App Store Sales Tips and Tricks

#21 Yeah, definitely make good use of the cross-promotion options in OpenFeint. As a consumer I like knowing about new games. Ads aren't all bad :)

#22 @Scott
Have you find any suitable publisher? I remember you suggesting http://appular.com/publishing/ before contacting them if you could share with us more info about it.
We just released an update of our game, we were a bit busy on the development side, but now we really need to think how advertise our game. The first weeeks were great because our app was in the hot new games, but after that it is very difficult to be noticed.

@All
Any other suggestion will be useful. We are trying to decide between many options:
- publisher
- paid review
- paid marketing company
- paid banners in top website (like pocketgamer)
- exchange of banners on our website
- Openfeint
We are not sure which can be effective.

Thanks,
Selvin

#23 Hi Selvin,

We have two games that will soon be launched with Appular using a revenue share model. Will it work? I've no idea.

We have had our biggest increase in sales for IWT by ensuring we are in the top six for the search term "space invaders" on the app store - now average 2-6 every day LOL!

Fundamentally I think that unless you are getting reviews etc at Touch Arcade, PocketGamer, TUAW, AppleTell etc then it is difficult to drive sales. So far I have had very little success getting any of the big boys to look at our games, this is where I'm hoping a publisher with all the contacts will make a difference.

Good Luck!

#24 Hi Scott,
thanks for sharing this info.
Probably a publisher with shared revenues is the way to go, since there are no upfront costs.
We have been in touch with PocketGamer but the banner are quite expensive for us. I assume that if you pay for banners and establish a relationship with them they will also review your app. For the time being we can't afford it but it is something we will try to do in future if we achieve decent revenues.

Good Luck too!

#25 Nope, I offered to pay for a banner and asked for a guaranteed review from PocketGamer - they refused outright to do it, so I decided to spend my money elsewhere.

#26 Then, it sounds really difficult be reviewed on those popular websites. There must be a way, probably through a publisher.

Since we are here, from your experience, does OpenFeint give any advantages in sales? We are planning another upgrade for OpenFeint, mainly for the leaderboards but it will be good to know if it will also improve sales.

#27 Cant say for sure it improved sales ... but we can cross promote each others apps.

www.torquepowered.com/community/forums/viewthread/117447

This means, for example, that people playing IWT and going to the OF dashboard will see banner ads of my choosing e.g. WIP. You would do the same for WIP and promote IWT.

IWT had over 10,000 OF users when I last checked.

#28 It sounds a good idea.
I will try to look into integrating Openfeint soon.

#29 I've just gotten my app Zombie Karts republished as part of the 10-pack All-in-1 ZombieBox. I'll let folks know how it goes working with a publisher. I can tell you up front that the marketing is much wider but the share in profits (split among so many) is far less. My personal belief is volume is more important than revenue per unit sold... so I'm about to find out!

#30 @Chris - What a great opportunity for Zombie Karts. It deserves to be in there. I still play it today.

#31 Good luck Chris, I read your blog post, you did really well to hit that deadline and get Torque integrated!

#32 I know this post is a bit late, but I think it might help some of you anyway regarding choosing a release date for a new app submission:

I too was bitten by the release date prediction fiasco. When I submitted my game for the first time, I gave it a two week approval window (set the date 2 weeks away from uploading my binary).

It took them 3 weeks. However, on the day it arrived in the app store, it was already a "week old" in the New Releases list.

An Apple support rep told me the "proper" way to handle this. He suggested that you choose an initial release date as *far out* as possible (a year is even ok). Then, once you get approved to release, change your date to the next day. That's the only way to guarantee that when your app is available on the app store, it is indeed new on the new releases list as well.

Hope this clears up the confusion for someone. However, Apple is to blame for creating such a broken release process.

-Dennis

#33 I concur with Dennis. It's also worth putting out a press release for the same day. You can get a press release for about $80 and they send it to 100s of news and game sites.

#34 I agree that the best thing you can do is pick a date and then spend a couple of weeks informing websites, sending out promo codes, etc. Our last app got a lot of attention (for us), but it was too spread out to have that big one-time impact that's needed to shoot an app up the ranks.

I should probably change-up the content of the first post since so much has changed in the app store world. :)

#35 Anyone use the Free App A Day campaigns (FAAD) ?

How successful?

How many downloads?

Was it worth it?

Really needing to push Cannibal Cookout into the US market - it's doing fine in Europe, but I need the larger numbers.

Also, if anyone has any other recommendations for app promotion then please share :)