Why am I not getting any downloads?? Every
fresher developers or programmer’s first question after Publishing his/her
first application or game. Even I asked myself the same question when I
published my first app on play store. So after doing so much of hard work of
months finally a day comes when you publish your first application and keeping
eye on the reports every second for like whole day and getting nothing at all
and you keep asking yourself, did I do something wrong, why am I not getting any
downloads. Well my friend that is not your mistake. It is not anybody's
mistake. We are developers, we can build things but the only thing we don't
know is advertisement. So we build this app and worked our ass off like a month
and the only thing we are missing is advertisement. When I built my first app
and published all I was thinking was “this app is made by me, it does not
require any type of advertisement”. But trust
me you are wrong at this point, I was wrong because it was my first step and I had
to learn everything in the commercial world.
Let me ask you a question. Why these big movies need promotions? I mean every person in this world knows about the movie “The Transformers”. It has more than three parts I think. It is so famous so why creators invested a butt load of money on promotions. And let me tell you something even “GTA V” cost £175 million to make and market and mostly half of the money went to the promotions for the game. So the point is it does not matter how good your application is or how talented you are if people don’t see it, it not going to be famous. Let me tell you something, I assume on some level you download and play some game from play store, IOS store or Steam or any other service. And I think you have seen some games are shit and got like millions of downloads, and you ask yourself how is this even possible. Well it is the magic of advertisement my friend. People buy shits if they see it but if they don’t see it, nothing is going to happen.
Let me ask you a question. Why these big movies need promotions? I mean every person in this world knows about the movie “The Transformers”. It has more than three parts I think. It is so famous so why creators invested a butt load of money on promotions. And let me tell you something even “GTA V” cost £175 million to make and market and mostly half of the money went to the promotions for the game. So the point is it does not matter how good your application is or how talented you are if people don’t see it, it not going to be famous. Let me tell you something, I assume on some level you download and play some game from play store, IOS store or Steam or any other service. And I think you have seen some games are shit and got like millions of downloads, and you ask yourself how is this even possible. Well it is the magic of advertisement my friend. People buy shits if they see it but if they don’t see it, nothing is going to happen.
So I think I have proved my point. Now let’s talk
about how to advertise your product. Well you are a developer and a fresher and
I don’t think you have millions of money for investing on advertisement. Well nothing
to worry about. First of all you have to find right audience. And first and
free option is tell your friends to use it. But in my experience they will
uninstall it within two days. Trust me this happens. I punched my best friend on face
because of this. But that is another story to tell. But trust me and do it. Before
taking next step it is the most important step to let your friend use this and
take some feedback from it. And you can make some steps to improve your app and
update it. And now one thing you can do is make yourself a little bit famous. Youtube
can do that. Uploading some videos and get good amount of subscribers is not a
bad idea but keep it in mind that if you are going to make game and promote it
on youtube than you should have right audience there. It is not going to work
if you have some famous channel for songs and you are promoting your game in it.
It is not going to work. But if most of audience are gamers than it can be
great. Now before you publish, you can make some trailer to make some excitement
in people. So making small videos on games and promote trailers will work. By that
you already have people waiting for your product in market and that is a good
point.
These are some free points to do promotions and
another option is find a publisher for your application but it is not easy. I
tried like hundreds of sites to promote my app, sending them message but no
replies at all. But you know what it is not bad because if your apps get famous
on some level then at some day you can sit on some chair and say “I should buy
a lemo”. And trust me you will. All you have to do is to trust yourself and
learn from your mistakes. It takes courage to accept the mistake and work on
them. Coward people blame GOD. In my opinion make mistake and learn from them
till you are 25. I can be wrong because I am 21.
Now back to promotions the last option is to invest
some money on your app and I am not saying like millions. I am saying $50 to $100.
And I think everyone can afford that. Best options are Google adsense and
facebook promotions. Now first lets talk about Google adsense. You can make campaign
from Google adsense and promote your app. It will take like 5 to 10 minutes to
make a campaign and start it. And the best thing is you need $10 to start that.
And in that money you can get like 200 downloads. Isn’t that great. Same thing
goes with facebook. You have to make a facebook page and make a campaign and
start it. And I think you can find some tutorial for that on youtube and other
sites as well.
Now the worst
thing and nightmare of every developer comes here. After you getting downloads,
you start getting uninstalls too. Well they give you users but it’s all on you
that how you can engage the user and make him/her keep the application. So before
investing big amount of money you should really get some feedback for you app
so you can find some of your mistakes and work on them. So good luck and never
give up.