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.

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?

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]

In this week’s show I share my thoughts on Apple’s iPad announcement last week.

Show Notes

iPood

You may have wondered why I missed the last podcast… Well, the reason is that I was meeting my new daughter: Keira Ruby! Just want to welcome her as the newest member of the mobile app family (iPood: there is an app for that!).

What I’ve Been Up To (Other Than Changing Diapers)

This week I’ve been creating content for the Mobile App Mastery Silver Program. Specifically, I am working on the NO-BS Cocoa-Touch module. This one is fun because it introduces what is unique about the iPhone SDK: Model-View-Controller (MVC), Target-Action, Delegation and Interface Builder.

[Click Here To Read More]

In this week’s show I talk about my business goals for 2010, Nexus One and I answer a question from Andrew about Business …

BREAKING NEWS!!! I have just leaked the second secret bonus to the upcoming iPhone App Development Mastery ECourse (Silver Subscription). Read more here: Mobile App Mastery, Secret Feature #2 Unveiled!

…Entities (your business firewall). Below you will find links to some of the business resources I mention in the podcast.

[Read More]

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.

So when it comes to apps, keep it simple.

#2 Having a Paid Only Strategy

There may be certain apps that don’t work well with a lite version, but I suggest you have a free and paid version if possible. You get double the possible exposure in the app store and you let users try your app before spending money on it.

#3 Using Sub Par Graphics

Just look at the top 100 apps. Some of the icons look like I created them (that’s not a good thing). They are blurry, unprofessional, and don’t stand out. Create the best graphics that your budget allows.

#4 Flipping a Coin to Price your App

The app store is a bit of a garage sale with $.99 tags on many items. Before you just go with the $.99 price, do research. What are your competitor’s apps priced at? Better to price your app a bit high to start. You can always lower the price later. One exception to this is the app Ping! Great app and great strategy. It was free for the first couple days while he marketed it into the top 100. Then he made it $.99. His strategy worked.

So it’s not always one size fits all. Think it through.

#5 Having No or a Last Minute Marketing Plan

I talk to so many developers that start their marketing plan once their app has been approved. Big mistake. While you’re dreaming up your perfect app, you should make your marketing plans.

#6 Not Tracking Everything You Can

At a minimum track downloads, ranking, revenue, and important changes daily. You do this to see what is driving your downloads and what is not. If you get a great review in an app review website, did it drive more downloads? If you spend money on mobile ads, how did that impact your lite and paid downloads?

#7 Not Being Willing to Spend Money

You’ve spent hours and hours building a great app. You should be willing to spend some money to promote your app. I realize it could be a waste of your precious funds, but you may also have a hit on your hands that no one ever finds out about.

#8 Not Doing Keyword Research

Apple gives you 100 characters to enter keyword information about your app. Do your homework. Use Google’s free keyword tool and the iPhone app store search box to figure out what keywords to use.

#9 Not Using your Userbase

If you’ve got a userbase when you launch your first app, announce the app to them. If you don’t, create a way to register or message your users for future updates or other app launches. Happy users you can contact are invaluable.

#10 Not Becoming or Hiring a Marketer

You can’t just be a developer. You need to become a marketer. Either start learning on your own or hire someone who can help you.
In summary, hope this helps you avoid mistakes and have success in the app store!

About Brook Lenox

Brook has been working in online customer acquisition for nearly 15 years and iPhone marketing for the past year. He helps developers with iPhone app marketing.

What are you thoughts about promotion and marketing iPhone apps? Discuss in the comments below!

Happy Holidays!  Thank you for a wonderful year!

BREAKING NEWS!!! Video sneak peak of a new iphone app development e-course coming in January released JUST NOW! Check it out here at the main mobile app mastery website!

This has been a great year for How to Make iPhone Apps – the blog was launched last January and has gone through 4 major revisions as I learned more about what our audience wants (and needs) and we managed to launch an ebook.  In addition to my regular iPhone app business this has kept me extremely busy to say the least.

Since this blog has been out for the past year I thought it might be fun to find out what the most popular posts have been so if you are coming here looking for iPhone development help (while I am disposed drinking eggnog) you should not be disappointed…!

So, without further ado, here are the top five blog posts from 2009!

How To Add A Nice Background Image To Your Grouped Table View

Are you tired of your table views having the standard, boring, gray and white striped background? Adding a nice image or pattern to your table views is one way of putting a little extra gloss to your UI.

[Click to read more]

How to Make Your iPhone App Send Email with Attachments

Would you like your users to be able to send email with attachments from your app?

In iPhone OS 3.0 you can easily send pictures and voice recordings from your app in an email. In fact, now your emails can be easily formated using HTML and once the user has finished the email control returns back to your app. Pretty nifty!

[Click to read more]

Examples of Objective-C Loops

Using loops to repeat actions in programming is a common task. Objective-C does this chore in more or less the same way as other programming languages. However, if you are still unfamiliar with the Objective-C syntax you may feel a little disoriented.

So, to help out I wrote out some examples of for, for-each, do and while loops for you:

[Click to read more]

How to Sort An Array in Objective-C

Arrays are structures used to hold a list of objects. Sometimes though you may want to sort the order that the elements appear.

[Click to read more]

For and ForEach Loops in Objective-C

Loops are the gears of programming: they make your code take action.

The two loops I use most often is the for loop (to do a predefined number of steps) and what is usually called a foreach loop (to move though a list of objects)

[Click to read more]

Happy New Year!

Over the past few months and weeks I have been busy creating a brand new super-charged ecourse that will help you mastery your app development starting with the iPhone platform.

Click the video below to see what I am talking about and how to get the FIRST MODULE FREE!

Click this link to see the video presentation!

Notes

iPhone App Development Mastery Course

iPhone Development

iPhone Programming

Objective-C Programming

Cocoa-Touch & UIKit

Online Business

Promotion

Marketing

More!

What is in a Module?
- written content
- videos, audio and screen casts
- source code
- ninja practice exercises

Anything Else? YES!
- you will get much more than the ecourse but I am not ready to talk about the other components yet so they are Top Secret!

How to Find Out More?

Go to http://mobileappmastery.com and register to get access to the first module, Getting Started With iPhone Development, for FREE. You will get an overview of iPhone OS, make your first iPhone app and get an extensive hands-on demo of XCode.

Anyone who signs up will be notified in advance when spots for the main course become available (it will be limited initially).

For this week’s link roundup we have: another free iPhone game engine and two fantastic articles about how to use web services and JSON in your iPhone apps.

Unity Technologies Launches Version 2.6 of Its Platform and Makes Unity Freely Available

Today at the Unite Conference, Unity Technologies, the leading provider of the multi-platform game development platform for Web, PC, Mac, Wii and iPhone, announced that version 2.6 of its Unity Platform is available and that the feature-packed Unity (formerly known as Unity Indie and priced at $199) is now available at no cost at http://unity3d.com/unity/download to make it possible for all developers to get access to the best development platform available. Unity Pro will continue to be priced at $1,499 per license.

Read More Here

Tutorial: JSON Over HTTP On The iPhone

This tutorial provides a step-by-step howto for consuming JSON web services from an iPhone app.

When you’ve finished the tutorial you’ll have created a simple, back-of-a-fortune-cookie inspired, “Lucky Numbers” app with a solitary label whose content will be updated to show a list of lucky numbers fetched from a JSON-over-HTTP web service.

Read more about consuming JSON based web services

Creating an iPhone friendly web service in .NET with WCF

With the introduction of Windows Communication Foundation in the .NET Framework 3.0, the responsiblity of building your own web service interface protocol has been lifted from the developer. DataContracts now provide a type-specific utility for easily sending and receiving data in either XML or Javascript Object Notation (JSON). In our iPhone Apps, we prefer to use JSON since it is both less verbose than XML (meaning less data to transfer on cellular networks) and easier to parse on the iPhone side.

Read more about using dot net to create a JSON based web service
CodeProject

Some of you may have noticed that a lot has been going on at this blog and the mailing list. Clearly, something is afoot and while I am not ready to tell you exactly what is going on I did want to let you in on a little tidbit or two.

Mobile App Mastery

If you correspond with me via email you will notice that I am now using the address matt [at] mobileappmastery.com. This partly reflects my decision to put all my mobile development tech blogs under the umbrella brand “Mobile App Mastery”. There are a few reasons for this.

Quick Note: I am conducting a survey to see how I can make this blog a better
experience for you.

Please help me out by filling out this survey:
Click Here to take survey

The obvious reason is that I personally am interested in all mobile technology, not just iPhone OS. Right now iPhone OS is the most significant platform and the one I would encourage most people to start with because it has the audience and the business model works for many people. However, at some point in the future other mobile OSs will become more significant (looking at you Android!).

Stay tuned here at this blog and the others that I will be pointing out below for more details on Mobile App Mastery. I have some big things planned for it that will interest iPhone app developers in particular.

Mobile App Mastery Facebook Page

I have created a facebook page for this blog and all my others under the Mobile App Mastery name. This is in part due to my non-iPhone friends complaining about all the iPhone related content I post. For now, I have moved this to the Facebook page that you can see by clicking here!

Sign up for the Facebook page to add that content to your timeline. If you have friended me on facebook for iPhone stuff then I would recommend switching over to the new page otherwise you will simply be bombarded with pictures of my cats and new baby that we have on the way…

New YouTube Channel

Since I have found my previous YouTube channel named MrScopeCreep to simply be too creepy for me I have changed to (again) the Mobile App Mastery YouTube channel. Please do me a favor and subscribe if you want to have a video feed for iPhone related content.

Recap

So, clearly I have a new brand name but I am planning on doing some big things with it in the very near future that I believe you will find compelling. Be sure to not miss out by subscribing to our mailing list or one of the other feeds available on this blog!