I said it before—as an iPhone developer you have to make a definite choice: stick to the traditional marketing route, take the hit-driven route, or compromise and probably fail.

I have decided to take the hit-driven route for my first app, Grades. Thus, I plan to research the various techniques to successfully produce a hit iPhone app.

The first technique I want to explore is holding contests.

I will definitely develop this line as I start to implement it myself but the basic idea is that people subconsciously attribute authority to products they see a lot of people talking about.

So how do you get people to talk about your product? Well, first its got to be a delightful product. Assuming it is, a great way to build buzz is to hold a contest that involves people tweeting, messaging, or blogging about your product for the chance to win something.

There are several ways to go about this. Below are some precedents.

Examples

Win a huge prize to kick off app launch

The Convert launch Tweetblast is the only iPhone app contest I know of that involved a huge prize ($5,999!) but the buzz definitely paid off ($150,000 in its first month).

Send promo codes to bloggers to hold their own contests
The results below indicate that if you’re going to take this path, do your best to get TUAW to run a contest; it’ll get you the most buzz.

Triazzle: got over 116 comments on TUAW

Convert (by Polar Bear Farm) got 613 comments on TUAW

SimplyTweet got 25 comments and 16 retweets on marcforrest.com

Tweetpush got 18 comments on iPhone Alley

File Magic got 10 comments on Just Another iPhone Blog

Getting Creative

I definitely think there are more creative ways to generate buzz through contests using Social Media. My ideas are half-baked so I’ll save ‘em for later but I received a lot of inspiration from the following links:

How I got 294 Comments With One Blog Post

VIDEO: Creating fans out of thin air

Update: Creativity in action! Just yesterday SmartBrief, a company that summarizes information for business leaders, just asked the world to name their upcoming iPhone app. The prize? The fuzzy feeling that your name was picked, plus publicity on the SmartBrief blog, Twitter, and the SmartBrief newsletter. They’ve had 121 comments so far and lots more hype for their app!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 3:17 pm and is filed under iPhone App Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.