You have built a great App. What next? How do you get noticed?

Its no secret that the App market place is cluttered. There are over 3.1 million Apps in the App stores and over 60,000 Apps are being published every month. The market is cluttered and getting noticed is the biggest challenge an App Marketer will ever face.

One of the most rewarding, yet challenging way to get App Downloads is to get your App reviewed by Influencers and Top App Reviewers in your industry. People who have done it know that its easier said than done.

Your First Experience with getting your App Reviewed would go something like this –

• How many App Reviewers you would contact? PLENTY! Probably hundreds of them..

• How many will responses to your email? ZERO!

• How many reviews you will get? ZERO!

• How many auto-responses you will get asking you to pay for a review? PLENTY again

Problem is it is really hard to market well. I hope to address below questions that I believe every App Marketer has –

• Is there a way to get noticed and get your App reviewed without being a Supercell, Rovio, Gameloft or Chillingo?

• Do the review sites even consider a small developer/publisher?

If you are a BIG App developer, your app will be reviewed any ways, the problem is for small developers. You need to go to reviewers and websites to pitch your app. A Top App Reviewer gets over 1000+ emails every day with a subject line “please review my app”, what do you think they would do? I am sure you know the answer and that is why you got – ZERO responses and ZERO reviews.

In my opinion, “Getting Reviewed” depends on 2 things –

• Quality of your App:

App reviewers are looking for something newer and better, they are looking for apps they themselves would love to use and hence recommend.

• Your Pitch for Review

As I said, I am assuming your app is great, so I would focus on the second part which is “Pitching your App”. Points mentioned below are taken from an insightful interview with Erica Sadun from TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog)

It starts with the subject line. Subject line is the elevator pitch in the blogging world. Mention the name of your app in the subject line and tell what it does and how it is different. Limit to 80 characters. Avoid writing meaningless subject lines like “please review my app”

Your pitch email text should include the following –

• App Full Name with proper spelling and capitalization as it appears in the App store

• Link to your product page i.e Website

• Link to the app store (Android, iOS, Amazon…)

• App Price

• Screen shots – Provide 1 or 2 very good screenshots. Don’t send 20 screenshots. Understand the human limitation.

• Always include a video (Max 30 sec to 1 min long). Need not be a public video. Just send a private link to your youtube video. This video should showcase your app. If you have a game, show your game play. This is used to decide whether your App is worth exploring further?

• Concise 1 paragraph description for the app – Who the app is for? How your App sets itself apart? What does it offer

• Contact Information – Add your email address (not a link to a form), add skype and twitter details

It would be great if you can supplement this email with a press kit ( Be more proactive, don’t make them look for information – they wont!). Your press kit should have your App Icon, Screenshots, Press Releases (so that they know the history of your app), Videos, Corporate Profile etc preferably arranged in separate folders.

Be novel, better, exciting and worthwhile to get their attention. All this starts from the pre-conceptualization phase. Why build something which is out there already?

Good luck with marketing your App and “Getting it Reviewed” 🙂