Good App Sales, AppViz 2, and My Morning Ritual

Over the past 3 months I’ve developed a morning ritual. Immediately upon waking up I go to my home office and wake my Mac from sleep. I click the AppViz 2 icon in the dock and click the “Get New Reports” button in the lower right of the app. Then I wait… I would say that I wait patiently, but that would not be the truth. I wait in anticipation like a kid waiting for Christmas morning. I wait to see how my apps have done the day before.

I’ve fallen into this ritual since purchasing AppViz 2 from IdeaSwarm last November 2011. I decided that I needed a way to track my app sales, and I did not want to rely completely on the various online tracking services that exist. Don’t get me wrong there are a lot of good online tracking services like Distimo, but I wanted a Mac app. AppViz 2 had everything that I needed.

Anyway, this morning I woke up to find that I had my best app sales day ever. As a matter of fact in the month of January 2012 I’ve had my 3 best app sales days. Yesterday can be attributed to a couple of things: First, I released a new updated to my best selling app Wallpaper Quotes for iPhone. Second, I released this week a new iPad app WP Quotes HD. WP Quotes HD is essentially the iPad version of Wallpaper Quotes. I know the names are slightly different, but the reviewers at Apple rejected the original iPad app name of “Wallpaper Quotes HD”. The reasoning that they gave me was that the app name, and the app title did not match. So rather than argue and delay the app I decided to make a slight change in the Title meta data and get the app approved. Sure enough that got the app approved a few hours later.

So now I have 4 paid apps for sale in the app store. I am pleased to say that each time that I have released a new app my app sales have increased. I am pleased, because releasing a new app does not mean that you will automatically get sales. I know because I have on app Flip Calc that I initially released as a paid app for $.99 and received almost no sales. I eventually made it a free download, and I can tell you that the downloads are negligible. Compared to my Wallpaper Quotes Free app that is receiving more 200 downloads a day.

There was an article published late last year, by Owen Goss, based on a survey of iOS game developers. That survey stated that on average a single iOS developer with one app made about $1200 – $2000 per year in app sales. The article stated that two or more developers and developers that had more than one app in the store made more money on average than single developer and single apps in the app store. I was representative of the single app and single developer group. I had one app in the store for most of the year, and that app generated about $400 in sales. Fast forward to the end of 2011, and I introduced 2 new paid apps into the store. In the six weeks that the additional apps were in the store I doubled my sales for 2011. And sales for the beginning of 2012 are looking really good so far.

Stay tuned, and tomorrow I will talk about my app sales goals for 2012.