How To Grow And Monetize Social And Photo Apps

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We just went over when we discussed how to promote game apps, and unfortunately many of the same challenges come up when it comes to creating photo apps or social apps. I am grouping them together because these are the kinds of apps young entrepreneurs love to build, spend time and money developing, actually come up with cool apps, and then an extremely difficult time generating downloads for their apps. And if you can’t get customers for your business, that can destroy the entire business.

Just like for game apps it is extremely difficult to rank for terms like fun, run, shoot, adventure, and similar other terms, photo and social app entrepreneurs find it equally difficult to rank for terms like photos, social, and friends.

The same pep talk takes place when it comes to these apps as with game apps. If this was the year 2010, you would be able to get a great amount of downloads, but today such apps must be truly groundbreaking to get publicity.

One aspect of social and photo apps that is more difficult than game apps is monetization. Games have much more clear monetization pattern than social or photo apps. Social and photo apps typically have to come up with some unique in-app purchase offers. The social or photo app entrepreneurs have to not only figure out how to get downloads (a big challenge), but they also have to experiment with monetization strategies to find one that converts users at a good rate.

I can give examples of other types of apps with similar issues, but I think at this point you are getting the idea. There are new apps in the app market every day, and new ways to discover apps aren’t appearing nearly as fast as the progress of app saturation. It has been like that since 2008. At this point, realistically speaking, some niches are nearly impossible to compete in unless you have some preexisting large marketing channels or are willing to spend the time to create one. One app store strategy I recommend, and one that I have myself used with success is to find niches where you can either make a fantastic app, or that are only semi-competitive.

Another savvy app store ranking strategy can be to target search terms that are easy to rank for when your app is new. Those terms won’t bring you many downloads, but at least they will bring you a small trickle of daily downloads. You can use those downloads to increase your app’s strength in search by making sure that the social and engagement signals of your app are positive, and are better than the social and engagement signals of your competitors. And as your app slowly rises in the rankings and becomes stronger in search compared to your competitors, you can adjust your title and description to attempt ranking for increasingly more competitive keywords.

Mobile App Marketing Book And Course

This tutorial is just one section of my mobile app marketing book. Check it out on Amazon. It is available on the Kindle which means that you can read it on the Kindle app of any smart phone. Or take my mobile app business course on Udemy.

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