How to Make Money Creating Apps (6 Important Tips)

This is a guest post by Deepranjan Ghosh, Founder of Geekybucks, where he talks about 6 important tips on how to make money by creating mobile apps.

Smartphones are now an indispensable part of everyday life. You check your e-mail, read the news and view all your social networks via your phone. In fact, there is a good chance that you are reading this article on your phone right now. It will therefore probably not surprise you that the market for apps is very large at the moment.

Every day, more apps are being added to the Play Store and App Store than you could ever try. If you have a good idea for an innovative app, you could use it to make good money. I’ll tell you how to do that in this article!

Nowadays almost everyone can build an app. But how do you ensure that your app is successful? And how can you use this to make a profit? Follow the steps in this article and you might soon be the king of the App Store! I will cover the following tips in this article:

Tip 1: Find the help you need

We often hear stories about people who build an app or website on their own and eventually become rich. Those kinds of stories are of course very inspiring, but unfortunately not very realistic for most. Chances are you are not a tech genius. So you will need a little help building an app.

It is therefore not bad at all to seek the help you need. You may have a good idea, but you can’t do anything with it if you don’t have someone who can program mobile apps well. You can try to teach yourself that via the internet, but it will take you a lot of time and effort. So it is easier to find a partner.

If you can’t find someone like that, there are a lot of resources you can use as well. For example, if you want to make a mobile game, then there are so-called engines that you can buy. Most of the programming has already been done in those.

For example, Unity is a program that provides basic programming for a game. Additionally, you can buy ready-to-use packages for this program.

Whatever the case, just don’t get into anything that you don’t really know how to do. After all, an app that does not work properly or does not look good will never be very successful.

Tip 2: Make sure there is a market for your idea

If you want to make money from an app, you have to get an audience. It is therefore important to know what kind of app there is a need for in the market. You can have a great idea for an app and execute it very well. However, if only ten people are interested, then you won’t be able to make a penny from it.

Obviously you won’t know on your own if there is a market for your idea, so you’ll have to do a little research. Ask people around what they think of your idea and whether they would ever want to use such an app. If you get a lot of positive responses that is an indication that people may be waiting for your idea.

If people in your own social network do not like it, then you better leave it immediately.

If they think it’s a good idea, your research isn’t finished here. Chances are people in your immediate environment do not want to hurt you, and therefore respond positively to your ideas. Moreover, chances are that your friends and family have more of the same preferences as you compared to other people.

It is therefore a good idea to search the internet to see if there is support for your app. For example, you want to start a new chat service that solves certain WhatsApp problems. In that case, you can see if there are many people online complaining about the problems you would like to solve.

I do recommend that you only trust close friends and family with information about the app that you want to build. If you just tell everyone about it, chances are someone might steal your idea. So think carefully before you entrust someone with all your ideas.

Tip 3: Earn money with ads in your app

Now that you have your app up and running, you have yet to find a way to monetize your app. You can do this in several different ways. One of the most common ways you will encounter is the use of advertisements. By showing all your users an advertisement every now and then, you can easily earn a good amount of income.

There are a lot of services on the internet that specifically offer to handle the ads in your app. I’m not going to be promoting all kinds of different services here, but one of the biggest and easiest to use is Google AdSense. These are often very easy to integrate into apps, and compared to other services you keep a relatively good amount of profit to yourself.

You will probably have to experiment a bit before you find the right number of ads for your app. If you show too few ads, you will hardly make any money.

If you show too man, you will irritate your users, causing them to stop using your app. In that case you will obviously not earn anything from them.

There’s no golden rule on this, you’ll just have to see what works well for your app.

A disadvantage of mobile ads is that you earn relatively little. You don’t have to put in a lot of effort to be able to earn money this way, but there are also lower returns.

An easy way to generate a little bit of extra income, but you can’t expect to make really large amounts. If that’s what you’re looking for, then you better try one of the other ways to make money that I’ll be discussing in the rest of this article.

Tip 4: Market a paid app

I just explained to you that many apps make money from advertising. These are often apps that can be downloaded for free themselves, and therefore have to look for monetizing in different ways. However, you can also earn money in a much more direct way by building apps. That is by selling your app, or to promote a paid app.

In the App Store or the Play Store, you can simply ask for a fee to download your app. If people really want your app, they will be willing to pay this price. This is better for you, because it is a safer income. When someone has downloaded your app, you can be sure that you will receive your money from that person.

A disadvantage of this is that you will probably attract fewer users. People are no longer used to having to pay for their apps because you can simply download most apps for free. Of course, this does not mean that it is impossible to sell a paid app, but it is just a lot more difficult.

Do you want to convince people to pay money for your app? Then you can use a sales pitch that you have no ads in your app. After all, you don’t need that if people just pay for the app. The one aspect of free apps that people often find annoying is the fact that they see a lot of ads.

Tip 5: Make use of in-app purchases

An increasingly emerging revenue model is the use of so–called in-app purchases. In such a case, people can download your app for free, and they usually don’t see any ads. You earn money when users make purchases within your app. Now you may think that I am talking about a webshop or something similar, but you’d be wrong.

You get to see this revenue model most often in mobile games. People download a free game on their phone and enjoy it for some time. However, after a while, they run out of lives or don’t have enough coins to do anything in the game. In most games, you can supplement this by waiting a long time, and then you can continue playing later.

However, you can also make people pay to continue playing without restrictions.

They then have the choice to either wait for a long time or continue playing immediately for a fee. A bit like how arcade machines used to work; if you died, you had to throw in another quarter. Many people seem to want to pay this once they start playing.

It is pretty much the same idea as with gambling in a casino, only to a lesser extent. You have already invested time and money in the game, so you want to keep playing to get as far as possible. However, you are a lot more honest than a casino. People know what they get when they pay, and you don’t sell a fantasy to anyone.

Tip 6: Ask people for good reviews

If you want to be seen in the App Store or Play Store, make sure the algorithms recommend you to users. This will happen faster if your app has good reviews. That is why it can be a good start for you if your friends and family leave a good review for your app. This increases the chance that you will be able to attract many users later.

Conclusion

I hope that this article gives you some good insight into how you can make money by creating mobile apps. If done right, it can make you a lot of money in passive income.

Have you had any experience developing apps? Or are there any other tips that I might have missed? Or if you have any questions, let me know in the comments below, I’d love to hear from you!