At that time, apps were introduced as key to this revolution. And now, ten years and billions upon billions of downloads later, that couldn’t be more true.

The impact of apps is plainly obvious: brands and businesses use apps to reach and interact with users like never before. This results in opportunities that have the potential to scale massively on a global scale — no matter if you’re Coca-Cola or a two-person team working out of a garage.

This is why translating your app is absolutely essential. With a paltry 6-7% of the global population categorized as native English speakers, there are massive swaths of people who never interact with English apps. Keeping yours as one of these apps is an opportunity your business can’t afford to miss.

There are a wide array of game-changing benefits for businesses that translate their apps. However, here are five of the most completing reasons on why you need to make translating your app a top priority:

1. Take Advantage of Economic Growth

Think about it: the most significant economic growth and increases in purchasing power are happening in parts of the world where English is either not spoken, or isn’t the preferred language.

Ensuring your app is fluent in languages like Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish opens the door to massive portions of the global population. With China and India currently experiencing booms in their economy with the help of their smartphone-wielding citizens, and the Spanish languages connected to swaths of smartphone users in Latin America, your app will no doubt experience accelerated sales.

2. More Effective Marketing

While simply translating your app instantly allows your business to penetrate a brand new market, it doesn’t automatically mean it will perform well. Marketing must also play a role in your app’s rollout to different countries too!

For instance, the translation of your app should go hand-in-hand with a translated home website as well. This will result in a more cohesive business offering that makes a far better impression to potential users, which ultimately means a more loyal userbase who understands their importance.

3. Better App Store Optimization (ASO)

There’s no better, nor more cost-effective, app store marketing technique than simply translating your app and localizing keywords and metadata.

Why?

This allows your business to enhance the visibility of your app and brand based on specific keyword phrase searches in app stores.

In other words, more downloads overall — never a bad thing!

4. Get Increased Engagement

Angling for the best methods to increase downloads of your app is just the first step. There also has to be the longer-term goal of enticing users to keep using the app itself!

Here, engagement is the name of the game: the ultimate standard of whether or not an app is successful. And translating an app is a great step to help in this regard. Not only does a translated app instantly improve its usability, it more crucially increases the comfort level of someone using it.

Both of these traits have a drastic impact on whether or not a user comes back to it — or deletes it within five minutes!

5. Getting the Maximum Value from Localization

Translating your app instantly opens the door to entire populations of people you didn’t have access to before.

That’s just step one, though.

While all these people may now be able to read, understand, and enjoy your app, localization — or tailoring every aspect of business offering to a certain people or culture — should be your end goal. It involves assessing every single aspect of your business, from what types of phrases the app uses, to the colors it displays, to even what icons it uses for navigation.

The danger here? Low-quality translation providers. They’re a huge risk for your business and can result in huge marketing fails, which can end up hurting your business big time.

Because of this, translation and localization should be considered investments of the highest importance. Using services like Worders guarantees experts familiar with both the topic of your app and the market for the very best results every time!

With benefits like gaining access to rapidly growing markets, more cost-effective marketing, better app store optimization, and more sustained engagement, translating your app with a service like Worders should be a top priority for your business.

The post The Top 5 Reasons to Translate Your App ASAP appeared first on Adscend Media Blog | Unlocking Insights: Offerwalls and Rewarded Ads.

The Struggle is Real…

You’ve just launched your app. However, besides your friends, family, and that random LinkedIn Android Studio group, your app isn’t exactly a household name. To make matters worse, if your app is like most, you’ve probably already lost almost 80% of your users. Sure, there are quick fixes like large user acquisition buys or paying thousands for trade show booth space, but these methods can be costly. Without “breaking the bank,” you’re basically stuck waiting around for new users to hear about your app. Will they show up? Let’s hope so.

If the above scenario seems familiar, fear not. Adscend has your back.

We’ve spent years researching user behavior in order to help developers from around the globe maximize revenue from their mobile games and apps. We found that it doesn’t take a ton of cash to get people to take note of your app or game, it only takes the little bit of digital “elbow grease” that is listed in the ten strategies below.

10 Free Ways to Promote Your App

Take Your Business Elsewhere: There are more places to promote your app than just the Google Play store or the App Store. Listing your app on alternative app stores (most of them are free!) allows you to reach new audiences in app stores that generally feature less competition. Business of Apps has a great list of alternative app stores to help you get started.

Network with Your Mom/Boss/Friend’s Cat: Whether you prefer Twitter, Facebook, Ravelry (we love crocheting!), or another social site, promoting your app on your fan pages and in relevant groups is the easiest way to spread the word. Check out Tech.co’s article for some ideas.

Speak Up: Whatever your comfort level is, there’s a free event near you that lets you show people why they can’t live without your app. From attending local developer mixers, to grabbing free expo passes at shows like Apps World or AnDevCon, to even creating a small Meetup with fellow developers, the interwebs are full of free places to connect with people about your app.

Get Noticed: App Store Optimization (ASO) is the practice of creating a search-optimized listing for your app to increase the chances of appearing in app store user searches. Essentially, the more often your app is seen in a search, the more downloads you will get. Though each app store has a different algorithm to determine which search results will appear, there are some common free methods that you can use to improve your ASO across most stores. Check out our interview with Todd Dunham from the ASO Project to learn more about these practices.

Ask for an Email: Collecting email addresses (always get permission first) and emailing news/promotions about your app can be easily done in your spare time. In fact, building an email list is actually easier than it sounds with the help of sources like this HubSpot article.

Become BFF’s with Google: Creating a site structure that is built for search engines, link building, and continually adding useful content is a great way to gain more visits to your app store listing or website. The best part? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) only costs you time. Learn the basics with The Beginners Guide to SEO from Moz.

Get Some Press: An excellent way to promote your app when you’ve just launched (or have new features) is to reach out to app review sites and blogs. Often it only takes a small, free gesture like an email to an editor, a social media message, or the promise of a case of Butter Beer to get your app reviewed. Other times it takes a media kit and extensive documentation. Apptamin has a great article about how to pitch to the app press.

Tighten Things Up: Your app’s website needs to have a logical flow in terms of content and links, proper on-page elements (e.g. header tags, active links, robots.txt file) and tons of great content to show up for relevant key terms. Sounds like we’re speaking Ewokese? No worries. An easy-to-follow guide to on-site SEO is included in Onsite SEO Basics for Small and Medium Businesses.

Drop Some Links: Adding a link to your app’s site or app store URL on relevant forums, blogs, and other sites is a simple (and free) way to gain more traffic. You can get the basics of link building with Word Stream’s guide.

Write About Yourself: Consistently adding quality content can help bring in more search engine traffic to your app’s site, as fresh content shows search engines that you care about your niche and are striving to provide value to it. Some ways that you can add more content to your site include adding a blog, news section, or guides.

And here’s one more…

Let Us Help You: Though we’re extremely biased, we recommend Adscend’s user acquisition solutions. With our solutions, you only pay for quality users delivered. Our ad campaigns allow you to grow your user base at a scale that you’re comfortable with (without having to spend too much cash). Whether you need to bring in tens of thousands of new users in a weekend, or are looking for a steady influx of new users, we can easily help you create a campaign to meet your goals.

Did We Miss Any Free App Promotion Methods?
Let us know by leaving a comment below.

The post 10 Free Ways to Promote Your App appeared first on Adscend Media Blog | Unlocking Insights: Offerwalls and Rewarded Ads.

So, how you can improve your rankings in the App Store, Google Play, and other stores? Having a massive marketing budget and a proven track record helps. Unless you’re Rovio though, those circumstances probably don’t apply to you. To gain better visibility in app stores, it’s going to take a little bit of elbow grease and a process known as App Store Optimization (ASO).

We reached out to ASO expert Todd Dunham of The ASO Project in order to get some of the basics of ASO, learn a few app-ranking strategies, and see what tips he has to help apps like yours achieve higher app store rankings.

Here’s what Todd had to say about ASO…

What is ASO?
TD: Simply, it’s SEO for apps! The goal of ASO is to improve an app’s rankings in its respective app store.

Why is ASO so crucial to an app’s success?
TD: It’s beyond important to capitalize on organic users! With the cost of paid acquisition rising, it’s becoming more and more crucial for apps to get creative in their user acquisition methods. Small developers that can’t afford the cost of a paid strategy can gain installs from ASO for free! Even the largest developers should focus on ASO! Running a lot of paid acquisition goes hand-in-hand with ASO. Working on your conversions from an ASO standpoint can help develop stronger ad conversions, and also can help in designing creative elements for ads.

What are some methods to rank higher in app stores?
TD: There’s a few “common” ways to accomplish this. Everyone knows that modifying keywords, title and description will provide search visibility improvements. However, there are a few things that are often overlooked, including conversions, retention and uninstall rate.

When it comes to conversions, it’s crucial to have an attractive icon and screenshots that convert highly. Apps are getting more and more creative on how to make the most out of screenshots, including adding text, superimposing the screen onto a device, etc. Split testing is a great way to collect data about what converts highly. Something important to note, test one thing at a time! Don’t run a split test on your icon and screenshots at the same time.

Retention and uninstalls are interesting concepts when it comes to ASO. With the introduction of App Analytics, it’s obvious that Apple is paying more attention to both of these factors. Google, being as complex as they are, is definitely looking at an app’s user retention and abandon rate. Now, obviously, these things are out of the scope of a typical ASO approach, and have more to do with the quality and build of the app.

Overall, ASO starts with the quality of the app, and extends to the exact keywords you choose to enter into your app’s text-based elements.

Do you have any tips to improve ASO through keywords?
TD: Adding keywords to your title can provide a lot of benefit (especially in the App Store). When it comes to the 100 character keyword list, remove spaces, and make sure there are no duplicates between the title and keywords. Do some keyword research! Look up what apps are showing up for specific searches, look at the autocomplete text in the stores. The best keywords are highly searched terms with the lowest competition.

Which practices kill most ASO efforts?
TD: Bugs and crashes! Users will inevitably leave a one-star review for a buggy app that crashes on them. It’s extremely important to test your app and ensure you’re putting out a quality product. Negative reviews will crush your ASO and make it hard to recover.

Where do you see the future of ASO headed?
TD: As app analytics get more advanced, so will store search algorithms. Developers will need to be even more in tune with current trends and their competition. Something that is gaining traction already is link building! Just like SEO, classic link building is gaining importance, and definitely will become more important in the future. ASO is always evolving. Something that converts well today, might not convert well in six months. It’s important to constantly test and stay in tune with new apps and your competition.

What is The ASO Project and how does your company help app developers?
TD: The ASO Project is a full service, performance-based app store optimization agency. We work with premium apps in the App Store, Google Play and Amazon Appstore, providing services that cover all the aspects of ASO that I’ve previously mentioned. We developed our own proprietary technology that lets us score and rank keywords based on search volume and competition. We’re able to analyze your app based on current rankings, daily installs, reviews and potential opportunity. Some of our current clients came to us in the top grossing lists in the app stores with enormous organic (and paid) install totals, yet there was STILL opportunity! We were able to increase overall organic positioning and installs, along with conversions. It goes to show that there’s always opportunity when it comes to ASO.

Where can developers get more information on The ASO Project?
TD: Our website is a great start: www.theasoproject.com. Also, readers can absolutely email me directly to learn more about our services and methods at: todd@theasoproject.com.

The post App Store Optimization Basics with The ASO Project appeared first on Adscend Media Blog | Unlocking Insights: Offerwalls and Rewarded Ads.