iPhone apps are making lots of money!

iPhone apps are making lots of money!

Most of these facts are pretty well known and have made news in several publications, however I just though it might be a good idea to get a quick consolidated snapshot.

This article in no way features these apps to be best or most popular, but it just puts forward the potential and some of the success stories of the iPhone App Store.

Trism By Steve Demter Steve made $250,000 in profits in just two months.

iShoot By Ethan Nicholas Ethan quit his job at Sun (JAVA) after his artillery app hit the top spot on Apple’s app store. It grabbed $100,000 in sales in the first month and had netted more than $800,000 in five months till Arpil 2009.

iFart By Joel Comm He made $40,000 in just two days. Within two months of the launch, the app wasmaking $10,000 per day in revenues

Ocarina By Smule It garnered nearly $1 million. It was an instant hit, becoming the No. 1 paid program on the App Store four days after it was offered in early November.

iSteam It earned a bunch of 22-year old kids $100,000 in one month, having already created a cult-like following and generating over 1 million downloads

Trivia: For an app to reach number one and remain there, some 10,000 plus downloads per day are required.

What can you expect from your App at the App Store

What can you expect from your App at the App store?

The itunes from Apple fetches a mammoth 10,035,828 monthly visitors. Study suggests that the monthly visitor’s rate has gone up by 15% and unique visitors by 13% and its growing by the day. What is your share?

Visitor Statistics

Where people go on Apple.com:

• 57.8% apple.com
• 22.5% store.apple.com
• 6.0% itunes.apple.com
• 3.3% support.apple.com
• 1.8% developer.apple.com

Apple.com users come from these countries:

• 36.4% United States
• 7.5% Germany
• 7.1% Japan
• 5.2% United Kingdom
• 5.0% China

Top 5 Paid Apps

Flight Control – Games ($0.99)
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=306220440&mt=8

Pocket God – Entertainment ($0.99)
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=301387274&mt=8

Bowman – Games ($0.99)
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=308752159&mt=8

ParkingLot – Games ($0.99)
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=293312989&mt=8

MLB.com At Bat 2009 – Sports ($9.99)
Link Not Available

Top 5 Free Apps

Awesome Ball - Entertainment
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=308174381&mt=8

Amazing X-Ray FX² LITE – Entertainment
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=308609213&mt=8

iFighter Lite – Games
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=308614334&mt=8

The Masters Golf Tournament – Sports
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=309025938&mt=8

WordSearch Unlimited Lite – Games
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=306245714&mt=8

What do I need to get on a list?

For Free Applications

Source: Pinch Media

The numbers show that free apps, as a category, tend to be used 6.6 times more often than paid apps (this figure incorporates both the increased download popularity of free apps and also the slightly decreased frequency-of-use of free apps versus paid apps). On average, free applications are used heavily at first but usage levels off quickly — the average app lifetime is 12 runs. So compared to a single paid app, making an app free results in 6.6x more app uses and at an average lifetime of 12 runs/app = 80 sessions. Remember that the paid app makes 70c

What is the best section to target?

General consensus and study proves that the Entertainment Category is the best sought after followed by General, Sports and Lifestyle. The app downloaded in the Entertainment category generally last for about 100 days with around 3% returning users.

What do you get by appearing on a list?

• Appearing on a top 100 list increases daily new users and thus greater downloads.
• Top 25 or Top 10 result will provide you with higher gain.
• App Store is structured for maximum turnover.

In General

• Don’t try too many experiments when there is a positive download trend.
• You can do a little experiment to evaluate its worth by decreasing the price.
• After you’ve been broadly exposed, experiments have less effect.

Study shows

• The average price cut increased demand by 130%
• The average price increase drops demand to 25%

So, get you app now and unleash the power of App Store!

Top 4 MUST HAVEs to Market Your Website Successfully

1) Do SEO – If your organization hasn’t done this yet, it is time to come out of your shell and face the world. It is not just about looking good to the viewer but it should ‘appeal’ to the search engine also. Do On page and Off page SEO or better still get an expert to do it for you. Every single dollar invested in this is bound to pay off.

2) Get the Web 2.0 look – This can’t be overemphasized. There is only one word for the non Web2.0 websites – ‘archaic’ and the next term would be ‘extinct’. Hire a good web 2.0 designer to help you with this.

3) Have a Contact form – It is not easy to get traffic to your website. And now that you have got people coming, convert them into leads. Give the viewers a platform to contact you directly – these are the leads you have wanted to capture.

4) Start a Blog- Give your viewers a forum to interact. This can have not just the latest happenings about the company but also industry specific topics for viewers to leave their comments on. The idea is to create a community around the website and to get fresh content on it. This is a great SEO opportunity too.

Top 5 Social News sites

What is Social News?

Wikipdeia defines it as “Social news refers to websites where users submit and vote on news stories or other links, thus determining which links are presented.”

I am not going to make this a long list of a lot of social news sites, it will run into pages. For starters, we will keep it very simple – top 5 social news sites and their key features which you got to know to leverage the power of social news.

1)   Digg

Focus : Everything related to news – from technology, business, politics to general news.

This is the most popular social news website on the internet. It covers a vast variety of topics and also provides facility for ‘digging’ images and videos.

2)   Reddit

Focus : Everything related to news – from technology, business, politics to general news.

A basic looking site but has an extremely large user base. Includes sections, known as subreddits, on almost all topics including politics, technology and science.

3)   Propeller

Focus : Everything including news, politics and science, just like dig.
It has ‘channels’ on almost every topic. Its unusual design has received widespread criticism. But nevertheless, it remains a popular social news site on the web.

4)   Mixx

Focus: Covers everything including business, entertainment and sports
Lists user-recommendations for stories, photos and videos. Users can customize the start page, join private groups, and rate content. Though it has been launched recently in 2007, it quickly become one of the leading social news websites mainly due to the additional features it offers.

5)   Slashdot 

Focus: Technology
An extremely popular niche website used predominantly by web developers and programmers.

If you haven’t tasted the flavor of social news sites…go ahead and explore these….you will get a good idea of what its all about!

4 Ways to promote your business on Facebook – for FREE

Innovative marketing is an inevitable phenomenon to make your company’s presence felt in the ever-changing marketplace. With increasing number of users going immune to advertisements, the phenomenon of engaging the user to subtly communicate your message -  is here to stay.  Social networking has become one o f the top user engaging activity on the internet. And Facebook leads in the social networking space.

Some facts which might interest you:

·    Facebook hit the 100 mn user mark on 26^th August. Currently it has some 110 mn active users.

·    It is the most-trafficked social media site in the world. (comScore)

·    More than half of Facebook users are out of college. 68% of these are professionals, executives, educators or in technical career.

·    The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older

Here, I will give you a quick overview on how to engage users on Facebook. I will discuss some of these in detail in future posts.

·    Create a Facebook business page

The Facebook Pages act as a Profile for the business. It helps you create an identity for your company or brand on Facebook. This feature was launched by Facebook in November 2007. Users can become ‘fans’, an activity which is seen by their friends and is highly viral. You can upload photos, videos and all information about your business. Facebook users can interact directly with the business through its Facebook Page by adding reviews, writing on that business’ Wall, uploading photos and in any other ways that a business may want to enable. These actions could appear in users’ Mini-Feed and News Feed, Facebook’s popular products that allow users to share information more efficiently with their friends

·    Engage the user in a Facebook application

The main challenge is that currently about 140 new applications are added on Facebook everyday to an already existing application pool of 24,000+ applications.  But this is indeed one of the promising tools on Facebook. The key is to make your app – Viral, Engaging and Unique. You can use apps to promote a brand, create your presence or tactical reference to your website, offers etc or simple to establish a user base and make money from ads. The best thing about the application is that it uses many component of Facebook like : news- feeds and mini-feeds, invitations, profile boxes, notifications,  some of which are highly viral.

·    Create a Facebook group

A Facebook group is one of the simplest ways to create community around your product or brand. Customer and friends can participate in discussions, writes posts, put photos, videos, etc. The group name also generally appears on the member’s profile page thus helping drive more traffic to the group page.

·    Post on the Facebook Marketplace

This is Facebook’s classified listing service. Users can post to-sell or wanted ads here. Although it generally  doesn’t generate a lot of leads, it is worth a try since its free. Unlike Craigslist, which is anonymous, all Marketplace responses are tied to real Facebook accounts. So, you can actually see the respondent’s profile page when someone responds to your listing.

A platform like Facebook provides unprecedented marketing openings. The multiple prospects available to marketers are beyond compare – the challenge is effectively utilizing the viral capabilities of this platform.

What do you THINK? Write a comment below…

Some Interesting Facts about Top Social Media sites

• Every minute, 10 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube
• The facebook.com domain was purchased for $200,000
• MySpace was founded by former Friendster members in 2003. It was purchased in 2005 for $580 million by Rupert Murdoch
• Wikipedia is one of the largest reference Web sites, attracting at least 684 million visitors yearly by 2008. There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 250 languages.
• As of November 2007, flickr.com claims to host more than 2 billion images
• It is estimated that nearly 90 percent of internet users in the Philippines have Friendster accounts
• Two-thirds of Brazilian net users use Orkut

Comparison of Social Media adoption across Fortune 500 and Inc. 500 companies?

A comparison of the adoption of Social media in Forture 500 v/s Inc 500 companies brings to light some surprising results. This is based on a study was conducted by The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research. It is a follow up to a similar study they conducted in 2007.  The survey focused on six prominent social media – blogging, online video, podcasting, social networking, messaging/ bulletin boards and wikis and spanned 209 countries.

The results prove that social media has penetrated parts of the business world at a great speed. Though this shows that corporate usage of social media has doubles for Inc. 500 companies, the number is not great for Fortune 500 companies. Since the Inc. 500 represent a list of fastest-growing private US companies, in my view, it would be quite valid to assume that social media is also one of the key factors to the growth of these companies in the present scenario.

The study also dives deeper into each some of the social media across the Inc. 500 companies.

While social networking, online videos and blogging are the clear winners, even the least use podcasting has 21% adoption. 77% of the companies in the Inc. 500 use some or the other social media over the 57% in the previous year. This further proves the huge importance of social media in the fastest growing companies in the United States.

To another question – how important are social media technologies for your business the response was no less encouraging. A huge 78% said that it was either ‘very important’ or ‘somewhat important’. Only 20% said that it was ‘somewhat unimportant’ or ‘ very unimportant’.

Well, one thing is certain out of the study – the Inc. 500 are aggressively embracing social media, can the rest of corporate America afford to be far behind?

For the detailed report of the study, click here.

What do you THINK? Write a comment below…

Social Networking sites across the globe

In my previous post, I gave an overview of some of the top social media sites based on their Alexa ranking. However, when it comes to Social Networking sites, understanding their key geographies of dominance becomes very important, both for users and marketers. Let’s take a closer look at this…

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A    Few highlights:·

• Facebook emerges as a strong network internationally closely followed by MySpace ·
• Orkut is pretty strong in Brazil and the Indian subcontinent. In fact, did you know that more than 2/3^rd of the Brazilian net users use Orkut. ·
• hi5 has strong presence in certain pockets across the globe. This is mainly in Peru, Columbia, Mongolia, Thailand etc. An interesting discussion is how it has established such dominant presence in select pockets. But I’ll leave that for some other time.·
• Friendster, one of the foremost social networks is mainly dominant in south-east Asia. In fact, it is estimated that nearly 90 percent of internet users in the Philippines have Friendster accounts!

While networks are trying to grow their presence across various countries, this is now simple even for the number Uno network. The underlying key to social networking is a user’s group of friends should be on
that network. Once a user establishes a circle of friends on a particular network, it is pretty difficult to  migrate the users to other networks, no matter how good the services provided!

For example, currently 61% of Facebook users come from only 3 countries - US, UK and Canada.  For the #1 social networking site to displace the regional market leaders like Friendster in South-east Asia, Bebo in part of Europe and Orkut in South Asia and Latin America is not going to be any easy task. But, knowing the speed at which Facebook has traveled from Harvard to Ivy League schools, further  to high schools and corporate networks and finally, to the entire internet community…millions of eyes are glued to track its progresses now!

Top 20 Social Media websites

This is a list of some of the most used Social Media websites. I have sorted them based on their Alexa rank to get an idea of their popularity. The category and overview gives you an idea about each of them.

If you haven’t tried out some of them…now is the time! Because its certain - many of them are here to stay!