There are several components to marketing your iPhone application online. Below I try to give a comprehensive list of resources and strategies. Keep checking back on this since I will add information as I think of other ways to promote apps online.
Submit your app to app repositories
Here is a list of sites where you can submit information about your application. Most will provide links to your application and your website – great way to generate meaningful incoming links. Before embarking on your submissions make sure you have the following ready:
- A screenshot
- Icon (128×128)
- Link to your YouTube video (I used screenflow to generate my video)
- App description that you can easily post into the forms on each website
The following is a list of good sites to submit your app to listed in order of importance and relevance:
I have seen a couple of sites offering to review your app for $100 or some other “nominal” fee. I dont think that such sites will survive long – how can you write an unbiased review when someone just paid you $100? This will erode consumer confidence in these sites and when they go out of business the review will disappear as their site is taken down.
Promote your app on forums
Figure out what your target audience is likely to be and find a forum that your audience frequents and register. Take some time to figure out the tone on the board and if there are any users that seem to be influencers. Send them a PM explaining that you would highly appreciate their input on your application and include a promo code if your application is a paid app. If you cannot find a user to target you can always try to just post yourself – this will likely not generate as much buzz as if you get an influencer to post.
Promote your app on social networks
Integration with Twitter is easy through the REST API and integration with facebook can be quite easy also – facebook has a drag and drop library which can be used to add facebook connect to your iPhone app.
