How I Do It: Successfully Selling iPhone Games

iPhone users love games and developers have created them by the thousands. Gaming is a huge money-making opportunity for developers, but it also presents a significant challenge: how do you make your game stand out?

The iPhone app development company bees4honey, which successfully sells several games in the App Store, uses everything from videos to widgets to spread the word. Konstantin Panchenko shares the company’s strategy for marketing their puzzle game iQBloxing and gives you the insider tips to help you sell your own app.

Marketing Your App: What is your app?

Konstantin Panchenko: So, the name of our app is iQBloxing. It’s a very addictive game. Basically, it’s a puzzle game, but it is very dynamic.

You may know the Flash game which inspired us to create iQBloxing, this game is Bloxorz. You can also take a look at YouTube video of iQBloxing gameplay.

iQBloxing is free, but contains an InApp Purchase option to unlock all levels and achievements. There are 7 levels for free, and 33 total levels.

MYA: What have you done to promote your game?
KP: We’ve done many thing to promote our app, such as:

1. Created a YouTube video and put it on our site’s header, on the iQBloxing promo page, and posted about this video in our blog. Also we submitted this video to some review sites, which provide an option to post the YouTube link.

On YouTube, we found the Bloxorz videos (original Flash game) and made a video reply with our iQBloxing video, so people who are interested in Bloxorz can also see that there is an analogous game on the iPhone. I suppose it would be much better to have lots of iQBloxing videos, so we can make more video replies, but unfortunately we have only one.

2. Submitted to numerous review sites. Most of them will never post reviews until you pay them, but there are also some nice and good-looking sites, like FreshApps. But anyway I’m not sure that review sites, excluding the major ones, are effective.

3. Registered on the most valuable iPhone-related forums, such as MacRumors, iPhoneDevSDK, etc. We created posts about iQBloxing and our company and put short, non-obtrusive ads in our account’s signature. In total we get about 1,000 views of the iQBloxing post – it’s free and doesn’t take too much time.

4. We created something like a widget for our blog. It shows all our apps available on the App Store. Site visitors can easily access our apps in the App Store by just clicking on the iTunes link in this widget. Judging by statistics, we have small sales from this.

5. We have a Twitter account where we post all our news. We are trying to grow our followers base to increase the effect from Twitter.

6. We embedded ad banners in our free game Brain Twister. This banner is linked to iQBloxing on the App Store.

7. Every app we submit to the App Store has a “More Games” section which contains direct links to all our apps on the App Store.

MYA: Are you planning to release a paid version of your game?

KP: We are going to create a paid version of this game – iQBloxing Pro – with more levels and I suppose we will post some promo codes in forums. I think we’ll try this idea – create a “premium users” group. These guys will receive promo codes for every one of our paid apps via email as soon as the app hits the App Store. Premium users would post an iTunes review for our app. Not sure if it will work well, but we are going to try it.

MYA: What tips do you have for developers who are looking to sell their iPhone apps?

KP: Having a good, high-quality product is only a half of success, the other half is marketing. Create a useful program which helps users and try to get as much as exposure as possible. Work hard and you’ll reach success!

iQBloxing is available in the App Store by clicking on this link

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Tagged as: app developer, case study, game, marketing tips, paid app, Twitter