lesson 6 – Extending Classes With Categories
- Lesson 7 – Protocols & Key-Value Coding

Module 4 – No-BS Cocoa-Touch With iPhone SDK

- Lesson 1 – Overview of Cocoa-Touch + Model-View-Controller
- Lesson 2 – Using Interface Builder (The View)
- Lesson 3 – Target-Action and the View in Code
- Lesson 4 – Delegation
- Lesson 5 – Super-Charging Your View With Interface Builder
- Lesson 6 – Model & App Architecture

Click here or the box to the right to access to your online workshop now

Let Me Guess – You Are An Awesome Developer But You Know Nothing About Marketing?

Top 5 reasons you should get this eBook:

Head over to the How To Market iPhone Apps website to find out how to get Brook’s eBook.

Can’t Program But You Want To Make An App?

Check out this wonderful book by Carla White. She outsourced her Happy Tapper app and it only cost $500! And the app brought in $7,000 in the first month. Happy Tapper is NOT A GIMMICKY RINGTONE APP either, but an example of how to do outsourcing right for iPhone apps. She does an impressive job of marketing as well (and talking about it in bonus book that she includes with this package).

Inside Secrets To An iPhone App is a complete step by step guide on how to create a winning app and outsource the development at a price you can afford. Also included are how to successfully promote your app and interviews with the best. These two eBooks along are worth the price for anyone considering starting an iOS based mobile app business.

Head over to Inside Secrets To An iPhone App website to find out how to get Carla’s eBook and the two bonus eBooks.

This past week an attendee, Kevin Lee,  from one of my live events released an iPhone app for Philly’s Beer Week. The app is really cool – you can use it to navigate local beer events that are taking place in Philly’s famous beer event.

Philly Beer Week

The app is aptly named “Philly Beer Week” – not only will it show you what is going on this week in Philly (in terms of beer that is) but you can use it to see maps of the events and even get information about taxis and transportation in case you try one too many beers.

Check out the app here, it is well done and free (in particular I like the UITabBar customization that they did).  Philly Beer Week was created with programmers and designers from Indy Hall (the Philly co-opt shared office space) and Cocoa-Heads.

Today I came across an interesting post from Brook Lenox of Online Marketing Rant. As you may know I am a reader of Brook’s blog and he has guest posted a popular article for this site called 10 iPhone App Marketing Mistakes to Avoid.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

The post is about using affiliate marketing from within your app as an alternative revenue model.  Affiliate marketing is the practice of introducing your audience to a product that you find valuable and giving them a chance to buy it will earning a small commission.  This is something that I do occasionally for others.  I also have an affiliate program for my eBook (I pay out 50% by the way!) and this is a common practice in Internet Marketing.

But, In Apps?

LinkShare is a service that will let you do this with a special URL that you may direct users to from your app.  You can see other apps, music and movies.  The commission is 5% which is small but is what you may except from places like this – Amazon offers something similar.

As Brook mentions in his post even free apps with a large audience can except only modest returns from this, but if your app lends itself to this type of marketing it could be a good idea.  This is especially true if you already link to this type of content.

What Is Your Opinion: Does Affiliate Marketing Belong In Your App?

Today I thought I would have a little bit of fun by answering the question, “How much more money could I have made by giving away my app for free?” Now of course, I don’t mean that I am running a charity. What I am getting at this that instead of just selling my app for quick change (with an Apple tax) it occurs to me that I could have taken the longer view and used my iPhone app as an up sell to a Mac desktop app for much more money and without an Apple tax. Apps like Things and 1Password are examples of how this is being done right now.

The Experiment Setup

For this thought experiment what I started with are real world revenue numbers from my Wine Pad application. For the next step I took what I know about the download rates of free vs paid apps to estimate how many downloads I could have expected in Wine Pad had been free all year (I get this number from tests I did with an add supported version of Wine Pad). The next thing I did was make an assumption about what a conversion rate for an app like this could be based on my experience with products I sell on websites.

NOTE: The word “conversion rate” refers to the number of people who buy your product divided by the number of people who view a value proposition that you present to them. I have found that websites typically have a conversion rate of about 3% meaning that for every 100 people who visit a sale page 3 of them will buy your product.

From these assumptions I arrive at what I think is a good model of what revenue I could have expected if I tried to up sell Wine Pad users to a Mac desktop app. First, let’s go over what happened in the real world last year with Wine Pad…

Wine Pad Case Study

Time Frame: 12 months
Units sold: 3586
Price Point: $2.99
Total Revenue: $10,722.14
Profit After Apple’s Cut: $7505.49

As you can see above, Wine Pad netted me over $7500 over the year. Not bad, but you would need 8 or 9 apps like this to keep your kid in sneakers all year. The Apple tax of 30% really stings here especially on top of the 48% in taxes you can expect to pay as a business owner on these profits.

Let’s try to imagine a completely different play next.

What About The Up Sell Play?

Let me take a second to describe what I mean about the up sell play. The idea is that you would need two products here: a complete desktop application and the iPhone application. Customers expect to pay more for desktop software and Apple has no control over desktop applications and cannot take any tax on these. Of course, having a desktop app doubles your workload but you can actually leverage most of the iPhone code here since the Mac and iPhone share much common ground.

The idea is to give away the iPhone app and engage your users with a quality experience. A certain percentage of users will want the additional feature set that and convenience that would come with a desktop experience. Since the perceived value of desktop software is so much greater you can charge more money for your desktop application (typically between $30 to $100).

From my testing I know that people seem to download 20 times as many apps when they are free. Using this as my guide I came up with these alternative stats for Wine Pad downloads last year.

Time Frame: 12 months
Units downloaded: 71,720
Price Point: FREE
Total Revenue: $0
Profit After Apple’s Cut: $0

Enter The Mac Desktop App Up Sell

Of course, now we are making no profit (of course neither is Apple). But, let’s add the up sell proposition to our business model.

Typical Website Conversion Rate: 3%
Sales Projected: 2,152
Price Point: $29.99
Total Revenue: $64,538.48

What I am saying here is that I hope to convert 3% of users who download the free version on the iPhone into buyers of my Mac software. If I priced my desktop app at a reasonable $29.99 then I would net $64,538.48! Wow!

Profit After Apple’s Cut: $64,538.48

Of course Apple cannot take a cut here so I am saving around $20,000. However, selling software like this usually entails credit card processing fees of something like 2% so I refine the numbers a bit:

Profit After Credit Card Fees: $63,247.71

That is a huge difference isn’t it? Specially, this model would have brought in $55,742.22 more than simply selling my app outright on the App Store.

Take Away Message

This may look like I am just blowing smoke up your [REDACTED], but I actually feel pretty confident in these numbers. They are based on a years of app sales and my experience selling eBooks. Obviously, producing another product will take some time but even if I outsourced a desktop version of Wine Pad I think I could gotten it down for between $15,000-$20,000.

Really the take away message for people who want to be iPhone app publishers is that it will pay if you get a bit creative in your revenue models. The model I am showing here is being used now. I would also encourage you to take advantage of the power of FREE especially on the App Store. Check out the book Free for a discussion of the power of giving away products. But, alway have a backend business plan in place.

Smoke & Mirrors, Self-Indulgence or Flat Out Insightful?

What do you think about this plan? Do you have any sizzling or silly ideas to make money on iPhone apps? Am I just full of it? Let me know in the comments below.

PS: please hit the retweet button if you like this article. I’m curious about what the rest of the Twitter-verse thinks of this idea…

Who else wants to see their app become the next huge success story of the year? Me Too! As I meet some of the most successful developers over and over again it is becoming clear that there are three things that you must do to push your app to the next level.

Here Is The Problem

Most of you are technology enthusiasts – you love things like programming, config files and maybe even hacking. There is a certain mindset that comes with being a tech superstar that you use to master computer systems. This ability and mindset really positions you to get your creations onto the App Store.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with this and I know that I fall into the same camp. It is just that this is on one part of what you need to make a really successful app. If you are missing the other two ingredients then you are really shortchanging your app.

So the three secrets that I have found successful developers are using over and over again are: marketing, design and technology. Many developers have separate people who are responsible for each of these tasks and each are superstars in their field. More on these…

Technology

So most of you already know the technology or you know how to learn it. To master iPhone, and of course iPad, development you must know how to program. You also need a grasp of Apple’s design patterns and sensibilities. Furthermore, you should know (or be interested in) related technologies like web services and information technology in general.

Readers of this blog will know that we offer plenty of resources here that will help you with this secret: we have hundreds of posts, weekly, tips, an eBook and an eCourse that will get you started. You can get info about this at the top of this website.

Technology, while exciting and important is only the first step…

Design

Prettiness is a requirement for iPhone OS apps. Users expect much more than something that “just works” – it really needs to be beautiful.

There are two related aspects of design for software: the high level idea of the app and the graphical design itself. A great designer should be able to sketch out every screen in your app, how it should behave and what it should look like. An artist can create the image files you will need to compose the app.

You know a great design when you see it. You probably also realize that creating a great design is a full time job that requires a special creative person (which is not likely to also be the technology person).

Marketing

Ok, so this is the one that inspired this blog post and by marketing I also need the overall strategy of your business (big picture, revenue model, future plans). Many of you may have read Brook Lenox’s guest post he wrote for this blog called 10 iPhone App Marketing Mistakes to Avoid. Well just now I finished reading his new eBook that will be coming out in a week or two and it is really good. I will let you know when this new eBook is available.

In the meantime, keep in mind that just throwing your app in with the crowd of 170,000 other apps at $.99 is probably not going to make you rich. Someone needs to analyze the different options you have to monetize your work and it probably will not be the obvious approach. Many more options exist including advertising, cross-promotion, up-selling and who knows what else.

You will also need to do a lot of work to get your app noticed: press releases, social networking, advertising on networks like AdMob. This stuff is time consuming (and can actually become expensive if not done well). As you think about this you may want to team up or hire someone like Brook. There are also advertising firms you can do a joint venture with (either for a price or a share of your profit).

So What Is a Solo Developer To Do?

Many of us are do-it-yourselfers and would love to be able to work these three areas ourselves. This is not impossible, but it is unlikely that you will be able to truly leverage your core skills and time effectively on your own. Most likely you will need at least one partner to really push your app business to a huge success story.

Here is what you need to think about doing: starting networking using the ancient technology of face to face meeting. Go to meetups, conferences while keeping in mind the type of person you would like to meet and eventually team up with. Have a good idea of what one or two areas you are strong in and who you need on your team to complement your skill set. Be prepared to offer them an equity position in your enterprise (or even to be come a partner).

What Are Your Thoughts On This? True or BS?

I’ve been fortunate enough in the last year to help Pinger promote 8 different apps into the top 100. I’ve learned as much from the mistakes we’ve made, as from the things we’ve done correctly.

Guest Author: Brook Lenox

Here are top 10 mistakes I’d encourage you to avoid.

#1 Creating an Overly Complex App

The first app we created at Pinger was called Pinger Phone. Although this app did get into the top 100 for a short while, its main flaw was that it was way too complex. It had both a social media feed and an IM client. Those who understood it, loved it. Buy many people just didn’t get it.

[Click Here To Read The Full Article]

Today I’m going to show you how to create custom buttons for your iPhone app. See below for video and demo graphics…

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The short answer to this is $99. This is how much it technically cost to get a license from Apple that will let you put your iPhone apps on your phone. Lately, I’ve been thinking about what the overall cost of learning iPhone programming was for me. Maybe this is just because this is the time of year where I need to talk to my accountant about taxes and what my learning budget is for next year (you do list the money you spent in your education and re-training as a tax deduction right?).

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