Having only sold 60 copies of GoodDay you probably should seek advice outside of this post, but these are the things I learned in my app store process.
1. Research your name, keywords, and categories by searching and browsing both the store and google. These are things you can’t change after your app is approved. You’ll also see how bad the app store search is. Unlike Internet searches there doesn’t appear to be any word stemming. So “goal track”, “goal tracking” and “goal tracker” (for example) all seem to return different apps. 🙁
2. It took 8 days for v1 to be approved. Which meant I had time to build the web site after I built the app. 🙂
3. Sales data only updates once a day. It took me a while to learn to stop hitting refresh.
4. You can update your description any time… But that doesn’t seem to impact search results.
5. If anyone knows a way to see all your reviews let me know. For now it seems that you have to pick each country and look for reviews. I don’t see a way to see all.
6. Build in your own feedback/news channel into the app that links to your site. I didn’t do this and now I have no way of knowing what people think or really connecting with users. I would also consider an easy way for people to share it. But thats just a guess for me at the moment.
7 You won’t find out how many people get to your app in the store and don’t purchase. It just seems like that sort of information would be useful. That’s why I’ve used bit.ly to track the success of different links… At least i can see how many people are clicking through my sources.
8. If someone lands on the app page they are way more likely to buy than I imagined… Based on my numbers it seems that about 5% of people that land on an app that costs a dollar seem to purchase. ( this, of course, could be way off. )
9. Direct links to the app store entry seem to do better than linking to your own landing page. This seems like common sense since you are bringing people closer to the point of purchase.
10. Go global. I think it was the default, but I don’t see any reason not to sell an app to all the different country stores. I feel like GoodDay is the David Hasselhof of apps with all the copies I’ve sold in Germany. Next up… Localization.
Thats all for now. It’s at least a good list of things I’d like to do better next time around. Do you have any tips to share?