This second part concludes this detailed guide – and you should relax as we teach you the fundamentals of making money with smartphone apps.

Develop pre-launch and post-launch marketing strategies

It’s always helpful to know how your app will perform after launch – and a sure way to know this is through pre-launch and post-launch marketing strategies. These activities are to put the word out about your product so that customers wait with money in hand for its release. Some of the ways you can do this are by creating a landing page for your app product, building a pre-launch email list, doing a press release for the media, engaging in paid marketing, and asking customers to promote the product.

Build your app using these techniques

Building your app brings life to it and makes it functional for public use. You can build your app by coding it yourself if you are skilled at programming, and you can hire a freelancer from Upwork or Freelancer among other platforms. You can also hire a dedicated app development firm or partner with a specialist programmer to build the app for you. You can use an app builder for this purpose and you can equally purchase an app template and customize it to meet your needs.

Submit your finished app to Play Store and App Store

Since you have completed your new mobile app, the next stage is to submit it to Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store so that millions of people can download it for personal use. Before uploading your app to the store, ensure you adhere to the store’s guidelines so that it won’t be rejected by the review team.

If you have followed all the store’s guidelines and regulations, you should optimize it by filling in all the metadata – title, description, keywords, screenshots – before submitting it. After the submission, the team may approve your app or even reject it – if it is rejected, just fix the issues they pointed out and resubmit.

Market your app for maximum exposure

You must do anything within your power to expose your newly hosted app to the world. Your target is to have millions of people download your app. If you can manage it, your app must get featured in the store. You can do free downloads while telling your audience the app will soon become a paid one. You must continue optimizing the app by tweaking its metadata on the app to give it more visibility. And you might want to pay a social media influencer to mention your brand on their program.

Optimize feedback on your app

The more people download your app, the more feedback you’re likely to get. Some of the feedback will be positive and some negative. Use the feedback to constantly update your app after fixing bugs and adding new features.

If you are able to execute these fundamentals of building and marketing a smartphone app in 2022, you are certain to hit gold. Persistence and collaboration might be required, but you are sure of success – and even hired to build mobile apps for rich clients with big budgets.

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Generate an app idea

If you have an existing business that is flourishing, you might want to build an app for it straight away. But if you just came upon the idea of making money from apps, then you would need a good idea for the app you want to build. There are three ways to generate an app idea:

Look at what is lacking in an existing app or apps and then build your new app based on that gap. Build your app to improve the functionalities of an existing app in a way that makes it uniquely yours. Turn a problem you are currently facing in your life or environment into a profitable app; if you have this problem, chances are that other people have this problem as well and need solutions to it.

Research competition for your proposed app

You must carry out online investigations to determine how popular your proposed app is going to be and whether competitors are already making a kill at it. You mustn’t be discouraged if you see several apps on App Store or Play Store solving the same problems you are targeting, this means your idea is viable and there is healthy competition for it. It is even possible the authors of those apps have stopped updating them, and that they do not really meet the needs of their target audience. So you have justifications to proceed with your app despite the competition.

Outline the features for your app

Outlining the features that will go into your app will guide you to create a superb product that anyone would be proud of. It will also save you tons of trouble during the development stage since you have an outline to work with. The best way to go about this however is creating a minimum viable product (MVP) that can generate feedback for subsequent improvements.

MVP requires that you build a simple app with basic core features and then release it into the Play Store. When users post feedback, then you update the app with the feedback and then release it again for more feedback and subsequent updates. You keep on doing this until you have the best app that people want and are willing to pay for.

Create design mockups

A design mockup will make it easier for you to create a functional and intuitive app when it finally launches. This design mockup should cover the overall design of the app, its respective sections, pages, or screens, and navigation. The layout should make navigation easy to improve user experience and usability. You can design your app mockup using pen and paper, and you can use digital tools such as Sketch, Figma, InVision Studio, and Frame X among others.

Proceed with the graphic design

This step requires designing how the final app product will look like. You can do this yourself if you are experienced in app graphic design or simply hire a freelance graphic designer to help. The design they create must represent what the final product will look and function like; it must be useable for presentations to potential investors, and it must useable by developers for asset integrations. The stage should take care of product performance as well as user interface and experience.

This is not the end of this guide to building and marketing a mobile app in 2022. This is only Part 1. Let’s go to Part 2 to examine the marketing plan, developer options, submission to Google Play, marketing, and monetization among others.

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