In my whole app marketing career, I have focused mostly on organic methods to get installs because i personally get the best results with them (got over 12.5 million installs for my own app portfolio) but ruling out paid advertising to increase reach would be a foolish move. Multi-million dollar companies like calm, headspace, cheetah mobile spend millions of dollars on ads every year.

Why do they do that? Because it’s working for them obviously! The users they acquire through these channels end up becoming buyers which eventually pay for their ad costs.

Now 5 things which i learned from spending over $150k in last 2 years

1) Conversion ratio (Cost/conv): This is by far the most important factor that determines everything from cost per install to number of conversions. This should be your OMTM (One metric that matters) while running advertising for user acquisition. ASO, which is discussed later, plays a huge role in optimizing conversion ratio too.

2) Target Audience: Nail down your target audience before you start running ads of any kind. Everything on your app page, from your app icon, app screenshots to app title & description should be laser focused towards this target audience. Find out their pain points and then send a targeted message through your app page.

3) Ad budget: Decide and allocate the ad budget which you want to spend on various advertising channels and then allocate or deallocate the ad budget depending on which channel gives you the best results. You should keep checking your acquisition cost daily to figure out how much budget you should allocate. Allocating more budget when the acquisition cost is low is a really good idea and something what i have done to get thousands of downloads quickly.

4) Campaign timing: Running ads for christmas shopping during summers is not a good idea for obvious reasons thus campaign timing is as important if not more than other factors mentioned here. Also, many times your ad costs will go up when plenty of your competitors are running ads at the same time so its crucial to decide what time you want to run your ad campaigns.

5) App Store Optimization (ASO) : Unlike what most marketeers believe, ASO is not a one time thing, it’s a continuous process of testing, optimizing and seeing what works. You can’t just do ASO one time and expect to magically see your app in top rankings. Before running ads of any kind, do get a professional ASO done to ensure you are able to rank your app for the right keywords.

Now as you can see all these factors are interlinked. You can’t just focus on one and ignore the other. It’s important that you try to work on all the factors if you want the best ROI.

P.S: We have been working on a breakthrough ASO tool for last 1 year which has improved our conversion ratio from 25% to 67% in just 3 months.

Also, We have managed to get 4 million installs in just 3 months after we started using it. Our secret ASO tool is called Storemockups, the only definite ASO tool which can almost 3x your app downloads as well as drastically reduce your user acquisition costs.

For a very short time while storemockups is in beta, it’s available for a ONE-TIME Payment of $999

What you can do with our ASO tool

1. Create breathtaking Multi million dollar App Mockups,
2. Reduce advertising costs by using proven high converting templates.
3. Customise your mockups with over 80 iOS & Android phones and tablets.
4. Set custom background gradients or set custom image backgrounds.
5. Add custom objects to your mockups to grab attention and sky rocket conversions.
6. Format caption & Sub-caption fonts, size and color to send the perfect message to your users.
7. Save and export mockups in all iOS sizes (coming soon)
8. Auto-translate your App mockups to different localized languages (coming soon)
9. Extract keywords used by your competitors (coming soon)
10. Version control your app store listing over time (coming soon)
11. Preview App Store/ Google play page with new screenshots and description (coming soon)

We will be ending our lifetime deal on February, till the time our Storemockups is in beta and after that, you can only use the tool with a monthly subscription.

Feel free to follow me or message me on linkedin if you would like to know more about the tool and how to best utilize it!

Disclaimer: My results are not typical and most people won’t see these kinda numbers even after many years and yes, that’s live revenue screenshot of one of my top performing apps.

Okay, so apparently we are here. I feel I owe it to myself and tons of other people who are still looking for answers to explain step by step how the hell do people make money through apps.

To be honest, looking from outside, it all sounds magical and to good to be true. When I started app development, I was fortunate enough to get exposed to people who were killing it in App Market and making thousands of dollars. Even after that, I could never imagine myself doing the same thing and thought I am not ‘lucky’ (sic) enough to achieve that dream.

Since that time, I have become the guy who is making thousands of dollars with apps and damn it feels weird. I am still adjusting to the new reality. (to read, how I got into app business, read this)

Now coming to the meat of it. Yes, it is possible to make a sustainable and sizeable income through apps. Please see the screenshot below to find the revenue stats of one of my apps.

I know, you going to be sneaking a bit more after seeing the numbers, so to make it easy for you, this is one of my app portfolios – KShark Apps in Android. I have just started releasing apps for iOS too, you can find them here. Now, since we know it’s possible. How the hell can one make this kinda money through apps. Keep reading and you will find out.

Apps have multiple monetization methods but they can be broadly classified into App Sales and Ad Income.

Ad Income: Making money through Ads is nothing new and has been there for a long time. Websites since a long time, have been making this type of income by asking advertisers to pay some money for placing an Ad banner and directing their traffic to the Advertiser. For Apps, you can use offerings from multiple advertising partners such as Google (Admob), Facebook (FAN) so that you don’t manually have to hunt for advertisers and strike advertising deals. Both work pretty well but from experience, Admob has better payouts compared to FAN. If your app starts getting big numbers, you could always try to strike personal advertising deals with clients in the same niche.

App Sales: As the term itself suggest, you make this kinda income when somebody buys an upgrade or premium version of your app. We can classify this income into Paid apps and In-app purchases. Paid app income is generated when customers buy your premium-priced apps. In-app purchases happen when a customer buys an upgrade in your free or premium app. Both of these ways can create sizeable income for you. I suggest to try out both and see which one gives you better results. In-app purchases, in general, get fewer refunds from my experience.

Now above two methods are a major part of my income but there are other methods too through which you can make money through apps. Selling app usage or customer data is also pretty common in this industry and many of the big apps do that and make sizeable amounts of money.

As you can see, making money through apps is not a big mystery. If you put sufficient time and resources you can definitely make a small fortune or even a sustainable income source for yourself. I and many other developers are doing that, it’s just that most of us don’t share our stories as we much rather ‘cherish our victories in private’. I personally wrote this article to clear any confusion and doubts in the minds of people who might be in the same boat as I was, a year ago.

If you are really serious about the app business and want to get to an intermediate level fast without forever wasting your time going through useless information on the internet, you can check out this package and accelerate your learning process by 10 times. In this package, I have collected all the resources and methods I have found over a period of 3 years which helped me achieve the level I am at and put them in a nice orderly fashion for you guys. Either way, do leave your comments and let me know if you found this useful. I will continue writing informative posts like these if I feel I am providing some value to you guys, appreciate your time, until next time!