The Eight Keys to App Success, Part 2

Missed Keys #1–4? Wondering what this is about?
Start with Part 1.

Key #5: Learn a Few Marketing Tricks

It’s the indie developer’s dream: Stay behind the scenes while the strength of your brand new app speaks for itself. People will just naturally — and quickly — discover it.

But in real life, there are too many apps, and too many other distractions in the users’ lives, for this to work. If you’ve made a great app, your work doesn’t end there. You must have a marketing strategy in place so users can find your app and understand why they need it.

So many appreneurs fall into the trap of releasing an app, then wondering why it isn’t successful out of the gate. “Developers get discouraged because they didn’t know what they were getting into,” says Rick Singer, CEO of GreatApps.com. “They don’t tell you, ‘Congratulations, your app has been released, and now here are the following things that you should be doing to make your app successful.’ It’s, ‘Here’s our fees, thank you very much, and you take it from there.’”

Think about this: there are, at last count, 1600 new apps being introduced to the app store every single day. There are 1.5 million apps live in the App Store (1.8 million on Android). The chances of users stumbling upon…