May 10, 2011 at 08:14Newsletter distribution: sharing experiences with Wordrive and prMac
As they say, doing business without pr is like winking at girls in complete darkness. Whatever a good product is, it’s right when only those who seek this information find out about it. There are always tools for communication between those seeking information and distributing it. And today I’ll tell you about the experience of using one of them using the example of the Wordrive game , which I launched in mid-April in the App Store , and the example of prMac , one of the press release distribution services.
About another service, iSpreadNews, on Habré already wrote in detail , and I mentioned about the experience with them in the last article - " How to promote the game in the AppStore: I share experience on the example of Wordrive ".
So, what I wanted to tell people through the press releases. About three weeks ago, I launched the Wordrive game in the AppStore. This is a cross between puzzles and funny phrases and quotes in six languages. Before you can read them, you need to collect phrases on the basis of the "puzzle". Examples of such phrases are “Learning to cook meatball soup.” First you need to peel the dumplings ... "or" If you love, then a woman so that she wouldn’t be ashamed to show her wife’s eyes "," Reality is an illusion caused by alcohol deficiency ", etc. ... In a press release I needed to focus not only on the entertaining, but also on the educational aspect of the game: after all, collecting a phrase in a foreign language is also useful: you understand an untranslatable pun, remember the grammar rules, what articles are put before what, what is the word order in the sentence and other other that in a game form is very, very good Xia. But training, of course, is the very last goal.
I came up with a press release for the game and translated it into English, and then sent it to prMac. And immediately paid. Extended Distribution costs $ 19.75 - quite a lot of money, even if you don’t particularly count on the result. The site asked me to register, and of course, I pretended to be a felt boot - I drove pseudonyms and anonymous e-mails, remembering the conclusions from past experience that different sites are more willing to work with Europeans than with Russian developers. An address in California, a phone in New York - everything works, transfers calls, forwards mail, correspondence, but has nothing to do with Russia.
In a couple of days I get an email from prMac: “Uh oh! Did you not read our TOS? We REQUIRE your legal first and last name. Registering an account with an alias or bogus phone number will result in the termination your account. (!!) ". It turned out that it is extremely important for them that the contacts in the press release correspond to the contacts during registration, so that this is a real person who can be called. They threatened to take money and not give service.
Further correspondence concerned the press release itself. PrMac has a Writing Service, for some "pathetic" $ 80 they will write three paragraphs correctly. But the guys are great: I did not "pull" these services, and they edited my text for free to make it significantly better . Probably took pity. After all, to make it right away as they consider acceptable, I did not succeed.
In this formThe press release went online. Here are the results:
* In fact, it is not clear how prMac considers views. The numbers are rather big, and the calculation method is muddy. The fact is that the published press release is a plain text, the number of views of which prMac seems to be unable to calculate in any way.
In order to recoup $ 19 at the application price of $ 2 (minus $ 1.4 in Apple fees), you need to make about 13 sales in total. For 0.99 - 27 sales.
You also need to take into account that my experience falls into the category of “Games”, where there is just a terrible competition in comparison with some educational applications.
Conclusions:
By the way, it is interesting that it is extremely rare to visit Wordrive.com from the App Store. There are no links and nobody really copies them from the announcement text to the browser. They also press infrequently on a special button “Developer's site”, since most often there is nothing interesting there. But this does not mean that the site does not need to be done, it really helps to establish communication with European webmasters. Screenshots, videos, a description of the game, ideally also works in their language with a bang.
Besides
The last six are known much less than the rest, plus they may be less relevant to mobile games for Apple. But, it seems, this is a complete list of services that are somehow used for these purposes.
If the Habra audience supports this material, I will be happy to share the details of the promotion of WORDRIVE and beyond. Right now, for example, I’m closely following the first results of the “sales” - I have halved the price of the application for several days. And soon we are going to release two “clones” of the game, which on the one hand will be independent products and have their own audience, on the other hand, they will coincide with Wordrive by 99% in terms of functionality and program code. More on this next time :)
About another service, iSpreadNews, on Habré already wrote in detail , and I mentioned about the experience with them in the last article - " How to promote the game in the AppStore: I share experience on the example of Wordrive ".
So, what I wanted to tell people through the press releases. About three weeks ago, I launched the Wordrive game in the AppStore. This is a cross between puzzles and funny phrases and quotes in six languages. Before you can read them, you need to collect phrases on the basis of the "puzzle". Examples of such phrases are “Learning to cook meatball soup.” First you need to peel the dumplings ... "or" If you love, then a woman so that she wouldn’t be ashamed to show her wife’s eyes "," Reality is an illusion caused by alcohol deficiency ", etc. ... In a press release I needed to focus not only on the entertaining, but also on the educational aspect of the game: after all, collecting a phrase in a foreign language is also useful: you understand an untranslatable pun, remember the grammar rules, what articles are put before what, what is the word order in the sentence and other other that in a game form is very, very good Xia. But training, of course, is the very last goal.
I came up with a press release for the game and translated it into English, and then sent it to prMac. And immediately paid. Extended Distribution costs $ 19.75 - quite a lot of money, even if you don’t particularly count on the result. The site asked me to register, and of course, I pretended to be a felt boot - I drove pseudonyms and anonymous e-mails, remembering the conclusions from past experience that different sites are more willing to work with Europeans than with Russian developers. An address in California, a phone in New York - everything works, transfers calls, forwards mail, correspondence, but has nothing to do with Russia.
In a couple of days I get an email from prMac: “Uh oh! Did you not read our TOS? We REQUIRE your legal first and last name. Registering an account with an alias or bogus phone number will result in the termination your account. (!!) ". It turned out that it is extremely important for them that the contacts in the press release correspond to the contacts during registration, so that this is a real person who can be called. They threatened to take money and not give service.
Further correspondence concerned the press release itself. PrMac has a Writing Service, for some "pathetic" $ 80 they will write three paragraphs correctly. But the guys are great: I did not "pull" these services, and they edited my text for free to make it significantly better . Probably took pity. After all, to make it right away as they consider acceptable, I did not succeed.
In this formThe press release went online. Here are the results:
- The newsletter dated April 18, 2011 brought:
- "Spam" in 604 media agencies ;
- 13,354 views according to prMac *;
- 34 trackbacks according to prMac. This is their own spider, crawling sites and looking for specific code among them;
- 76 press releases published according to prMac and google (figures converge);
- 73 retweets with appmodo. For example, on one of the resources, AppModo , 73 people released the press release and eight people “clicked on”. There, all new press releases get to the main page. Someone clicks on them;
- 118 retweets in total. According to Topsy, a total of 118 people turned up. But the real situation should be better, all these search services on tweets are slightly buggy, because they do not have time to bypass all twitter;
- for detailed information on the information prMac took 417 (= clicks) for purchase & download - 307 on screenshots - 164 on app icon - 120 persons.
- Repeated free mailing on a much smaller base on April 26, 2011 brought
- 7,626 views *;
- 6 retweets;
- practically nowhere has passed.
* In fact, it is not clear how prMac considers views. The numbers are rather big, and the calculation method is muddy. The fact is that the published press release is a plain text, the number of views of which prMac seems to be unable to calculate in any way.
In order to recoup $ 19 at the application price of $ 2 (minus $ 1.4 in Apple fees), you need to make about 13 sales in total. For 0.99 - 27 sales.
You also need to take into account that my experience falls into the category of “Games”, where there is just a terrible competition in comparison with some educational applications.
Conclusions:
- it’s definitely worth using prMac services, for $ 19 Google and Twitter are filled with links that will lead in no less than 13-27 people, which pays off the investment. And for good games and programs, it pays off even more;
- use the free prMac services to no purpose - it will be the same as when re-sending in the case of paid ones - nothing
- it’s better to run the campaign along with the launch of the product so that the effect overlaps with Apple’s default promotion. Ideally, use iSpreadNews here;
- iSpreadNews sent live webmasters interested in reviewing the game, and prMac didn’t. But according to the results of the iSpreadNews mailing, no one published the text of the mailing without changes, and in the case of prMac we have almost 80 sites, but not a single live webmaster. That is, these are different services that should be used simultaneously.
By the way, it is interesting that it is extremely rare to visit Wordrive.com from the App Store. There are no links and nobody really copies them from the announcement text to the browser. They also press infrequently on a special button “Developer's site”, since most often there is nothing interesting there. But this does not mean that the site does not need to be done, it really helps to establish communication with European webmasters. Screenshots, videos, a description of the game, ideally also works in their language with a bang.
Besides
- iSpreadNews.com and
- prMac.com worth mentioning
- GamesPress.com , as well as a number of lesser-known services
- SoftPressRelease is a pretty good service, it is praised and cheaper than prMac.
- GameRelease.net - a service from GameProducer.net, for a fixed annual fee of 150-180 bucks, they give one press release per month.
- BusinessWire.com ,
- PRNewswire.com ,
- NewsWire.net ,
- GlobeNewsWire.com and
- PRWeb.com
- VGSMart.com
The last six are known much less than the rest, plus they may be less relevant to mobile games for Apple. But, it seems, this is a complete list of services that are somehow used for these purposes.
If the Habra audience supports this material, I will be happy to share the details of the promotion of WORDRIVE and beyond. Right now, for example, I’m closely following the first results of the “sales” - I have halved the price of the application for several days. And soon we are going to release two “clones” of the game, which on the one hand will be independent products and have their own audience, on the other hand, they will coincide with Wordrive by 99% in terms of functionality and program code. More on this next time :)