Taking advantage of launching a new App

Monetizing, Advertising & Marketing Marketing Methods
1

Hello forum. New here, but hope to help out and contribute as much as possible, as well as learn some stuff.

We only have one app so far but there’s a few thing’s we’ve learned from the process.

It seems that reviews correlate to app popularity, so your goal should be to get as many 5 star reviews as possible. If you have a crappy app and get 1-star reviews, don’t expect a lot of help from the Google Play Market.

But if you just launched an app… it’s kind of a Catch-22. You have to jump start that marketing effort.

It looks like Apps show up in the New / Trending section of Google Play for about 30 days from the release of a new app, so this is the best time to do as much marketing as you possibly can to take advantage. The more you promote, the better your chances of ending up on the Trending page.

Tip 1: When you launch a new app, review it yourself. Then ask as many friends and family to review it. Hooray for free reviews!

Tip 2: It seems like Google Play now ranks review by Most Helpful by default. So you can go through your reviews and give them a “thumbs up” to push the positive reviews to the top.

Tip 3: Fiverr.com - there are a lot of people on that website that will review your app for $5. Some will even promote it to their twitter followers. Many will also give you an honest review of your app on things you can improve. For about $50-100, you can really jump start a new app.

You should be getting most of your reviews from within your app and actual users. The fiverr.com method is good for jumpstarting an app… I would not rely on it entirely, only in the beginning.

If you depend on this method to push low-quality apps a) it becomes morally questionable and b) it gets expensive.

Tip 4: In-App Cross-promotion. When you’re ready to launch that 2nd app, the best free traffic is from your first app. You can use Admob to display house ads, or put up a pop-up screen promoting your new app in your 1st app.

With the 2nd and 3rd app, you also take advantage of the “More by this Developer” feature on your App’s page.

That’s all for now… Reflect.

2

Thanks for the good tipps.

I’ve had some mad feelings, when I reviewed my apps by myself but did it anyway xD

3

@shyconic - Thanks for the tips, and welcome to the forum!

I hadn’t thought of using fiverr.com to help launch my apps before, but it’s a good idea. If you’ve got $50 to spare, it could definitely help you get started with a new app (assuming it’s good quality, of course!)

And you could put up a post on this forum too - I’m sure some people would be happy to review your app :wink:

I’ve also found Google+ is a great way to spread the word about your apps. Sharing from your personal page, or even creating a separate page for your Android development can be handy, to keep that audience separate. Either way, there are a lot of tech-savvy people on Google+ and it can be a great discovery platform for this kind of stuff.

4

RE: using FIVERR to get positive reviews.

My numbers for WordHero on Amazon are: 25k downloads, 220 reviews. So, 1% of people review the app (and I nag them after running the app for a few days !).

Lets back this number out and compare to install base.

Assume you spend $500 on fiverr and get 100 reviews. So, 100 reviews (using the 1% rule above) = 10k downloads.

Lets say you advertised @ $0.05 CPC and had a 20% install rate. 10k downloads would cost you = 10k / 0.2 * 0.05 = $2500 advertising.

To sum up:
Fiverr reviews seem to be 5x more cost effective for getting reviews than actual installs, but at the cost of zero actual users.