Giving away free stuff is an age old marketing strategy. It has been used since the earliest times of sales and it continues to be an effective sales and marketing tool in this age of online commerce and mobile lifestyles. Thus, it is no surprise that you can indeed make money by giving away free iPhone applications.
Read on and find out how you can join in the bandwagon and start making money for yourself with free iPhone applications.
Advertising
This is the most basic way to earn money from your endeavors both online and off. How do you think giant free websites such as Yahoo, Google, MSN, and yes, Facebook, earn their millions -even billions – of dollars? That’s right, by selling advertising to the hundreds of thousands of sellers who are looking for ways to get their own products in front of their target customers.
By giving away free applications, you get to have a lot of users that are possible customers for many other sellers out there. This is your target: to get a lot of users to download your free iPhone app and use it for a considerable amount of time. The more users download your app, the more sellers would want to advertise in it. And the more sellers you attract to advertise in your app, the higher you can charge for the advertising space and the higher your earnings will be.
Let’s use Facebook to illustrate this point. Facebook boasts of millions of users based all over the planet. It actually claims to have the biggest membership among all social networking sites (which, really, is not hard to believe at all). With this large number of users, Facebook could easily attract different companies from all over the world to buy advertising space from them. Furthermore, since Facebook holds a big advantage over its competitors, it can easily charge top dollar for its advertising real estate. Add to that the additional information in can provide advertisers based on the information that its users voluntarily input into the system and its got a slam dunk marketing strategy that has made it one of the most profitable – if not the most profitable – internet based companies in the whole world.
Do you see it now?
The key to making money from your free iPhone apps is to get as many users as you can. You can do this by developing apps that will cater to a wide range of users. If you can’t come up with a single application that can cater to a variety of users, you can also opt to produce different apps that can cater to specific user types. For example, you can develop a free app that will cater to women and another app that will cater to men. Another app will cater to students while a different one will cater to working professionals and adults. This way, you will be able to sell advertising space to business owners who are looking for specific customers to sell to.
You can sell advertising space on your free women’s apps to businesses who sell women’s clothes, accessories, bags and shoes. On the other hand, you can sell advertising space on the apps targeted for men to businesses that sell sporting equipment and apparel, men’s boutiques, hardware and electrical supply stores, and car detailing and sales shops. The main catch here is that in order to make money from free iPhone apps, you do not just need to be able to create, develop, and produce free apps that users will like, you also have to be able to properly present the opportunity that you have to potential advertisers and you have to be able to sell advertising space. Just like any endeavor, competition will always be present so you should continue to improve on your apps and continue to sell your advertising space.
Sell items on your free iPhone app
Some apps, especially games, require users to improve their game characters by either increasing their level or finding different items within the game. This fact has been put to good use by enterprising developers by allowing users who can afford to actually buy these items with real world money and is either too lazy or too busy to spend too much time on the app to simply buy the items they need from the developer. This may seem unbelievable at first, after all, who would want to pay real money for some virtual stuff, right? You will be surprised at how many people would actually do it. After all, buying virtual stuff for your virtual self is just the same as buying a doll house for your Barbie or a new set of games for your PSP.
So try to develop free iPhone apps and games that will motivate users to take care of their characters and make them want to improve them continuously. Make it engaging and they will surely make it worth your while when they begin to purchase add-ons for their virtual selves. This also works for apps that help users to socialize or to compete. Social apps motivate users to improve their characters because their friends get to see them. Competitive apps motivate users to improve their characters because their enemies might see them.
Use free apps to encourage users to buy the paid versions
Many users are actually willing to shell out the cash for iPhone applications that are actually worth the price. But with the thousands of applications available, users are sometimes weary of the fact that they might be paying for an inferior product. You can convince these users to pay for your application by first providing them a free version which will prove to them that your app is of superior quality and is definitely worth the price that you are asking for. Of course, the key here is for you to be able to provide just enough functionality on the free app to provide the proof for what the customer is looking for while still leaving enough in reserve to motivate him to pay for the rest of it.
There you have it, three of the best ways that you can make money with free iPhone applications.
If you would like to know more about earning money online, just leave a post on the comments below.
About Aurora Freegard
