How To Make Money From Your App?

What are the action items that will increase the odds in that battle to improve your monetization?

This is one of the most challenging aspect for every startups. After you build your application (or service) you need to measure all the actions that the users take. This is a learning mechanism that will let you iterate (hopefully quickly) and improve your product. Once you feel that you have a good product market fit and you are out of the alpha (or beta) modes it’s time to put efforts in the ‘Grow’ and ‘Earn’ parts.

Let’s see what are some of the tools that we can use.

Earn More Revenue With Firebase And AdMob

Firebase is a mobile platform that helps you quickly develop high-quality apps, grow your user base, and earn more money. In the slides below, we will focus on the growth part. In other words, we will talk about ways to acquire and engage the right users at the right time.
There are several features that Firebase is giving developers out of the box in order to help with growth:

• Notifications – Engage with users at the right moment
• App Indexing – Drive organic search traffic to your app
• Dynamic Links – Send users to the right place inside your app
• Invites – Empower your users to share your app
• AdWords – Acquire users with the reach of Google

For more, check the slides below. Btw, if you want to see what are the options to monetize your work (both on the web, Android, iOS and other platforms) join thousands of developers that took my Monetization course on Udacity.

How To Attract More Users?

As an app developer, the biggest problem you have is “How can I show my wonderful creation to every user possible?” and this isn’t as straightforward as “tell your friends”. Users today are informed, and use different channels to find, understand, and get apps.
Did you know that 3 out of 4 users do some kind of research before installing an app?!
So what is the problem?
Among all those informed users, how do you attract new, interested users that will generate revenue for you?
You don’t just want a ton of users, you want a ton of users who love your app.
So, how do you wade through the horde of less-than-interesting users, for the ones that truly matter? First, we need to see where users are searching (see the image below).

 

Second, we need to see what are good ways to find new users that will match our service (or app).

Three recommended methods

The Art of Retaining Users (Video)

This is the 3rd episode of “The Zen of Monetization”.
It covers three principles for users’ retention:

• Understand user behavior in your app.
• Identify roadblocks to retention (e.g screen tracking and events).
• Use tactics & tools to re-engage users (e.g. use a specific method to specific users’ segment).

Anrdoid In-App Payment That Works

The first video of “The Zen of Monetization” is out!

What?

Well, it’s a series of videos I’m creating, in order to cover different aspects of monetization. The goal is simple: help developers earn more from their work. In the first episode, we cover how to use In-App Payments. It’s a brief overview that gives the macro view. We have in the pipeline few more episodes that will cover it in more details with (of course) code samples.
If you wish to get it as an article (and not a video) check this “Android in-app payments” post.

Mobile Trends During 2015

Quick stats that shows why it’s a “mobile world”.
Time spend on mobile grows 117% year over year. One quick look at the image below will show that we have a new form factor that is taking all others in terms of growth.

 

Phablets are rocking

Phablets have become the unstoppable media consumption device. What a proof? Check the quarterly form factor distribution forecast (below).
Amazing. In the next 6 quarters, we might be in a place where phablets are 60% of all mobile devices.

App Monetization Course #StartupTips

In the past year, I had the pleasure to work with @JessicaUelmen and the rest of the professional team in Udacity on a course that aim to help developers and entrepreneurs. There is no higher form of user validation than having customers support your product with their wallets. However, the path to a profitable business is not necessarily an easy one. This course blends instruction with real-life examples to help you effectively develop, implement, and measure your monetization strategy, iterating on the model as appropriate. In a nutshell, it will help you make money.

Go try it at: udacity.com/course/app-monetization–ud518

Android In App Payments

As we know, user like free applications. However, we need to make a living out of our application, right?
One of the most popular method these days is In-App Payments. You can see this in many examples: Clash of clans, Netflix, Spotify and many more.
In this post, we’ll see how to perform common In-appPayments operations from Android applications.

What is this service?

In-app billing is a service hosted on Google Play that lets you charge for digital content or for upgrades in your app. You can request product details from Google Play, issue orders for in-app products, and retrieve ownership information based on users’ purchase history. Google Play provides a checkout interface that makes user interactions with the In-app Billing service seamless and provides a more intuitive experience to your users.