As 2015 draws to a close, we’ve been reflecting on some of the most helpful and popular blog posts that were released this year in the app marketing sphere. Whether the pieces were geared towards helping you land that elusive Apple App Store Feature or assisting you in making the most of App Store Optimization (ASO), plenty of words were written over the span of the last 12 months. Some, of course, were better than others. Without further ado, let’s take a look at the 11 best app marketing blog posts of 2015.
How a Cold Email to Apple Led to an App Store Feature
by Steve Young, AppMasters
We’ll start off the best articles of 2015 with the unlikeliest of scenarios: a cold email to an Apple contact leading to an App Store Feature. It sounds too good to be true, and for the unprepared, it is. However, there is a strategy you can employ to actually make this work, and Steve Young lays out what worked for him and MiniGamr in getting Are You In Over Your Head? featured on the App Store.
13 Steps to Perfecting Your App Store Optimization
by Shlomo Garbi, The Next Web
When you talk to most people about ASO, they usually fall into one of two camps. On the one hand, you’ll have people who admit to not having a clue what it is, while the other group will tell you it’s like SEO, but for app stores. The real story behind ASO is close to the latter, but it’s far more complex, deep, and interesting. Shlomo Garbi is an expert in the field, and his article will help lead you towards making the most of your app store optimization work.
How to Use Facebook Mobile Apps for Marketing
by Andrea Vahl, Social Media Examiner
Marketing your app through Facebook is a key method to get consumers to download your pride and joy. If you aren’t doing your Facebook marketing right, however, you won’t see the full results that you’re looking for. In this article, Andrea Vahl outlines what each of Facebook’s mobile apps (Facebook, Facebook Pages, Messenger, and the Facebook Group App) is capable of and how they can improve your marketing strategy. This article is a must-read for anybody who plans to be involved in Facebook ad marketing in 2016.
Boost Your App’s Chances of Being Featured by Apple With These 7 Tips
by Steve Young, Entrepreneur
The Holy Grail of iOS app development is getting featured on Apple’s App Store, but nobody in Cupertino will divulge the magic formula for making that happen. Steve Young has researched this with the help of six experts who have had tremendous success at getting their apps featured, and shares with us seven tips on how to improve your chances of getting that elusive top row spot on the App Store.
Detailed Guide on App Store Optimization
by Shane Barker
When you’re competing in such a vast marketplace as the mobile app audience, optimizing your keywords and other factors is crucial. Shane Barker is an expert at ASO, and his detailed guide is essential reading for anybody who wants to take their app entrepreneurship seriously. Barker outlines what ASO is and isn’t, why it’s important, and how to do it right. He also dispels some of the most common ASO myths, which is vital for learning what advice to listen to and what to ignore.
9 Daily Habits of Successful Mobile App Entrepreneurs
by Steve Young, The Next Web
What daily habits do the most successful app entrepreneurs practice that you’re missing out on? New success stories are constantly popping up, in spite of the fact that the App Store is crowded and most people are barely making a living off apps. How do some find success when most are barely surviving? Steve Young has interviewed more than 300 app entrepreneurs, and has found several common qualities that separate the successful from the surviving. In this article, Young highlights nine of the most important daily habits of these successful app entrepreneurs.
The Beginner’s Guide to Building and Launching an App
by Thomas Smale, Entrepreneur
If you’re new to the App Store or Google Play Store ecosystems, as in you’re just now building your first app, you need a great guide to how to best get your software into the hands of the users. Thomas Smale does a great job in this article of outlining not only what app entrepreneurs need to build their apps, but also what they should know when it comes to marketing. You’ll find help on optimizing for the app store you’re launching on, too, along with advice like incorporating social sharing features to encourage the growth of your app.
Which App Store Optimization Tool Can You Actually Trust?
by Gilad Bechar
There’s a whole slew of ASO tools available, which shows you just how important it is to optimize everything related to your app in its marketplace. After all, most downloads stem from basic app store searches, so you want to make sure your particular title is one of the first options that gets presented to users. The problem with many ASO tools is that you can’t trust them. Gilad Bechar’s article looks at recent research into these tools, and it’s required reading before you choose one particular platform over another to help you with your ASO.
15 Tips for Succeeding as an Independent App Developer
by Steve Young, Entrepreneur
There are already more than a million apps in the Apple and Google Play App stores, so how do you maximize your chances of succeeding in that ecosystem? There are a handful of tips that you might have overlooked, and Steve Young lays out 15 of them for you in this article. From actually trying to invalidate your app idea to making sure you start off doing it independently, in your free time, instead of seeking out investors, these tips will help you, the independent app developer, succeed where so many fail.
What A/B Testing Taught Us About App Store Optimization
by Anna Pratskevich, Smashing Magazine
Whether it’s your icon, your screenshots, or your app description, they all play a role in how well your app performs on the market. The question is, how do you narrow down your choices and find the best combination? According to this detailed examination by Anna Pratskevich, you absolutely must practice A/B testing in order to make the most of your ASO efforts. Pratskevich’s article details how to go about A/B testing, what to test for, how to interpret the tests, and what results she saw as a result of A/B testing.
6 Overlooked Components of App Store Optimization
by Steve Young, AppMasters
Getting everything just right for the app stores can be a time-consuming task, and it’s easy to overlook key components of ASO. Steve Young knows this, and has provided us with an article that details the six most commonly overlooked components of ASO that could be killing your download rates. Whether it’s retention, your marketing screenshots, your icon, or something totally different, little changes can make big results. Follow along with Young as he lays out the best things to take a second look at to improve your ASO.
Summing it all up
There you have it, the 11 top app marketing blog posts for 2015. Maybe you came across some that were even more helpful, or maybe this post helped you find some gold nuggets that you’d previously missed. Let us know in the comments which of these articles were your favorites, and which ones you came across that were even more beneficial to you than these.
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