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

You gotta love how they’re adding in hot topics of celebrity gossip like Plastic Surgery with old school “bat boy” style sensationalism:

The National Examiner:  Always Keepin’ it classy!

Trey

Hey Guys,

HUGE update today.  As I’ve mentioned before, if you have in app purchases in your iPhone App then you get a “snowball effect” after a few days.

Here’s what I mean:

If you are giving your app away for free, like I did with Maze+, then you’ll rack up a TON of downloads.

Some people will buy something inside your app immediately, others might wait a few days… or even a month.

The cool thing about this is you always have a BIG SURGE of cash come in after you get a ton of downloads.

Like an after shock.

Actually, after shock sounds 10X cooler than “snowball effect”, so let’s call it that

I was hoping I would have an AFTER SHOCK this weekend so I could report something cool, but I had no clue this would happen:

This isn’t even including Jump Pack, my other games, money from iAds or Linkshare.  Including everything I did about $6100 just on Saturday & Sunday!  That is AFTER paying Apple.

 Now, here’s the cool part:

Yesterday I made just as much money as Saturday, even though I had 26,000 less downloads.

That’s because of the after shock *RUMBLE*… chances are I’ll have a big day today as well.

Here are the total numbers for Maze+ so far:

So far Maze+ has made $9,774.79 averaging $815 per day.  Awesome!  This is more profitable than Jump Pack was on release and I have no doubt our next app Dragon Run will eclipse this one.  That’s the App Network in effect.

Now this is weird (but in an awesome way.  It’s awsome weird).

Up until the launch of Maze+ I had gotten around 900,000 downloads of all my apps.

And here this one app comes along and racks up 631,000 downloads all by itself.  Believe it or not, I’m on track to break 2,000,000 total downloads by the end of this week!

I contribute the insanely large downloads to two things:

1. The game was multiplayer… so people were telling their friends

2. It was a success internationally.  I actually made more money in Australia than the U.S.!

If you’ve watched any of my webinars, you’ve probably heard me talk about the Nag Screen.  A nag screen is a full page banner ad in your app.  People see it when they open up the app for the first time.

Let me show you how powerful that is!

Jump Pack had sort of died down… I was getting ready for the launch of Maze+ and wasn’t promoting it hard, updating or any of the other things you’re supposed to do

Then I put it on the nag screen for Maze+. 

So all 600,000 people who clicked on the nag screen saw an ad for Jump Pack.

The funny thing is, like usual we kinda botched it.  You actually couldn’t read all the text on the nag screen… But who cares, it still made a bunch of money!

I setup the nag screen to point to Jump Pack on Wednesday September 7th:

As you can see we had a bunch of downloads on Wednesday, but hardly any sales.  I was still waiting for the… wait for it… AFTER SHOCK *RUMBLE*.

Thursday I started seeing sales… and was really curious how high it could go.  Then by far the biggest day was yesterday at $659.  I’m hoping to break that today!

This is the absolute MOST FUN I’ve ever had in business!

:BIG ANNOUNCEMENT:

I’ve decided that I’m going to slowly move my business 100% into making iPhone Apps.

This market is so new (and profitable) that I would be absolutely crazy to not jump in full force… It’s just the right time to do it.

I’ve been staying up super late toying around with numbers and created a plan to build this into a $100,000 per month business in the next 6-8 months.

I’m going to share it with some of you guys on a private webinar for free.  Look out for details later this week!

Thanks for being a subscriber and/or blog reader!  Even when I quit teaching this stuff, I’ll still keep this blog going because YOU GUYS ROCK.

Talk soon,

Trey

Wow, what a cool week.

I crossed over 1,000,000 downloads in iPhone apps and also just found out today I broke the top 10,000 sites in US according to Alexa (top 30,000 in the world).

I posted my first blog post on December 11, 2009 and honestly got VERY LITTLE traffic until January this year.

I just checked stats and for the last two months I’m averaging 1,559 hits per day (that’s for August and September 2011).  I figured some of you might want to know what I did so you can use the same game plan.

So let’s get to it…

The truth is, it wasn’t a very complex plan.  I just had three things in mind:

1. Post about stuff that’s different from everyone else.

2. Rank high for my name on Google.

3. Actively bring people back to the blog.

All three have been instrumental to bringing in lots of traffic, but if I had to choose, I would say “actively bringing people back to the blog” is the most important.

Let’s check each of these bad boys out:

Posting Different Stuff:  Separating Yourself From The Pack

Like I said, all THREE of these points are instrumental.  This one is very important… if I wasn’t talking about different and interesting stuff here that people wouldn’t read it. 

As you guys know, I released my first iPhone App in January and was making money instantly.  Little did I know at the time, but this was something that TONS of people were interested in and absolutely no one was talking about.  Here I was thinking I was the only iPhone App “wannabe developer” out there…

So I started talking about that stuff here and people got REALLY into it. I’ve looked around as well and haven’t found any other blogs that explain how to make money with apps, so it was a good way for me to separate from the pack and give out information you literally couldn’t find anywhere else.

I promise you if I was talking about only Google Adwords and SEO like thousands of other blogs out there, it wouldn’t be seeing steady growth as it is now… it would have simply been lost in a sea of mediocrity!

That said, I don’t JUST post iPhone stuff as that would get boring as well.  I try to make sure I sprinkle in silly posts like the Trashy Headlines and the Frank & Trey Show… and also add in branding posts like the Kicking Ass & Taking Names seminar footage.

So keep it fun and talk about stuff that is unique and interesting.

Ranking high for your name (or brand) on Google

We all know this one is important, but it was interesting to see the stats really laid out in front of me.

For the longest time, I was ranked #2 or #3 in Google for “Trey Smith” and was getting about 50 hits a day from JUST that one term.  Then I got an email from a super cool girl named Mel.  She wanted a copy of the iPhone System and asked me if I wanted any SEO done as a trade.

Being that I was born in Macon, GA from a LONG line of crazy entrepreneurs (seriously, my grandfather once traded 3 cows for a car), I coudln’t pass up the opportunity.

I told her if she could get me to #1 for Trey Smith then we would have a deal.  It was something I was having a hard time doing myself with my outsourced team.

Well, again, Mel is awesome… within a week she had me at number 1.  I found out that the #1 position gets about TWICE as many clicks as #2 (for my name at least).  Now Mel is working on ranking  just “trey” by itself which is tough because the super bad ass lead guitarist and vocalist for Phish, Trey Anastasio, owns Trey.com!

I suck at SEO, but she has a WSO here that explains the process she does.  Btw, I don’t get compensation or anything, just letting you guys know what worked for me.

Actively Bringing People To Your Blog

By far the biggest for me.  I do this in multiple ways.

Of course the easiest is to email my list about a blog post, which I will actually be doing tomorrow and totaling the numbers for the Maze+ iPhone game launch.  That always gets great results and must cause some sort of viral action.

I’ll check my clicks in Aweber and iContact when I email my list to the blog and it’s ALWAYS double or triple the numbers that show up.  I haven’t really figured that one out, but hey… it works!

But don’t stop at just emailing.  I also put links to my blog at the end of big promotions I do.  For instance, when I close down an iPhone System promotion I have a link to my facebook and blog on the “Sold Out” page.

This drives a TON of traffic and gives people some cool free information as well!

Anytime I don’t have a good “thank you page” setup I route them back to the blog.  If I do a survey and don’t have something setup, I’ll make a page on my blog that just says “Thanks for taking my survey”.  A large portion of people will click around and check out some articles while they’re here.

Think outside the box on this stuff… If you have a free offer you give away people who sign up for your list, you can make it into a blog post.  There are a ton of possibilities.

Ok, well hopefully that helps some of you out and THANK YOU for taking a part in this blog!

Talk soon,

Trey Smith

Well this launch is shaping up to be a big one!

First off, I just crossed $1,000 in profit yesterday.

What’s great is I only spent about $1200 making this one (since we already had most of the resources) so I’ll cover development cost after only a week!  Pretty sweet… Think that’s the fastest so far on a big title like this.

Sales are still going good, yesterday was the biggest day yet, doing RIGHT under $300.

The reason it did better was two fold:

1. I got reviewed by App Advice which is a large publication

2. I just started a Free App A Day campaign

You can see the downloads went WAY up yesterday because I switched from Paid to Free:

My goal is for Free App A Day to help me push to the top 20 and I think it’s going to work.  I’m moving quickly and last time I checked (this morning at 9:00AM) I’ve already broken the Top 100!

TIME FOR THE BIG LESSON.

This has been an overall positive launch, but one thing happened that I NEVER expected.

My big games, like Jump Pack, get HIGH RATINGS because I strive to make them GRADE A.  I had absolutely no reason to think that Maze+ wouldn’t get the same.  Typically if you have a very nice looking game with minimal bugs and NO ADS then it gets a good rating.

But Maze+ has an average of 2.5 stars (fair) instead of 4 stars like Jump Pack!

So I was obviously wondering how this could happen.  What I did wrong… and the answer really shocked me.

The main reason I’m seeing people are rating the game bad is because I didn’t include a single player game.

What’s kinda funny, is there IS a single player game… I just named it “Practice” instead of “Single Player”.  I did this because I know the game is MUCH more fun when playing multiplayer and I wanted to psychologically urge players to play the multiplayer mode.

But it totally backfired on me.  Especially because there is a bug that won’t let you invite a friend (you have to automatch a random player).

We have already submitted a fix for the bug and are changing “practice” back to “single player”.  While we’re at it I’m going to add in a few new features into single player to make it more robust.

The big lesson is this:

1. Don’t try to think for your users.  Don’t tell them what they can and can’t do.

2. LISTEN to them and fix the problems ASAP.  Work overtime if it takes making them happy.

So today we’re creating a new version that takes care of this issue and I’m getting friends to give me a good rating as well.  (If you liked the game, then gimme some love!).

The GREAT news is this:

I had a similar issue happen with Jump Pack.  I changed the economy of the game to make it harder and people KILLED the game on reviews.  When I changed it back with a public apology I created HARDCORE FANS.  People changed their reviews and wrote new ones.  It boosted the ratings up from 2 stars to 4…

So remember… if you listen they will love you for it.

Trey

Hey Ladies & Gents,

So a few days ago I launched our latest game, Maze+.

Things are going REALLY good with this one…  I’m averaging about $140 per day (totaling over $500 the first 4.3 days):

Besides emailing some people who were on the iPhone App webinar on Wednesday, the ONLY promotion I’ve done with this in within the apps.  If you download any of my apps you’ll see a new Maze+ Nag Screen when you open it up, and now Maze+ is at the top of all my More Screens.

When I emailed the iPhone App Webinar peeps on Wednesday, I tracked ALL the information to find out how much that made a difference.

Here’s the breakdown for Wednesday August 31, 2011:

- The email I sent to iPhone marketers got 1,400 clicks
- Nag/More screens got 1,850 clicks
- The email I sent to my in-app email list got 200 clicks

So on that one day I had a 40% bump in traffic from the email list (letting you guys know, because most of you won’t have an email list to mail as well!).

It appears if I DIDN’T have an email list I’d be sitting around $480 total instead of $590.  Pretty cool to see how much more POWERFUL the Nag/More screen are than a big email list for iPhone Apps.

You just can’t compete with marketing to people ALREADY on their iphones!

So, looking at sales data, here’s what’s really interesting:

It’s not tapering off much… Yesterday I got 83 sales.  The day before I got 85 sales.

The reason is, I am not relying on my standings in the market place to get these sales.  It doesn’t matter if I’m in the “latest releases” list or anything.  Sure that might have helped in the beginning (judging from the numbers it might have given me a $40 per bump day or something), but now I’m relying on the power of my APP NETWORK to drive FREE traffic.

It is to be noted I’ve spent ZERO dollars marketing this app, that said I expect to have some BIG THOUSAND DOLLAR DAYS this week because I’m doing a big promotion with Free App A Day.  I’ll report back on how that works out

Trey

—- EDIT —-

Some people were asking me on Facebook how much I paid to have this made.  Just me and one programmer worked on this one and he works for me full time.  If I would have outsourced it, he said it would be around $2200… Which means if I keep this rate I would make my money back in 15.7 days.

But here’s the cool thing:

It didn’t cost me near that much because a large portion of the content was taken from OTHER games.  For example the character is from Kolo’s journey and the in app purchase system was ripped straight from Jump Pack.  A LARGE portion of the code was already made, so my programmer was able to crunch the first version out in less than a week.

That’s the cool thing about making MULTIPLE apps.  Each one you create ends up being cheaper because you have a VAULT of code and assets you can use for the next project!

Hey Guys,

Wanted to give a shoutout to some students that made some killer apps and software.

Look out for some more stuff from me like this… They are doing amazing work.

Congrats guys!

IPHONE APPS

iFlick Soccer (Joey Kissammee)
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iflick-soccer/id450529795?mt=8

Body Compare (Warren Hales)
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/body-compare-photo-weight/id455546537?mt=8

Note Record (Tobias Hummel)
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/note-record/id434809593?mt=8

Happy Jumper (Mark Laverdiere)
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/happy-jumper/id438033163?mt=8&ls=1

OTHER SOFTWARE

LPN Travel Website & App (Sheri Miles)
http://lpntravel.com/jobs/

Easy Business Software (Nathan Lewis)
http://www.easybizsoftware.com/

The Loc Box (Stephen Joyce)
http://www.thelocbox.com