Driving traffic to your app by launching free tools

LogYourRun is a site for active people – runners, hikers, and cyclists.  To generate interest and app sales for the paid version of the LogYourRun iPhone app I have decided to launch a series of free running tools.  The hope is that the target audience of LogYourRun will be looking for apps that can solve simple problems for them – such as measure heart rate and calculate heart rate zones and calculate pace based on distance and time – and they download these apps they will see advertisement for the paid LogYourRun app which will potentially dive sales of this app.

Here are the free apps:

  1. A free version of the GPS/pedometer app.
  2. A free heart rate measurement tool.
  3. A free Pace Calculator

All of these are tools that runners might look for on the app store and all of these apps have links to the full LogYourRun app and the YouTube video showing what a great app that is.

The LYR Free (GPS/pedometer) has been in the app store for several months but interestingly has not been hugely successful maybe because of the lack of brand name recognition or because the paid version is so cheap

The Heart Rate tool (HR) has proved to be hugely successful – probably because it is one of the few free apps that will let you measure your heart rate and calculate your heart rate zones.  I still need to integrate pinch analytics to see if this is actually driving traffic to the full app – but since the HR app has launched the sales for the full app has gone up 3 fold.

The Pace Calculator will go live this week and I look forward to seeing the response to this app.

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WebKitErrorDomain error 101

The LogYourRun app uses both UIWebView and NSURLRequest to communicate with the LogYourRun database.  To let users upload and access their data.  These requests often contain fields that the user enter such as running notes, distance, time etc.  I had the WebKitErrorDomain 101 error come up on occasions when users tried to send requests that contained spaces that were not properly encoded.  I was not able to find any documentation on this error so it took a while to figure out what was going on.

WebKitErrorDomain error 101

Once I identified that the issue was that some users had a space in their username it is a very easy fix.  Just use the stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding function to have the string properly encoded:

[username stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding: NSASCIIStringEncoding];

So if you come along a WebKitErrorDomain 101 error – take a look at the URL you are trying to submit and see if all the parts of it are properly encoded.

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How to test location and accelerometer functions from the comfort of your home

The LogYourRun iPhone app uses both the GPS and the accelerometer functions of the iPhone.  Neither the GPS nor the accelerometer can be accessed on the iPhone simulator so to circumvent this I used the following methods:

Accelerometer: Otto Chrons has a great Google code project which contains the code for an app that can be run on an iPod touch or iPhone which is on the same subnet as your development computer.  The app will transmit accelerometer data which can be caught by some code that you can insert into your Xcode project.  When you run your app on the iPhone simulator it will thus receive the accelerometer data from the real life device.  This was a great help in troubleshooting the setup of the pedometer functionality.  I was running around in my living room counting steps and comparing to the # of steps on the iPhone simulator.  Be sure to remove the accelerometer simulator code from your application before releasing.

GPS: Everyone who has played with the location manager on the iPhone Simulator knows that you will only get only one location from the location manager on the iPhone Simulator.  Testing the GPS functionality is a critical part of testing the LogYourRun app.  I could run the app on an iPhone and then run/walk/drive around outside – but that would take much too long and the weather in Saint Louis is not conductive to such testing.  Instead I added a button to the pedometer screen of the application which when clicked runs the following code:

- (IBAction) locationButton:(id)sender {
   CLLocation *thisLocation;
   double latitude  = 37.33168900 + (float) ((random() % 100) +1) / 1000000.0;
   double longitude = -122.03073100 + (float) ((random() % 100) +1) / 1000000.0;
   thisLocation = [[CLLocation alloc] initWithLatitude:latitude longitude:longitude];
   [self locationManager:locationManager didUpdateToLocation:thisLocation fromLocation:thisLocation];
   [thisLocation release];
}

This piece of code creates a random location close to the location that the iPhone Simulator will usually get from the core location (One Infinite Loop). The location is sent to the location manager delegate function of the pedometer class and is handled as if it came from the real location manager. Since the location is different from the previous location the getDistanceFrom: still works.  When I am ready to submit the application all I have to do is hide the two buttons (probably should be done programatically – since one of these days I will forget).

Pedometer showing location and step button

The pedometer screen showing location and step button

Locations shown on map

The random locations shown on map

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Market your app online

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:

AppSafari.com

Appolicious.com

148Apps.com

GotApps.com

FreshApps.com

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.

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Promoting your iPhone app in print

Although promoting iPhone apps and web sites can be done efficiently through online advertising campaigns, the market for LogYourRun (runners, cyclists and other active people) is such that real world marketing can also be a highly efficient way to reach an audience that is unaware of LogYourRun and unaware that such a service even exist.

Historically, print advertising consist of designing a brochure with information about your product and distributing to potential customers.  Since a single sale of a $1.99 iPhone app brings in $1.40 and the free app has no revenue attached I have been exploring cheap print alternatives to promoting using a brochure.   I have found several places online that will print high quality business cards for very little money.  I was able to get 2,500 business cards printed with high gloss front and matte color back for under $150 using Vistaprint – that is about 6 cent per card so only one in 23 cards have to be effective at getting someone to download the app in oder for me to break even.

As it turns out the dimensions of the iPhone are such that it fits perfectly on a business card.  So on the glossy side I have a picture of the iPhone running the LogYourRun application so people can see what it is all about and on the back I have instructions on how to get the application.  And that is the hard part – since the main screen of the LogYourRun application does not contain the application name – I have to rely on people to turn the card over and read the name of the application.  It would be great if apple implemented something similar to the android barcode scanner where all you have to do is take a picture to download an app.  Maybe someone is already working on making such an application for the iPhone.

I have collected about 1 months worth of baseline data on downloads of both the free and the paid LogYourRun applications and one of my friends are going to Miami Marathon this weekend and will hand out about 1,500 of the cards there.  I will report back the results here after the weekend.

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