

Tips for Beating the App Store Blackbox - Frocer
http://blog.playhaven.com/2009/12/top-3-marketing-tips-for-beating-the-app-store-blackbox/

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patio11
That is a _fascinating_ graph of sales versus events. Winners win, indeed.

 _It really blows my mind that the App Store doesn’t provide any customer data
to developers besides number of downloads by region. In any business, it’s
critical to build a relationship with your customers. Knowing who your
customers are helps you iterate your game quickly to suit your customers’
likes, and most importantly, to up-sell your future games._

I think I've mentioned this a couple of times before, but Apple doesn't
consider the customer to be _your_ customer. They are _Apple's_ customer.
Apple deigns to grant you access to them, temporarily.

Not that I will ever build anything for this platform, but I'd be thinking
"How can I build 'participate in permission marketing to enjoy this game even
more' into my application?" One trivial example: a Brag To Your Friends
feature (high score list, but with Facebook integration), which by necessity
gets you from "anonymous Apple customer" to "verified, identifiable person who
loves us interacting directly with us via a web page of our choosing." Or,
alternatively, a bling widget for the customer's blog or site detailing your
in-game accomplishments ("Toby the Vicious Corsair has slain 96 dragons!").
After you get executable code on somebody's site your options are, well,
rather wide. (6 months later: "Toby the Vicious Corsair has slain 96 dragons!
But can he handle the brain-busting epic tactical puzzlombat of
(link)Dragonslaying 2: Now With More Fire(/link)?")

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Frocer
I have been experimenting with various iPhone marketing strategies. In the
past few months, I worked with some very talented iPhone game devs and learned
some more interesting marketing / promotion tricks they employed. I thought
I'd summarized the ones I found most effective and share with you all.

Hopefully this would help some of iPhone game devs in marketing your next game
this holiday season. I'd love to hear what you guys think as well. If you have
any additional thoughts / tips you'd like to share please let me know!

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allenp
Great article, I'd love to see more data about advertising/sales - especially
conversions. How close of a correlation can you make with the banner
placements and increase in sales. It seems like once you're in the top 100
listing, there is some natural momentum as well. Also do you know if the
geared banners were direct click through to iTunes or if they used landing
pages?

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eyao
Judging from his current app up right now on Touch Arcade, it looks like it
goes straight to iTunes (probably hits his server first to record where it
came from).

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mcav
Developing for the iPhone is like launching a rocket. Provided your
calculations are correct (i.e. you don't do anything to get rejected), you're
really trying to get escape velocity, so that your app pops onto the top
lists. If you miss that, you'll have a much more difficult time.

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petercooper
Uh oh, it's started.. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=951520>

