DAY 22

TODAY’S GOAL:

Create A Traffic Goal

The two most important parts of a business…

Do you know the most important parts of any business?  It’s two things that are of equal importance:

  1. Traffic
  2. Conversions

Without traffic (in this case downloads) it’s impossible to stay in business.  Obviously there are the atypical situations where you might get funded for $10,000,000, but we’re talking in a normal bootstrapping situations like most of the challengers are in.

On the other hand, you have to convert that traffic into revenue also.  If you get all the traffic in the world, but none of it converts, then you are still in a bad position.

Luckily with apps the conversion part is pretty simple.  If you are using ads in your game you will most likely convert fairly high.  The big trick here as you’ll see is the traffic.

Lesson Steps

STEP 1

STEP 2

STEP 3

Choose Your Strategy

There are a few different strategies you can focus on when discussing app traffic:

  1. Getting Featured – This is the holy grail, but also the hardest one to happen.  If Apple, Google or any other app store manages to feature your app then you will manage to get a huge boost of downloads on the initial release.
  2. Going Viral – Another one to chalk up in the “luck” category is going Viral.  The best example we’ve seen of this recently is Flappy Bird, which grew viral mainly because of Twitter.  Unless you have a huge app network (which we’ll discuss next) it’s almost impossible to force viral growth.
  3. Internal App Network Promotions – This method is the holy grail and what every App Developer hopes to achieve.  You’ve seen it with large publishers like Ketchapp, and here’s how it works:  Every new game they release is promoted in their old game
  4. App Store Optimization (ASO) – The most common approach for new and indie developers is ASO.  This is when you put a majority of your focus on the keywords and try to show up for high traffic and low competition search results.

All of these have their own strengths and weaknesses, but the one big thing they all have in common is the importance of focusing on keywords.  If your app is fortunate enough to get a big boost of downloads through any of the methods above, then you want to maximize this effect by having it show high in search results.

Choosing great keywords will give your game a much longer lifespan than choosing bad ones.

Preform The Research

Since most likely you’ll be focusing on ASO, let’s discuss keyword research.

Basic ASO research can be broken down into 5 steps:

  1. Use your device to search for competitive terms
  2. Make note of any “outlier” apps that have a high ranking but low reviews or are very new (apps that seem to be misplaced in this top list)
  3. Focus on these outlier apps and try to figure out what keywords are making them rank high in the search results

There are many sites out there for keyword research and one of our favorites is SensorTower.com.

This is just one approach, another common popular one is Coattail Riding which revolves around using keywords from popular games that get a lot of searches in the app store.  This approach can work, but be wary of copyright claims and also the fact Apple and Google will remove keywords if they see this being taken advantage of.

Choose Your Keywords

Throughout your research session start jotting down keywords you think are worth noting.  Compile this list of keywords into a list to use in the app store of your choice.

It’s important to note this is a major part of the success of your app.  If you get good a keyword selection, you can create a serious business on that skill alone.  We’ve seen multiple customers who are great with picking keywords achieve millions of downloads in a fairly short amount of time without spending any money on promotion.

Remember, there are tens of thousands of developers who are trying to achieve the same results as you. If you put in the average amount of effort then you will achieve the average result.  You have to either work harder — or smarter — than everyone else if you want to achieve outlier success and create something breaks the mold and gets noticed!

 

30 Day Game Challenge Lessons:

Week 1 – Game Ideas &  Basic Training

Week 2 – Creating Your Game

Week 3 – Monetization & Setup

Week 4 – The Launch

  • Day 22 – Game Traffic Goal
  • Coming Soon

friends4Know someone who might like to do the challenge with you?
Send them over to the challenge page so they can download Buildbox too:
www.buildbox.com/challenge/