Best Laid Plans
Publicising your application is hard....tricky tricky tricky stuff!
New ways to publicise...posted: 3rd September 2009
...your application are appearing all the time. Recently there has been a trend towards web sites which will guarentee a review for your application for a price. All well and good but many of us balk at a (very reasonable) price of $200 per month for the understandable reason that we think our apps are not going to gross dollar one, let alone cover the cost of new marketing.
If you know in your heart that your app sucks balls, please do everyone a favour and DONT submit it.
iphoneappreviews.net
Not every app deserves promotion, how many apps are there that are simply 'place markers'? 'Look! I am here' applications litter the app store, but don't worry, they wont confuse end users unless you make the mistake of publicising them!
A list of 11 top iPhone review sites has been doing the internet rounds and you can read it here. But How much bang can you get for zero bucks?. My marketing budget was essentially zero so I have had to scan around for the best site for me, and that site is...
iPhoneAppIndex
The best way to advertise your app is for it to be a real killer app that no-one, especially the Apple product managers
can ignore. Failing that, and most of us fail at that point, developers have to persuade and coerce reviewers to
look at their work. Let's face it reviewing is hard work and probably the worst part of the job is having forty developers
a day ringing up, sending emails and hassling you for a review.
IphoneAppIndex turns that scenario on it's head by empowering the developer to 'Show off their own work.'. The developer does this by signing up to what is a wordpress blogging site and agreeing to the site's simple editorial rules. Yes the site is open to abuse but iPhoneAppIndex's owner, simply says, Break the rules and your post(s) get deleted.
The Do's and Dont's for the site are simple and for any sane developer, they are very fair. What the rules do is help the developer produce a blog entry that a reviewer of iPhone apps would be happy to read. Yes it's an advert for your app but if you go overboard and litter your post with links or insert advertising or god forbid if you mis-represent your app then expect your post to be pulled.
All in all, a great site for developers; one that I will be using for the forseable future. For those of you who are interested here is a perma-link to the post I created today for the Vernon Bright ebook applications from Sleepydog Limited.
Thank you for reading this far. If you have any comments or wish to link to this entry then please feel free. I sincerely wish you and your app all the very best. Good Luck!
Damien Laughton 
