Twitter® Application Development for Dummies®

Chapter 18. Promoting Your Application

In This Chapter

• Leveraging online social networks

• Using viral marketing to promote your app

• How to manage your own PR

• Advertise your app

• Make your app easy to find via search engines

As a developer, I know how exciting it is to invent and bring to life a new product. I also know how disheartening it can be to launch your product to the sound of crickets chirping. This scenario happens all the time to entrepreneurial software developers. It's a common pitfall to expect a barrage of users excited about your product right after you launch. In your heart, you know you've built something wonderfully useful and entertaining, but if nobody knows your application exists, they can't fall in love with it like you have.

Tip

If you don't love your project, how can you expect your users to love it? You can't. Consider moving on to another project you're excited about.

When your application has launched, your work has just begun. It's time to spread the word about your app. I cover several promotion strategies you can use in this chapter, but they all focus on driving traffic to your Web site. If you have a desktop or mobile application, you absolutely must have a central Web presence. From there you can direct visitors to download or purchase your application.

There are some common promotional strategies you can leverage to build your user base. The strategies I cover in this chapter include social media, viral marketing, public relations, advertising, and search ...