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[APP][TOOL] Bing Rewards Automator

I have this posted in the Apps & Games forum, but I'm looking more for constructive criticism from a coding standpoint here in the Software Development forum..
I'm sure some of you are familiar with the Bing Rewards system; it's simple, search with Bing, earn rewards points, redeem rewards points for gift cards, Xbox Live Microsoft Points, among many other things. Most commonly you are able to accumulate 15 points per day (in some cases 30), with 1 point being equivalent to 2 searches. This means you must do 30 Bing searches per day to get the maximum amount of points. But who has time to sit there and tediously search for 30 different things? That's where my app comes in.
I haven't found anything similar on a mobile phone. I know there are websites that do this for you, but if you aren't near a computer and want to bang out your 30 or so searches quickly, this is the app for you.
Be gentle, this is my first crack at an app! Although it is extremely simple I believe there is much to be done and updates will continue to roll out over the coming weeks.
Thanks guys! Any constructive criticism is appreciated
You can find the link to the Play Store here.

Bing Bot
I also made a Bing bot. This was also my first app.. Take a look and tell me what you think

How did I reached 46,000 downloads in less than two months full details

It's was very hard and almost impossible if you don't have at least a small marketing budget. I am making this thread to help developers learn.
I want to stress that all my marketing was free. I didn't use paid advertisement.
Deciding what I am going to make
1) I decided to make a platform game that had very simple controls, anyone can understand how to play it without instructions.
2) I decided to use some cartoon images that, almost all I made myself. There is no some "Complicated graphics".
3) I made the game easy enough so that a gamer can play it without instructions.
Before Launch
1) After I finished the game I didn't release it to the google play store , that would equal a fail. I opened a small community in Google+ and collected some people that want to hear when I release the game to production.
2) I posted on facebook groups screenshots about my game that going to be published. I did it in 5-6 groups and I spend on it 3 days.
3) I went to some games forums and also a create a post and trying to make people waiting for this game to be published.
Launch
1) Launched my app on Google Play , posted on facebook and on Google+ that its finally arrived. And here comes the numbers:
After one week my app got more than 10,000 installs!
And now my game has 46,000 downloads at Google Play!
And I am still fighting to get more downloads. Hopefully I can reach higher but for last couple of days the downloads just decreasing Any questions ask away.
Game Link
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.platform.game
My community page in Google+:
https://plus.google.com/communities/104791047015811270026
Please tell me if this thread help you

congrats
I don't think you got the downloads for the reason you think. I am unsure what you did, but almost 800 ratings is good.
congrats on your successful launch that is a lot of downloads for that type of game.

Tomer Trier said:
I don't think you got the downloads for the reason you think. I am unsure what you did, but almost 800 ratings is good.
congrats on your successful launch that is a lot of downloads for that type of game.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So, If can I ask, why do you think all the downloads come from?
And thanks for replaying

Pretty interesting read, thanks!
Do you have a facebook page or something where people can follow you as a developer? I'm not sure if I should do that for the future.
4 days ago I published my first Android App. I prepared my release fairly well, I've read a lot about marketing apps.
- I've posted my app on forums where I'm active, inclusive a niche forum for the app.
- I've posted it on my personal facebook and tumblr.
- I've made a pretty good YouTube video for it.
- I've send it to over 30 review sites.
The reviews I've received are all very good, but I'm still struggling to get downloads. I'm still at 50-100 and I've done the best promoting I could.
Any tips?
The app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ignacemaes.bpmtap

Nebulic said:
Pretty interesting read, thanks!
Do you have a facebook page or something where people can follow you as a developer? I'm not sure if I should do that for the future.
4 days ago I published my first Android App. I prepared my release fairly well, I've read a lot about marketing apps.
- I've posted my app on forums where I'm active, inclusive a niche forum for the app.
- I've posted it on my personal facebook and tumblr.
- I've made a pretty good YouTube video for it.
- I've send it to over 30 review sites.
The reviews I've received are all very good, but I'm still struggling to get downloads. I'm still at 50-100 and I've done the best promoting I could.
Any tips?
The app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ignacemaes.bpmtap
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have a community page in Google+ at the link:
https://plus.google.com/communities/104791047015811270026
You are more than welcome to join my community
1) A bunch of facebook groups are here where you can post some screenshots of your app:
> https://www.facebook.com/groups/108079516002935/
> Innovative APP Users & Developers for iPhone, iPad, Blackberry & Android (Huge group, more than 9k people are in this group)
> https://www.facebook.com/groups/152169141638746/
Publish your app in these groups and you will get downloads for sure.
I very recommend using this Forum, post there some screenshots of your app with description and I'm sure you will receive more downloads:
http://androidfreegamesapps.forumotion.com/

Can you show statistics of sources of installation? Just to compare how many people comes from reviews, Facebook, YouTube and other places.

Thanks for sharing. But REALLY???

Great
I'm trying hard to get only 100 down per day. It seem a hard target to reach. Could you give me some advices
My game on GG Play name Vivid Juicy Kool YOLO

INDY devs paying it forward!!!
We've hit the wall getting a 100 a day, and actually we did pay for advertising, I like your strategy and will try that with our next title. Indy devs paying it forward i like it!

inoutsider said:
Thanks for sharing. But REALLY???
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
yes,
I am not lying

honghoand said:
I'm trying hard to get only 100 down per day. It seem a hard target to reach. Could you give me some advices
My game on GG Play name Vivid Juicy Kool YOLO
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
100 download per day is pretty good!
Look at my first comment. Publish your game in facebook groups and forums and try to get people knowing about your game, If they like it they will share it with their friends and you will get more downloads.
BTW I saw your game. Its looks very nice Keep updating this game.

This is cool!

hi , cool game you have there

thanks for sharing your experience

Thanks for your sharing

Some pretty good numbers. Best of luck with your app

Tomer Trier said:
I don't think you got the downloads for the reason you think. I am unsure what you did, but almost 800 ratings is good.
congrats on your successful launch that is a lot of downloads for that type of game.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Agree with it
but truly graphics sucks

congralutation
Juste to be more helpful what's the list of forum where you have annonce jour game,
Thinks

From my own experience I can say, that it's very hard to find the right formula. There are so many variables and sometimes one method will work for specific app, sometimes not. But I agree that social factor has the best influence in downloads. The more people see, hear about your app - the more likely they will tell their friends and etc.

Thanks for the information really helpful, I will open a community in G+ right now for my current project.
Good luck with your platformer

App Promotion for fellow Indie Developers using the 80/20 principle.

Hi Fellow Developers,
A little bit about myself. I am part of a group called 'New Rich' . The NR is a group of individuals who make just enough money to fulfill their dreams by doing things that excites them with their free time . Each NR is excited by different things and I find my excitement in teaching others what I have learnt and still learn from the group. I am currently working in India and I teach a lot of youngsters the way of the new rich and enable them to be financially free by blogging, App development E-Commerce and me and my fellow NR's do a lot of free knowledge sharing on this front . I see that a lot of developers develop brilliant apps but fail to get it in front of the market and the app gets lost in oblivion. I hope that I can give my two cents here and be able to help you in promoting your apps. This is my first post and I would not be able to post links here . But will update the post if it proves popular and once I have posted 10 comments.
Warning : Post would be long and will be updated from time to time so feel free to grab a cup of coffee.
The post is based on two principles.
80/20 Principle (Pareto's Law) : 80% of your downloads comes from 20% of the sources.
Pareto's law on income distribution can be applied to just about anything you want . The usually accepted assumption that all the work you do will yield equal result is false. For example : Most of the blogs will have that 10 or 20 posts out of a 100 which gets them more than 80% of the traffic. Only 20 % of what you study will be asked in your examinations. 80 % of your effort on preparation for the exam is useless. So what if you can know that 20 % of your promotion effort which is giving you more than 80 % of your downloads ? Then all you will need to do is spend more time on this 20 % and not waste time on the other 80 %.
Parkinson's Law : Work expands to fill the time available for its completion
After you know that 20% which is giving you the best results. Come up with the things you should do to maximize and DO IT NOW !!! Keep a deadline of 3 hours to complete all your promotion task and call it a day. Don't fall into the trap of reading a hundred posts on promotion and not doing even one . Dont get into the habit of 'paralysis by analysis'. Another suggestion would be not to read something to its entirety. Even this post. Read the part that you really need to do now and the rest when you are ready to execute .
You must be well aware by now that more than 80% of the apps in Playstore get majority of the downloads and consequently more than 80% of the revenue. I don't want to bombard you with stats bore you to death. This is also true with marketing and sales. 80% of your sales will come from 20 % of your sources. Here I want to distinguish between sales and marketing.
Marketing : Where you let a lot of people know about your app . Promotion, Ads, Guest Post are examples for marketing.
Sales : Where you convincing a person who reaches your play store link because of marketing to download your app. Beautiful app Icon, an HD YouTube video explaining your app, screenshots explaining your app features on each screen and not just a plain screenshot are examples of sales.
Our method for app promotion is simple. Find out which 20 % of the events or actions that you do gets you 80% of your success (80/20 Principle) and Do more of that 20 % to get you the best result in the least amount of time spent(Parkinsons Law).
Finding out which 20% of the things you do is getting you 80% of your result
One of the problems is finding out from where you are getting your downloads. So the idea is to measure from which source you are getting maximum downloads. This can be done in three ways.
Whenever you are posting your playstore url ALWAYS use an url shortner(search "Google url shortner" ) and use the short link to post about your apps in forums. This will allow you to track the sources from which you are getting your clicks from and this is very important.
You can now link your app to Google Analytics. This will allow you to track how your downloads are generated. Using this you will be able to better determine the percentage of your downloads which are generated through Organic(People searching for your app or keyword in your app description through Google Search and Play Store) and InOrganic(People clicking on some link you have posted elsewhere and reaching your app) . Google on how you can add your app to google analytics page and its easy.
Another effective method to know if your app was mentioned on any blogs or news is very important to keep track of your app.
Enter your app name in quotes in Google Search(Ex : "FallToid app") and click on "google news" . At the very end of the search list you will have an option to called "Create an Alert" . Set that up once and whenever your app is mentioned on any news or blog you automatically get alerted about it by Google.
If you do the above , you can be rest assured that you are tracking almost all the sources of your downloads. Also I have noted that many people don't trust short-links so it would be better if you add something like (shortened link to play-store) to let people know that it is a play-store link.
Next up, Posting links to your app . I have a list of forums and websites on which I have had success promoting my client's apps and I will post those when I am able to do so. But basically there are two kinds of apps .
Promotion based apps : These are the apps which people don't want currently or don't know it exists but will download them when they come across it. These apps will not get much organic downloads. But can go viral based on the downloads they get. Examples for these apps are most of the games and some of the apps. User sees the link or reads about the app from some website or forum and downloads the app. These apps need more promotion channels including Social network sites.
Need based apps : These are the apps that user goes looking for. Examples of these are popular games like Chess, Crosswords, Scrabble etc or some root apps such as SuperUser, or sim unlock app like SuperSimUnlocker are examples of such apps. These apps will get organic downloads but will need some promotion and acceptance initially.
This post will talk about promotion based apps.
I love forums like XDA for promoting my apps for one main reason . You don't need permission to create a post(like this one) provided that you follow the rules and add some value to its readers. Forums are after all about user generated content and the more good content they get the better it is for them . Plus most of the forums are free. That is why I suggest you begin by writing a useful content for the users of the forums and add value first. I have also seen that many of us will just reply to a thread that talks about an app and spam it with your play store links . This is useless and does not work 80 % percent of the time . Spend most of your time here and it will be worth it .
Next up app review sites , If you can pay 100 bucks for a couple of review sites to review your app it will do wonders to your promotion . Don't look at this as an expense but as an investment. If you have faith in your app then go ahead and spend it . At worst you will at-least know what does not work .
Play store is not the only app market for you you know , Play-store has the highest number of users but also stiff competition . Place your app on all the alternative stores that you can find and this will get you more downloads. The main goal is to get your app in many places as possible and who knows if an influential blogger likes your app then he may spread the word around.
You have already heard it many times that your app needs to have a social presence. But Google+, You Tube is much more important than Facebook and Twitter simply because these are Google Products. Integrating Google + in your app as well as an HD video on YouTube will make Google like you very much . Also if your app is doing very well including GoogleAdMob will get you much much more promotion than using any other Ads platform simply because this is a Google product and it is in the best interest of Google to take care of the app which earns them most.
Add your app in product hunt dot com . This will get you some eyeballs.
I know press release is important but I dont want to spend all my time on it . What I do is spend 50 bucks on pitchpedgion dot com and send my app to over 120 influential bloggers at a time and call it a day.
The last promotional effort that I do is I find the app which is similar to my app. For Ex : If I am doing a calculator app I find out the competitor app and lets say the name of the app is "Calcu" . Then I search for the app on Google along with the quotes. This will give me the list of websites that this app was mentioned in and get in touch with them and use this trail to promote my app in the same places.
I have also noted that many of us just spam comments this actually works for some time . As you can see comments are sorted as latest comment first. So this means that if you add a comment earlier and don't add your comment often then you will get to the bottom of the comments and will be a futile effort.
That is it . Now sit back and analyze from where you are getting maximum downloads and spend more time on it . Don't worry about the least 10 percent since it is not worth your time .
I will post part 2 of this post shortly.
Mods, Please consider this to be a sticky post and if I have broken any of the forum rules please send me a pm allowing me to correct myself. Happy Promoting.

Great read, looking forward for the next part!
It's true 20% of my apps have the +80% of total revenue! Do you think i should focus on promoting those 20% or the others?

How did I reached more then 55,000 downloads in less then two months.

It's was very hard and almost impossible if you don't have at least a small marketing budget. I am making this thread to help developers learn.
I want to stress that all my marketing was free. I didn't use paid advertisement.
Deciding what I am going to make
1) I decided to make a platform game that had very simple controls, anyone can understand how to play it without instructions.
2) I decided to use some cartoon images that, almost all I made myself. There is no some "Complicated graphics".
3) I made the game easy enough so that a gamer can play it without instructions.
Before Launch
1) After I finished the game I didn't release it to the google play store , that would equal a fail. I opened a small community in Google+ and collected some people that want to hear when I release the game to production.
2) I posted on facebook groups screenshots about my game that going to be published. I did it in 5-6 groups and I spend on it 3 days.
3) I went to some games forums and also a create a post and trying to make people waiting for this game to be published.
Launch
1) Launched my app on Google Play , posted on facebook and on Google+ that its finally arrived. And here comes the numbers:
After one week my app got more than 10,000 installs!
And now my game has 55,000 downloads at Google Play!
And I am still fighting to get more downloads. Hopefully I can reach higher but for last couple of days the downloads just decreasing Any questions ask away.
Game Link
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.platform.game
Game Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIlMAMYM0LA
My community page in Google+:
https://plus.google.com/communities/104791047015811270026
Please tell me if this thread help you

Thank you for sharing your story. Can you provide any specifics such as revenue/detailed execution plan?
Sent from my Z10 using Tapatalk

Please, share links or name of forums and Facebook groups where you post about game.

Low budget for marking

Hi all,
I have low budget for the marking of my new game that i will publish soon
I have only $200 , is that amount will effect or i will just spend for nothing ?
and how i can use them ?
Thanks

It would be very easy to throw that money away. It won't do a lot, all told. Focus instead on the app, encouraging people to review it positively, managing bad reviews, building up a good relationship with an initially small number of users so that they'll tell their mates and build your numbers up. Talk to people for whom your app solves a problem. They don't exist? Well, there's your problem and $200 of marketing won't help

Ryan.T.Student said:
It would be very easy to throw that money away. It won't do a lot, all told. Focus instead on the app, encouraging people to review it positively, managing bad reviews, building up a good relationship with an initially small number of users so that they'll tell their mates and build your numbers up. Talk to people for whom your app solves a problem. They don't exist? Well, there's your problem and $200 of marketing won't help
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ryan has an important point: actually, adwords, facebook ads, *can* bring some result but at a too much heavy cost. I have tried them and my cost per install was like $5 to $10, for free apps...
Prompting users to review your app in your app works, but do it at moments when they achieve something positive with your app, like attaining a certain level in a game. Building a relationship is a key, i can't agree more to that

$200 is a low budget.
Try first the all free methods we all know are aware off (mailing, asking parents and friends to download and promote the app, posts on forums and so on).
Also try to exchange reviews with other developers (I'm always willing to do it, for instance).
And if your really want to boost the number of downloads of your games in order to look more attractive for users visiting your Google Play page, you can buy incentive installs from tapjoy (0.10 / install will give you up to 2,000 downloads (but I don't think it worth the effort, as vast majority will remove your app right after they get their rewards).

Here are some useful methods to increase downloads for consumer mobile apps:
• Application name-is unique
• Keywords-including related keywords, but be careful - don’t stuff every keyword into your app
• Make Facebook or Twitter page for your app and write story of your game there to attract every users
• Description. Your description is clearly the value of your App
Best of luck in your app business.