Paid marketing has never really worked for me. I've had a few apps reach number 1 in their categories and they key was getting lots of downloads in the first 24-48 hours. Once it's up there it's not much work to stay there.

I have a few hundred followers on Twitter and sent out several promo tweets a day. I gave out 10-20 promo codes. I left comments on forums which relate to the app (some forums will ban you but with some you will get good interaction.

So basically you need to get as many sales as possible out of the gate. I've found that if you don't make the top 25 in your category within the first few days it's never going to happen.

In the "freemium" app world, which relies on in-app purchase, the big players pay for installs of millions in users in hopes that a few percent of them will become payers.

In order for that to pay off you need to know what your conversion rate and ARPU are, and optimize your new-user funnel with tracking and A/B tests.

Yes. Complete waste of time.

Fostering relationships with bloggers might be useful. But the advertising networks, so far, no success.

I'm not saying it can't work, it just didn't work for us.

The main reason is that ads (google or mobile) are priced for traditional sales (e.g.: cars or whatever) products and apps are just way too inexpensive to make it viable.

I would think that the massive amount of inventory ad networks have would allow you to run $0.01 or cheaper clicks, which would be viable for apps--- but it seems they'd rather not have inventory than take less than $0.15 a click.

Thanks.

Besides cultivating relationships with bloggers, have you found any other form of effective online marketing to boost app adoption? We've gotten some newsletter signups and downloads off of our front page and blog page (I've been creating a lot of topical content that relates to what our app does) but the numbers aren't that big. Maybe two or three people clicking off to the iTunes link on a typical day.

If your app has a particular market of enthusiasts (e.g.: a pet grooming app, for instance) you could seek out forums of those people and participate in those forums (constructively) while having a link to your site in your signature (if the forum allows it.)

I don't know if that's effective or not, its just an idea.

Making apps easier better to market is something we think about a lot and hope that we'll eventually have a MUCH better answer to in the future.