In this video, I want to talk to you about what category is the best for the App Store. I want to walk you through what categories you should be going after, why you should be going after them, and what to do about it.

Here, we’re going to focus on iTunes, the Apple App Store.

The App Store’s Categories

If you’re new to the app business, the first thing you have to understand is that the App Store is organized into categories. These categories allow the developers and the people browsing to organize their thoughts. Like when you only want to see sports apps, or only music apps.

You can go into those categories and each has its own lists. There’s top paid apps in the sports category or the reference category. Then, on the top level, there is the overall top list. It’s a little bit of a hierarchy.  There’s the global App Store, and then there are individual categories that have their own ecosystems inside it.

Are You A Developer or A Marketer?

When people ask what category they should go into in the App Store, I think there are a few qualifications that you need to know.  

The first one is: Are you planning on building a really, really great product? Are you a developer, are you looking to make something with really high quality? Or, are you more of a marketer, and you obviously want to make good profit, but you’re really more excited about the market opportunity, getting in front of people, growing your business that way? Both of these can be very lucrative, both have been proven time and time again. Just understanding which one you want to get into.

If you’re a developer and you want to make a great product, any category will work. These categories all have the ability to make money. While some may be bigger, it also means they’re more competitive.  So, if you are a developer, if you’re thinking about building a really great product, if that’s what you want to do, it doesn’t really matter what category you go into. What matters is you should just be gunning to be one of the top people in that category.

Now for those who are more of a marketer type just like myself, you obviously need to build a great product. In the app business these days, if don’t build something that people want, or like, you’re not going to last very long. But as a marketer, there are categories that are better than others, in terms of getting to the top, or making money, or finding opportunities.

Looking at Categories and Groups of Buyers

The first thing you want to do is, not to look at the categories, but look at the groups of people, and specifically, which of these categories have people that are buying stuff already elsewhere.

I would look at something like Shopping, and Health and Fitness. But I’m not sure about Education.

So if you are a marketer looking for opportunities, the key is to go to the categories and identify those that have the biggest group of buyers. A lot of this comes down to just your own market research.  

My Favorite Categories

From my own experience, my favorite ones are Finance, Health and Fitness, Shopping, and Entertainment. I think those four categories have been proven time and time again, that people will buy products, not only in the category but when they’re outside the category as well.

Categories that are Heavy on Content

The final piece that I would tell you when you’re picking your category is to focus on categories that rely heavily on content.

You want to focus on categories that have a lot of content that people consume on a regular basis. Which of these categories have lots of videos, lots of photos, lots of blog posts you can write, that have a podcast, or anything around that category?

Health and fitness, and finance are great examples of this.

Today, I want to talk to you about the best way to make money with apps in 2017. This is a very popular topic among anyone getting in the app business because this is how you’re going to make your return.

I want to talk about what’s hot right now, what is working right now. And there’s a few things that are working and a few things that aren’t working really as well as they used to.

1. Advertisements

Advertisements is when you show a pop-up for somebody else’s app and then you get paid every time that you show that pop-up. Advertisements still work. They work just as well as they do on the web, but they can go up and down based on the ad network.

You have to show advertisements through an ad network, and so you don’t really have a lot of control over who the advertiser is, and how much they’re going to spend on a given day. So ads can work, but it really comes down to how much money the advertisers are spending that month.

Ads can be a very lucrative source of revenue for you. It can be a very quick and fast way to make money. But you have to have a lot of downloads, thousands and thousands of it, to make advertising work.

2. Create more in-app purchases for your users.

What happens with most people is they put in a few in-app purchases into their app and no one buys it. And they’re like: “Well, this app doesn’t convert, there’s no way I can make my money on this.” And they just forget about it, and go back to advertisements.

But you don’t just put in-app purchases in your app. You have to sell your in-app purchases. What you have to realize is that the way that the world works in 2017 for the app business is you have to market to people. You have to put your app in front of them and say: “Hey listen, here’s the product that we’re selling, make sure to check this out.” So every time that they go through the app, you need to make sure that they know that it’s available, and that it’s easy to buy.

So, in-app purchases are actually becoming a very viable source of revenue for people, but you have to sell it to your users. You can’t expect your users to go searching around and pick through every single menu and try to find it.

And not only do you need to sell it, you need to consistently add more and more in-app purchases to your app. If you want to make more money, you need to just have more things that people can buy. And then you sell it to them, you present it to them in the app.

3. Subscription model

This one has the most potential. Apps like Spotify and Pandora have subscriptions. Meaning, you sign-up and say: “Hey, for two dollars every week, or for 10 dollars every month you’re going to keep this app and you get all the premium access to the products.”

This is the future of App Monetization. The most successful apps will focus on subscriptions. It is a winning and proven business model and not a lot of people are doing it.

Now, Apple specifically has a few guidelines on what kind of apps can use subscriptions, but as long as you just put a lot of content into your app, or even stream content in, like if you have a YouTube channel, you can just show those videos directly in your app and put a gate on it.

Adding a subscription and giving people access to premium parts of your app is the best way to make money with a really good app over the next 12 months.

For this model to work, you have to have a great product. You can’t sell crap, you can’t sell garbage to people and expect them to sign up for a subscription. If you do have a great app though, make it a subscription and get people to sign up for this subscription, and then continuously deliver on what you promise.

Summary

So, if you’re thinking about getting into the app business, or if you are in the app business and you’re wond...

Today I want to talk about Facebook's affinity score.

Many of you may have noticed that when you log in to your Facebook Ads account, the affinity score isn’t there anymore. A lot of you, including people in the Emoji Arbitrage Course, have gotten used to this idea of having an affinity score, using it to pick your audiences. And now that there’s no affinity score, you may feel like you don’t know what to do.

Now, I'll show you what’s going on and explain why this is all happening, so that you can change your strategy a little bit, to make your strategy much more effective.

The downside of removing the affinity score is that there’s a little bit more work involved. But the upside is you’re going to get much better results over the next couple of weeks, months, years for everything.

What's an affinity score?

On your Facebook ads account, you see the Facebook audience insights area, where you go to research people on Facebook.

Let’s say you just created an emoji app or you’re thinking of doing some Facebook Ads. For example, you did an emoji app on pizza. When you go to Interest and type in “pizza,” this generic term has 40 to 45 million people a month, interested people in the United States.  Now, that’s pretty broad, and typically, you want something under a million to be specific enough for an app, especially emoji app.

What we teach is that you go to Demographics and then go over to Page Likes. The Top Categories section talks about people who like pizza tend to like these specific pages within these categories.  

Down in the Page Likes section, this relevance column used to be over on the right and it used to be called the affinity score.

The affinity score will give you a list of pages and tell you how likely people who like pizza were to like that specific page. And this was a big part of research and of buying Facebook Ads and everything else.  

Facebook now replaced this with Relevance and, here’s what they say: “The pages that are mostly likely to be relevant to your audience based on page size and the number of people in your audience who already like that page.”

Now you need to get specific. So instead of “pizza”, type “golden retriever.”  

Seeing the results, there’s some difference, but it’s not like a game-changing difference. So this isn’t that helpful. But, it doesn’t mean all hope is lost.  

Why did the Facebook affinity score disappear?

This is from talking to a bunch of people, and this is also just my best guess.  Facebook’s algorithm is better than anything we could ever do on targeting. We, as humans, probably think that we know what we’re doing. We think that there’s no way Facebook’s optimization or pixel could ever do the work we’re doing, that there’s no way they’re smarter.

The news is, actually, Facebook’s much better than we ever are or will be. And they’re trying to get people to do less manual work, and let Facebook do more of the ‘finding the best customers’. They want you to do less targeting yourself, and they want to take over that targeting for you.  

The more that they can take that out of your control, the better that their pixels are going to get, and the better that they’re going to get at finding the customers you need.

What Facebook is telling you, and what you want to tell Facebook

What Facebook is trying to tell you is this: “Just tell us the people you...

I highly recommend doing an A/B test on your app icon so you can get more downloads. Here are 3 strategies to do this:

1. Posting on Facebook

You can do the testing on your own Facebook page. But the best place is typically in Facebook groups with other people who are used to providing feedback. Any group of people who are supportive of entrepreneurs, app marketers. You can post a few different options and just ask people: “Hey, which one do you like? Leave a comment.” And people will comment “I like icon A” or “I like icon B”. It’s an easy, free way to quickly get information from people.

If you’re not part of a group, you can use your personal page. Or you can email your family and friends and ask, “Which one of these icons do you like the most?”

2. Facebook Advertising

This is going to get you a lot more data, and a lot more objective data because the people typically don’t know you. But it will cost a couple of bucks, maybe $5, $10 a day to get this kind of impression and click data.

What you do is run two advertisements. One has one icon, the other ad has a different icon, and everything else stays the same. You send both ads to people, with the same budget, and the only thing different is the advertisement itself which is the icon. With this you will see which one people click on more often. When you see the one people click on, that’s the one you should pick. You could do this with 3 or 4 different tests.

This is what Tim Ferriss did with the cover of “The 4-Hour Workweek.” He used Google adwords to test the title to see which ones people click on most often. It works. It’s a very good strategy and people do this with many different things.

3. Change the icon on your app in the iTunes store

In the iTunes store, you will see the analytics that shows how many people saw your iTunes page in the store and then went and actually downloaded your app. That shows what the conversion rate was to get them onto your page. You will see those conversion metrics. So for one week, you run one icon and that gets 30% of people to come into your iTunes page. And the next week you run another icon and see that it gets 50% of people to come in. You know that you’re going to keep the second one.

While this step takes the longest, this is the truest test because this is the ultimate goal of testing the icon. That is, to get more downloads.

So, friends and family and Facebook groups, using a small sample size, is the easiest and cheapest way to do it. Facebook ads will cost some money but it will give you great objective data that you can get in a matter of hours. Last, go to your iTunes account and update the app and see which one moves the needle for you.

Having a better icon, changing a few things about the icon can make a huge difference in the long term. So I highly recommend testing out your app icon.

See ya!

Carter

A lot of you are getting into Facebook advertising for your apps, or you have heard a lot about Facebook advertising for your apps. It’s an incredible way to get traffic and downloads for apps. That’s why people do it. Of all the platforms, it’s by far the most effective, and also has the best targeting.

Beyond targeting for specific interests, you can also segment people and you can use algorithms and indicators that you give Facebook to justify or to find the people that you want to reach. Facebook does this with custom audiences and lookalike audiences.

So what’s the difference between custom audiences and lookalike audiences on Facebook advertising?

Custom Audience

If you want to create a custom audience, what you would tell Facebook is, “Hey, Facebook, make sure that you tag everybody that does this particular action and put them into one small group. For example, everybody who comes and downloads my app, or everybody who goes to my website, visits my website one time, or people who make an in-app purchase.

So, custom audience means, you are saying to Facebook that these are the people that I want to track and that you want Facebook to keep a list of who these people are.

Lookalike Audience

A lookalike audience is when you take one of these groups (people that you want to track) and tell Facebook to go and find as many people that look as similar to this group as possible so that you can put your ads in front of them.

Knowing that Facebook has data on billions of people, and they will be able to go out and run an algorithm, and come back and say, “Hey, we found 2 million people in the United States (or whatever country you want) that look really similar to all people that are in your custom audience. Let’s only serve your ads to those people.”

When you do this, you see much better results because you’re showing it to people that are already pre-qualified by Facebook based on the group of people that you are tracking.

Lookalike audience is more about scaling your ads while custom audience is more about tracking the users.

With custom audiences, you can imagine how many different applications there are for this. In emojis for example, we track people that install the app, and also track how far into the onboarding experience do they get. Did they go through all the screens? Did they actually go and install the keyboard? Did they send an emoji? You can track all of these behaviors.

You can create these custom audiences all throughout your app, and also for anyone who purchases things.

You take these custom audiences and you go over to Facebook, and Facebook goes out and gives you millions of people that are really similar to those that bought in-app purchases or people that installed your app, or people that sent emojis. Facebook says these are the people that you should be showing your advertisements to.

Those are the two types of audiences that you can create Facebook ads. When you use them together, you can create a really powerful strategy. We talk about that on the Facebook Ads mini-course on Bluecloud Solutions.

We encourage everybody in the app business using Facebook ads or thinking about getting into Facebook ads to start building custom audiences, build them up, and then start to use these lookalike audiences to get even better results, better traffic,

Early on in 2012-2013, a handful of our apps were around celebrity themes – musicians, entertainers, influencers. I would take their names and images and I’ll make them cartoon formats and put them into fun games. And it did well. I made a good amount of money doing this. But it wasn’t a very long-lasting strategy. I definitely got letters from their legal team that said, “Hey, you can’t do this.”

But people saw that success and they go to the app store and see political apps going to the top of the charts, and they’re wondering, “Is this a way to make an easy buck? Can I do this?”

So, here are 3 things to think about when making your decision to use celebrities in your app:

1. You’re playing with fire.

You can make apps using celebrities, politicians, entertainers, musicians, or whoever the person is. But realize that you’re playing with fire. This is not something that you broadcast to the whole world, because on some level there is legal precedent for the celebrities to say “You can’t do that.”

There are laws about creating parodies and things like that, but once you get into that world, you’ve got to tiptoe around a little bit. You can do it, for sure, but know that there’s going to be people looking at you once you do it.

2. Law of diminishing returns

As you get more downloads and more money, because you’re leveraging their popularity, you will attract more attention to your app. You could attract the attention of a celebrity who might think, “Hey, why is there an app with my name and a cartoon version of me in the app store at #50 that’s making a couple of hundreds of dollars a day. Why are they making money on it and not me?” And as soon as you get that attention, that’s when you start to get the letters from the lawyers who are not happy with your app.

The law of diminishing returns says that, As you start to grow, your chances of staying under the radar go down considerably. As you become a success, you really set yourself up for failure in a much bigger way.

This is not legal advice. I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t do this from a legal standpoint.

You might not get sued, but you’ll probably get a strong warning from the legal team to take the app down and potentially pay them what you have already made.

3. It’s really difficult to build a business on this model.

There’s no compounding effect. You really go for that one big pop and then hang on as long as you can until either the popularity goes down or you get a slap on the wrist by somebody else.  And then you start all over again with a new celebrity or a new current event. And it’s really difficult to constantly be timing that over and over.

People have tried this many times, and 4 to 5 years ago it was feasible to a certain extent. But nowadays it’s just not a way to build a business.

So if you’re trying to make a quick buck, and see if it works, you can try it. You may go up the charts and earn a couple of hundred bucks, or thousand bucks if you’re lucky, maybe you won’t get caught. But over the long term, you’re going to have a very hard time making a sustainable income following this process.

As long as you’re very honest with that about yourself, you’ll be okay. You’ll be able to use this as a learning process as opposed to a real business opportunity that you’re going after.

To anybody thinking of doing a celebrity app, it can be a really fun, easy way to test the app business. But I’ll advise anybody looking to make a sustainable income, a couple thousand dollars a month, it’s going to be more difficult for all the reasons I just talked about.

All that energy may be better spent focused on building a product that doesn’t have the risks of using a celebrity, and following the marketing plans laid out in Bluecloud.

A great way to get started on any new app business or project is to use templates. Instead of building apps from scratch, you start with a framework. It’s a prebuilt template that doesn’t have any of the designs. It’s just the guts. If you start with a template, it’s a lot easier than if you build an app from scratch.

Here are 3 ways that you can get app templates:

1. Go to marketplaces

Go to Google and type iPhone app template or iPhone app source code. You will find different marketplaces out there. There are dozens out there where you can buy a source code from a developer through a marketplace. Here you’ll see different prices and different types of apps.

The good side of this is that you can just go and browse, and if you like one, press buy, you download the app and you’re good to go.

The downside is that you don’t always know who the developer is. Sometimes you get code that might be old. You get a template that hasn’t been updated for a while. They may never provide any customer service.

Like in any marketplace, you’re never 100% sure what you’ll get. But it’s an easy way to get started. You can get templates for $5, $10 for games and other simple apps.

2. Buy courses that include templates

There are app courses that will include the templates with the courses.

At Bluecloud, you can buy courses that include templates. But there are also other programs. There’s game building software like Buildbox.

This is a terrific way to start because it gives you proven templates, and also an education that goes along with the template. And you know that the templates are always going to be updated by the developer teams.

3. Ask people for a copy of their app

This is the one that people do the least often but is the most effective way.

Back in May 2011 when I first started, I emailed app developers in the App Store. These were cold emails: “Hey, I noticed your app (or your game). I think it’s really cool. Would you be interested in selling me a license of this template, of this source code of the game you built for $500 (or $100 or whatever).”

You go through the app store, go into any category and just email any of these developers. Then you negotiate and tell them you’re not going to compete with them. You’re going to create something new and you’ve got a whole new system.

This way, the developers get to keep their app and their game stays in the store. But now I get the rights to create my own version. I get to redesign it, I get to make a new version. But at least I don’t start from scratch.

You’d be surprised that on average, about 10% of the people you email are very interested. And about half of them will say, “Yes, I want to do a deal.” Because many developers out there are programmers. They don’t know how to get downloads. They’re not making any money. So you come to them and offer them a little bit of money.

This third one is one of the best ways to break through the system because realistically, nobody else is going to do this.

See ya!

Carter

 

Before he sat down for his first class in college, Dan Novaes had already built a $2M business online.

By the time he was 25, he was making millions more in the app business.

His latest project deployed  a marketing strategy that was so effective the company needed to separate the app in order to calculate all the revenue correctly.

At 28 years old, Dan in well on his way to impact one billion people and change the world as only he can.

It's rare to find entrepreneur like Dan in today's world.

Typically, we only find the people figuring out the latest crazy hacks if we're deep inside private forums.

Conversely, we only see the million dollar success stories on the cover of Entrepreneur.com.

To find someone who has achieved both…and is willing to share his story is a true gift.

In this podcast you will hear some of the most aggressive and successful marketing strategies that have ever been used on the internet.

Dan and I do plenty of swearing and plenty of real talk – the kind of raw conversations you'd expect to sit in on when two OG marketers get together.

You'll also get a taste of the kind of energy that's synonymous with big success – charisma, focus and purpose.

Here's what you can expect to learn:

* How Dan went from minimum wage to $30,000 in 5 months as a 15 year old (while working a few hours a week): 3:50

* How he scaled arbitrage to larger markets: 9:15

* The different types of entrepreneurs: 14:40

* The crucial conversation Dan had with himself about his legacy: 18:10

* How his app business got start (crazy story): 18:55

* His first huge app success: 23:45

* Why people do blackhat marketing: 31:20

* The birth of influencer marketing: 34:20

* How Dan saw a huge app opportunity, raised money and capitalized: 42:16

* How he built a content marketing site to aggregate 120,000,000 page views a month that translated to content: 47:00

* How to hack the influencer marketing world: 50:25

* Building something great vs chasing opportunities: 56:45

* Impacting 1 billion people: 59:20

Resources Mentioned:

* Pairade.com

* Current App

* Influencer and Celebrity app portfolio

* Email Dan [email protected]

Download this podcast episode on iTunes

Dan will be speaking at our Bluecloud Hawaii Event and sharing more insider information about his businesses, answering questions and providing guidance to all attendees.

Share this interview with someone who loves to hustle!

Rock and roll,

Carter

One of the questions that I often get asked is this: Do I need an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) for my new app?

Some people who have an app idea or have built something, don’t want to share this information and want to protect themselves. So that when they talk to or hire developers, they are legally bound to keep the information private.

Short answer: You only need an NDA if you can enforce it.

There are two things you need to think about:

1. How are you going to enforce your NDA?

Lots of times you go to freelancer sites like Upwork, Fiverr, or 99designs to hire people, and often they’re not in your country. So, what do you do if the person you hired, who did sign the NDA, ends up breaking the NDA? Are you going to fly to Southeast Asia or South America to enforce it? Your NDA is only as good as you can enforce it.

Now if you’re hiring someone from the US or from your native country where you can enforce the law, then maybe you can think about getting an NDA.

2. Building a good relationship with your developers is more important

What’s more important is for you to build a good relationship with your developers from the start. That way, they’re not incentivized to steal anything, especially when it comes to intellectual property.

Developers are not normally in the business of finding people who have good ideas, and using those ideas to build their own app business. Most of the time they’re not interested in your ideas. They’re more interested in the budget and getting the project done.

If you do have ideas that you want to protect, and you plan to hire someone locally or in your native country, there are NDAs that you can get. We have a simple template on Bluecloud Solutions that you can download.

Look for it here:

https://www.bluecloudsolutions.com/how-to-make-an-app-guide/

Know that most developers have heard most ideas before. There are very few ideas that are truly revolutionary. Often, going through the NDA process will just end up costing you more money. And the real money in any business is in the execution, in building the actual product itself.

You can definitely get an NDA. Just make sure you have a plan when you want to use it.

See ya!

Carter

As you start any new project, you subconsciously ask yourself one of two questions

1. What should I do next?

OR

2. Is what I'm doing the right thing to do?

These may seem the same but they are actually very different.

In this video, I explain why:

Here's what you need to know:

* We all approach new projects with mindset on how it's going to work out. Most of the time we're worried it's not going to work, less often we start working and figure it out later.

* When you're at a “low” point, you start looking for the permission slips. What's the latest hack? What's the trick? What's the exact, step by step path I need to take to get winning results? This is what the mind does when it's on defense because the idea of trying + failing is too painful for the brain to handle.

* When you're at a “high” point, you start looking for results. What can I try next? How fast can I get this done? Who can I talk to in the next 12 hours that I could collaborate with? This is the mind free of pain, constantly pushing forward to create something new + great.

* The sooner you move away from seeking out the “right” information to make your decisions for you, the sooner you will find the progress (and results) you're looking for.

In the app business, there will always be new tricks and new tactics. We share a lot of them in the Bluecloud Select facebook group.

But tricks breed a defensive mentality. Why would you ever try the “hard” fundamentals when you can wait for the “easy” trick?

It's a tough cycle to break, but you must fight it.

Every day, ask yourself one question:

“Am I seeking decisions or am I seeking course correction?”

If you seek out decisions (the world deciding your fate), you'll always be plagued by the ups and downs. You're ASKING first and DOING second.

If you seek out course correction (you deciding your fate), you'll create a winning path that compounds each day…because you are DOING first and ASKING second.

Work will work when nothing else will work.

CT