Ok guys, special video from me below that explains some basic principles you need to know before starting your FIRST mobile game for iphone or android.


It’s pretty crazy to think about.  Just 14 months ago I published my first iPhone game for kicks just to see what would happen.  Last month we crossed 5,000,000 downloads:

What a crazy fun journey.  Glad so many of you could ride along while I was figuring this stuff out.  What is crazy is I’m now hearing some MASSIVE success stories.

Angela Hayes for example (who was in my App Elite) is doing $350 per day profit.  Today she had her first $500 profit day.  So awesome!

Talk soon,

Trey

You guys have probably heard me mention that I DJ as a hobby.  Actually at one point in my life it was more of a career choice, but then this whole internet thing took over.   Back in the day I used to do a monthly radio show on protonradio.com called Warm Art.  It was a blast but when my first internet marketing company took off I didn’t have much time to focus on it anymore, so unfortunately I had to give it up.

Fast forward 7 years and things haven’t slowed down, but I do have more time now because I have amazing employees and outsourcers helping me out.  If there is one small business lesson you can get form this post, it’s to expand when you are capable.  It is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to scale a business efficiently without hiring people to help you when possible.

Even if you are just barely profitable I recommend hiring someone from odesk for $4 an hour to help out with remedial task like answering emails or automating anything you find yourself doing often.  You need to free up your time so you can focus on one thing and one thing only:  bringing in more revenue for the company.

I’ve finally got my business situated so I literally do nothing but creative work.  Creative work for me is what creates revenue for my companies. Things like coming up with game ideas, marketing strategies, writing emails to my list and creating webinars.

So now I have some more free time and have been doing a lot more DJing and producing at the secret headquarters.

I’ve decided to team up with fellow marketer and super awesome guy, David Jacopin, to do a monthly radio show.  David owns VipUltima.com which is a website that helps labels distribute their upcoming unreleased tracks to some of the biggest DJs from around the world.  VIPUltima will be providing the music and I’ll be putting together a mix once a month, will post more details as they come.

Until then, here’s another live video DJ mix I did that has been making the rounds.  It was featured on Allen & Heath’s home page which is pretty awesome.  I use their mixers and they are one of my favorite companies.  They make some amazing gear.

Take care,

Trey

If you would have asked me how I was making money with apps 3 months ago, I would have said almost 100% with In App Purchases through Apple.  This industry moves fast and times are quickly changing!

I was just looking over my stats and thought I would share how I’m currently monetizing my  apps.

Let’s check out data from the last 7 days:

Click To Enlarge

So here’s a quick breakdown of each column:

In App Purchases – This is either .99 sales or in app purchases from Apple.

iAd – This is money generated form Apple’s ad platform.  Mainly from banners.

AdMob – Google’s Ad company. I show their ads when iAds is out of inventory.

MoPub – This manages iAds and AdMob.  Really cool free system that rotates ads based on who has inventory currently available to share.

Chartboost – Great company that we do extremely well with.  They show full screen ads on start up.

BCFAds – BestCoolFun Ads.  A new company by my friend Gui (who made the popular Ant Smasher game).  This is a big up and coming one.  We are about to start using it even more.

As you can see with this data, we are making about 77% of our money right now form ads.  Pretty crazy, but there is a very good reason for this.

A few months ago I was focusing on promoting my OWN games.  I really wanted to focus on building up my own network and have a large “traffic source“.

Now that’s happened.  We are doing about 20,000 clicks per day and we’ve found it’s easier to make money promoting apps that have large payouts.

Example:

If I have a game that generates an average income of .10 per download, then that does not compete with a .70 payout from a larger company like Zynga right?

So if you monetize with ads then you immediately will start making less with in app purchases.  It’s all about figuring out which makes you more money in the long run.

There is a negative side to promoting other apps.  It doesn’t help you grow your network.

The end goal is to promote your own HIGH CONVERTING apps.

In a week we are releasing our first really big social game called “Animal Mall”.  Since this will have a much higher RPI (Revenue Per Install) we will start pushing more traffic to it instead of ad companies.

Check back for a breakdown of how that goes later on!

Talk soon,

Trey

Quick teaser… in about a week I’m going to give out a free DVD that dives into Jump Pack.  You’ll find out how I came up with the idea, the theme, the monetization and what I did to break $3,000 in a day.  It’s killer and I’m shipping it to anyone in the world for only $5.99.

Check here for first updates.

Trey

P.S. – This is now CLOSED.  I’m thinking of making it up all the time and putting a link here.  Will update this post if I do!

So before I got all into marketing and iphone games, I was a DJ/producer.  Most of the music I made was a small genre of electronic music called “tech house“.  I was pretty serious about it for a while, moved to London to pursue a career and even got played on the radio show of my favorite DJ, John Digweed.

Anyways, I’ve recently been back in the studio in my spare time, which is one reason I haven’t updated here as much lately

Here’s a DJ mix I recently did that has been getting a pretty good reaction on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKSUtc9Cdkw

I’ll update soon with some more business stuff.  The games are going GREAT.  We have some amazing things coming out very soon

Trey

I’ve got a confession to make.  I’ve been a bit addicted to this little site called Reddit.com the last few months.

If you’ve never heard of Reddit, it’s really simple.  If you find something cool online you can link to it.  That’s neat and all but it’s been done a million times.  Where reddit is different is they build small COMMUNITIES around it.

See, let’s say you are into skateboarding and you live in a small town in Wisconsin.

Chances are there is not a skate park near by or a thriving “skate scene”.  If this is the case you might look online to meet with other skate enthusiast and talk shop.

Reddit is PERFECT for small niche stuff like this.  Here you can talk with over 5,000 other people DAILY who are interested in Skatebaording.  There are over one hundred thousand thriving communities on there.  You can think of about ANYTHING and there are people talking about it.  I check stuff like funny pictures, video games, music, marketing and more.

What’s also amazing is the fact all these subcommunities form a large active community that actually has PUBLIC MEETUPS in every major city.  Colleges throw “reddit parties” and more.

What fascinates me is the site is not very pretty.  From a design perspective it’s extremely simple.  Also, besides that ad on the bottom-right, they do hardly any other advertising:

Crazy stuff, but the stats they just released are even more amazing.

First off they got over 2 BILLION page views last month. That’s a lot of damn people.  It ranks them in the top 55 traffic sites in the US.

Not only that, the average viewer stays on the site for 16 minutes.  That is insane.  In the  mobile game world it’s a STRUGGLE to keep people on more than 3 minutes if you don’t have a social game.

So if it’s not the design of the site that attracts people, then maybe they are brilliant marketers?

Nope… in this same article they mention the following:

1. We don’t get traffic through ads.
2. We don’t participate in any traffic trading.
3. We don’t email our users (unless they choose to enter an email and then forget their password).
4. We don’t harass users to sign up.
5. We don’t harass users to invite their friends.
6. We don’t pester you to download our app.
7. We don’t use slideshows and other pageview gimmicks.
8. We don’t know anything about SEO.
9. We don’t integrate with Facebook.
10. We don’t even link to our Facebook or twitter accounts.

So where in the world do they get traffic?!

Simple.  It’s 100% VIRAL.   Maybe it’s a friend telling a friend, someone finding a link online while searching on a forum board or someone mentions it on the news…. who knows, but it’s done with no advertising budget and WITHOUT doing the typical marketing tricks.

After getting into creating mobile games, I started studying viralility a good bit.  I have no clue if viralility is a real word, but let’s pretend it is

There is ONE THING that is common with ALL THINGS that go viral.  It’s KILLER CONTENT ALL THE WAY THROUGH.

That’s reddit’s secret.  The content is TOP NOTCH.  People only see what the community UPVOTES to the top.  Since it’s community driven rarely does something rise to the top that is not interesting.

It doesn’t matter if it’s angry birds, the keyboard cat or a site like reddit, it doesn’t grow naturally unless it’s great.

Regardless if you’re an internet marketer or getting into the app busienss, don’t forget to focus on creating something really great.  All the marketing in the world won’t help you grow a real business full of duds.

Talk soon,

Trey Smith

We are about to test using paid and free versions of our apps.  Will report back on results

Ok Guys & Girls,

New game is here… that means time to dive in deep, analyze some stats and give you the breakdown on how it was done!

This one is called Monster Magic and I have to say, I think it’s by far our best one yet.

This is another take on the jumping genre (similar to Jump Pack) but wed decided to add a lot of stuff in there to make it crazy.

See, I always liked Jump Pack, and apparently so does the general public:

But here was one thing that has ALWAYS bugged me about Jump Pack.

Well, actually two things:

1. It wasn’t CRAZY enough.  It’s a really solid fun game, but it needed more wild and wacky power-ups and excitement.

2. It wasn’t truly mass market.  The theme, graphics and style is tailored more towards boys.

GETTIN’ CRAZY

Making the game crazier was actually pretty darn easy.  We just added more power-ups to the game that do really unique things.  One flips the screen upside down and really takes you by surprise.   Another does a mega jump.  This one is really fun and if you land on the “bomb” platform while using this power-up, it blast you EXTREMELY high.

In this game there are lots of little things like this that keep you going.  Much more than Jump Pack!

Also, we made the game get FASTER the longer you play.  This stacks the crazy.  Actually, I am going to have to remember that.  Crazy stacker.  Games need crazy stackers

MASS MARKET

You hear people talking about going “niche” all the time with Internet Marketing, but I’ve found that the iOS store is totally different.

If you have a game that is created for Boys from 10-17 years old, then you are only targeting about 10% of the market (if that).

So what happens when you push it to the top of the app store?  About 10% of the people are interested in your app and it falls right out of the charts.

With Monster Magic, we went with a much wider demographic… here’s how it all went down:

So I was talking with my lovely wife, Amy, one night about ideas for this game.  We were talking about how this game needed to be more mass market.  This is before we knew it would be a monster game.

So while we were bouncing ideas she brought up the fact that monsters are a very hot market right now… You see them in plush toys, movies, books and more.

You can see Google is trending VERY well for monsters the last few years:

Now, not only are monsters trending well, they are also a great demographic target.

As you can see from our group here, we’ve got characters for boys, girls, men and women:

So that was the thought process behind the “theme” of Monster Magic.

Now when we push this to the top, we’ll hopefully a LARGE portion of the people who see it will be interested in downloading it.

Will report back with updates

Check the game out and leave a review if you like it. 

Take care,

Trey

Well, I had came up with an icon I liked for my new game, Monster Magic.

I’m EXTREMELY proud of this game and we’ve really taken it up a notch, so I wanted to have a really good icon.

I made 5 different ones and did a survey for it here:

http://treylink.com/monstericon/

(Would love to know which one you liked as well, after you vote you get to see the full results of what is winning).

Anyways, get this, the one I was going to go with is DEAD LAST!   The one I put together as a last minute afterthought is now winning.

I think I might need to start getting public opinions of this stuff more often

Trey “really bad icon guesser” Smith