Step by Step Resources for Marketing your iPhone Apps at ~$0

Updated: Dec 2022. There's a lot of resources out there for how to market your apps that I have been discovering while trying to market my app "BeAware, the d/Deaf assistant". I would love it if you all could also share what has worked with you, agnostic of the focus of your app. This is the order that I recommend: 1. Depending on your app, you would want to create a website so your app appears on Google when people are looking for a solution that your app is trying to solve. Choose the domain based on what your target customer would likely search for on google ( www.deafassistant.com for us since people might search "Deaf Assistant"). You can search themeforest for an amazing affordable HTML5 template and use shared web hosting. 2. When you are sharing the app through TestFlight to Early and Late Beta testers, it's better to get people's email addresses (using a Google Form) instead of sharing the new "Download TestFlight URL", because otherwise Apple doesn't share the email addresses with you & you aren't able to communicate with them when the app goes live (make sure you get consent to do this) or when you need their support (for eg: ProductHunt). 3. You can apply for the app to be ``showcased in the App Store (Eg: App of the Day), but for first release, they require the publishing date to be "6-8 weeks" in the future. We delayed our launch date to be eligible but they didn't let us know that our app wasn't going to be showcased. If you've had success though, please do share! 4. Engage with front-page posts on reddit where people might be able to use your app, DM-ing people that respond to your comments helps a lot to find "early adopters". Also, engage with users in the sub-reddit that fits your app ( r/deaf for us) and similar popular forums like Facebook groups. 5. Try to provide an incentive for people to sign up to Beta test, like a free month of premium subscription. You can make it pseudo-viral by giving them an extra month if they refer someone else, and that person enters them in as a referrer 6. Create a Twitter account and find relevant hashtags, people will find you and follow you once you post a few pictures/videos. 7. Launch the app on ProductHunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/beaware) and try to become the Product Hunt of the day. It will get you a lot of organic international coverage, blog posts and YouTube referrals. But finding a free hunter is HARD, and it might cause you to stall, but you can always hunt at a later date too and doesn't have to be done on the date you launch your app. 8. Ycombinator's HackerNews is also a great way get support for apps. From our "Show HN" post, we are getting >2500% traffic to the BeAware website today since the post went live, and it was my first time doing it. (Give it an upvote while you're at it) 9. Work on the SEO of the website following search engine design requirements for your HTML. Definitely recommend setting up your "Google Search Console" profile to know what Google searches people use to find you. Look at what forums, blogs and conferences are similar apps shared using the free "Ahrefs backlink checker". Improve your website's backlinks 10. There's a book by Ryan Holiday called Growth Hacker Marketing that can help you with this mindset. It will get you thinking about implementing viral strategies in your app, that apps like Wordle used. The audio book is available on the Hoopla app for free through most local libraries! 11. Paid Ads: As much as I hate Facebook, it's the only place in the world you can publish a targeted ad for $1/day! We got to try and fix different "creative" ads and the text, and eventually we were able to get 3 downloads per dollar spent. (We targeted an age range in a small radius around a university for the Deaf). For world wide marketing, you can get downloads at <$0.20 /download through Apple Ads and <$0.1 per ad click through Google Ads 12. Press Releases: You can create one and get one fixed for $60 from Fiverr and it will publish a sponsored news article across 50+ news outlets across the world, but it might make 0 difference to your traffic & downloads. This is a traditional means of marketing, but it will help with getting backlinks to your website 13. ASO: App Store Optimization is great, but it takes time to perfect. There are effective ASO experts on Fiverr (<$20) but they only help with English markets. Keep track of your apps using the free subscription of https://data.ai. We had a huge bump in downloads, and we only realized it was because our app got featured thanks to this website. We were able to use that to further boost our marketing reach. 14. Link to the app: You can create your own link on your website with a redirect so that you can track stats on the people coming from that link. I added a folder "app" and placed an index.html file with redirection code like this https://github.com/saamerm/BeAware-LandingPage/blob/main/app.html