This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Happy Independence Day to you wherever you are in the world. This episode is going out on the 4th of July in the United States. Well, it's going out 4th of July everywhere, but obviously in the United States, we have this holiday known as Independence Day. I like to wish you a happy Independence Day wherever you are because independence is something worth working towards. I want you to have more independence to do more of what's important to you.
That's why we make the podcast every day. And today we've got a question about promoting an app. Today's caller is wondering where to go to promote a wellness app she's made. And so how is promoting an app different from anything else? Or is it in fact different?
What are some ideas for her? I'll do my best to give a couple of helpful tips, get her on her way to having her app being more widely known, downloaded, signed up for, et cetera. And hopefully this can help with somebody else out there as well. You could always use more eyes on your project, right? Your side hustle, whatever it might be.
Detailed question from Gigi and my answer coming right up. [Music]
Hi Chris, this is Gigi from Orange County, California. I've been listening to your show and your books on Audible for a couple of years now. They've been absolutely inspiring. And because of your books and podcasts, I finally started my own side hustle, which is a meal planning app for people who love to eat mainly paleo or whole and natural foods.
I combined my passion for software development, photography and cooking in this app. And I've really enjoyed working on it more than anything. I finally had the courage to submit the app to the app store. It was approved early this week. My big question is where and how do I promote my app so that people find it among the millions of apps in the app store?
I have some ideas, but not sure which would be the best use of my time or money. Should I use social media? Should I use ads, YouTube or the mouth, T-shirts? The app has short instructional videos for the recipes. So I thought about creating a YouTube channel and posting those and promote through YouTube.
I also have Instagram account, but I probably am not using that correctly yet. I can't wait to hear back from you. Thank you for all the inspiration. [Music]
Gigi, thank you for the call. Listeners, check out mainly paleo in the app store.
That is Gigi's app. And so for the question, in a lot of ways app promotion is not that different from promoting any other digital product. So we'll focus more specifically on the app store here. What is important? Well, SEO is important.
Search engine optimization, getting the right keywords because in the app store, just like when people search on Google, when they search in Amazon, when they type in queries on chat GPT or other language models, you want your resource to be the ones that come up. So mainly paleo. I imagine paleo, diet, fitness, wellness, health, those are keywords that you really want to target. You probably want to pick one or two. I would imagine that paleo is one of them here.
You want to get some initial reviews ASAP, just like books or restaurants on Google maps or Yelp. You want to get some initial reviews up as soon as possible, even if it's just five or so, you want to get some good reviews. You want to respond to all reviews. Developers are now able to respond to app store reviews, which they complained about for a long time, not being able to do, so that is important. You want to submit to directories.
I don't know if that matters as much anymore. It used to be a big thing, but might as well. So if you go out and look for app directories, there's probably some places where you can submit. If it is for sale, if you have a subscription service, if you're otherwise monetizing, make it free or very cheap in the beginning. You definitely want to establish a user base and maybe even grandfather the price in for those initial users to reward them and then hopefully go bigger.
And then lastly, I would recommend you check out a Reddit subreddit. There is a Reddit subreddit specifically about app promotion. Just go and search for it on Reddit and you're going to find current information, lots of people posting their stories, examples, what to do, what not to do. That will take you even further down the road, but hopefully these tips also get you off to a good start. Let us know what develops.
Thanks again, Gigi. Listeners, thank you for being out there. So excited to make the show for you every day. Happy Independence Day and more. Much more is coming up.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. You are listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]
