How To Make a Six-Figure Income Selling Apps

Introduction
Small businesses have – in the past – been weary about
launching a dedicated mobile app. High costs, and the
technical skill required, contributed to this weariness,
with a 2016 survey suggesting that only 20% of small
businesses currently have a mobile app. But costs have
fallen dramatically, and apps can now be launched with
considerably more ease, creating a sizeable market for
anyone in the business of selling apps.
With dedication, and a good structure in place, it is
possible for entrepreneurs in this space to begin
generating a six-figure income within 24-months. In this
ebook, we will take you through the steps to follow in
getting started, and putting the required structure in
place. And when combined with your dedication, and
AppInstitute’s White Label App Reseller Programme,
you will soon be on your way to generating a recurring
revenue stream, and moving toward making a six-figure
income just through selling apps.
AppInstitute | How to Make a Six-Figure Income Selling Apps Page 1

Step 1: Choose a Differentiator
Identify up to five local app development services in your
area, and if there aren’t any, then expand the area you
are looking in. Now make a list of the services they offer,
relating to app development for businesses. Look at the
following:
Do they offer different packages, and if so, what does
each include?
• What is their pricing structure?
• What features do they offer with their product(s)?
• Do they offer any form of after-sales support?
Compare this to your own product, pricing, etc.
and highlight where you are different. Rank them
according to how much of a positive benefit they are
to your potential customers. The one that offers the
most benefit to your customers is your differentiator.
The three most important factors to consider when
evaluating your differentiator are:
• Is it true? Don’t make anything up, and don’t resort to
negative marketing by lying about your competitors.
• Is it provable? This leads on from the first point; your
differentiator must be demonstrably true.
• Is it valuable to potential clients?
Price is not a differentiator, and if there is no way
to differentiate yourself from your competitors on
features or service, do it by focusing on businesses of
a certain size, or within a certain industry.

Step 2: Build a Website
There is little reason for any business in the 21st century
not to have a website, but it is unthinkable for any
business promoting a digital product or service to not
have a website. Modern website builder platforms make
it easy – and affordable – for anyone to design and host
a professional looking website. Unless you are quite
comfortable designing and hosting your own website, you
could consider any of the following:
Whether you decide to host and design your website
yourself or use a website builder platform, it is important
that your website looks professional, and be accessible
on mobile devices. Aside from that, your website should
include the following:
• Your offer - details of what it is you’re providing
should be prominent on your site.
• An ‘About’ section - introduce who you are, your
background and any relevent information about the
company itself.
• Pricing - make sure this is easy to find, nobody wants
to have to search for this, or worse, get in contact
just to know your price.
• Examples and Customer Testimonials - you won’t
be able to inlcude this at first, but plan to include it
down the line.
• Contact Information - make sure it’s easy enough to
contact you.
• Lead Capture Form - these are easy to set up with
tools like SumoMe and Hello Bar.

Step 3: Set up Your Marketing
It is difficult, in an ebook this broad, to address all the
aspects of marketing you should be taking care of, so
instead, we will look at the basics that you can then build
on.
Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an important
marketing tool for any business with an online presence.
But SEO is not only about peppering your content with
appropriate keywords, it is also about attracting links, and
being visible for local queries.
Start by adding your new business to Google My
Business, and filling in as much detail as possible. Even
broad queries are starting to bring in local results, so you
could end up benefiting even more from this.

Attracting backlinks from other websites requires more
effort, but will be easier once you build up a good catalog
of content (see Content Marketing). In the beginning, you
may want to:
• Ask your clients to add a link to your site on their
website,
• Identify and then contact influencers in your industry,
via social media and blogs,
• Get your business listed on relevant local online
directories
The keyword element of SEO has also changed over
the years. Our fractured search queries of the past have
shifted to more semantic queries, so while individual
words and phrases are still important, it is also essential to
look at the inclusion of long-tail keywords.
Identify suitable keywords by using tools such as the
Google Keyword Planner (free), Keyword Tool (free with
limited options, Pro from $48 /month), or Moz Pro (from
$99 /month).

It is important that you identify keywords and phrases that
your potential customers would use in search. To help
with that, and with building up a collection of long-tail
keywords, try the excellent Answer the Public. All these
tools allow you to filter your results, or customize the
query by the search engine, or country.
Having a good understanding of which keywords your
potential customers use is not only important for general
SEO, but also for paid marketing, which we will cover later.
Content Marketing
Google considers around 200 factors when
determining a website’s rank on search engine result
pages (SERP). Two of those factors are the recency of
content updates and the usefulness or quality of the
content. And content marketing is about marketing
your business by frequently sharing useful content with
your audience. When done right, content marketing not
only boosts your businesses visibility in search results
but also helps establish you as a trustworthy authority
within your industry.
Great content not only answers your customer’s
questions before they have asked them, it also –
without asking – encourages them to share it, bringing
your business additional exposure with minimal effort.
But without a strategy, your content marketing will be a
miss, rather than a hit.

The simplest way to draw up a basic content marketing
strategy is by answering these questions:
• Who are your customers? Create personas of your
current and your target customers. You don’t need to
flesh them out in great detail, but enough for you to be
able to describe them in one sentence.
• Who are your competitors? Look at both direct
and indirect competitors, anyone who could draw
customers (and business) away from you.
• What makes you unique? Remember your
differentiator? How can you incorporate that into your
content, either in tone, or topics covered?
• What are the problems your customers are facing?
This involves not only listening to what you customers
talk about, but also what is being discussed online
about their industries.
• What do you want to achieve with your content?
Generally speaking, you want your content to
drive sales, grow search traffic, build authority, and
generate leads. But not all at once. Each piece of
content you publish will influence one of those
factors, and you just need to remain alerted so that
you don’t end up influencing one factor only.
• How often will you publish new content? It isn’t
feasible for any small business to try and publish
new content on a daily basis. Once a week, or even
once every two weeks is more manageable in the
beginning. As your business grows, so too can your
publishing schedule.

• Where will you publish your content? Obviously, you
first publish on your website, but to assist in reaching
an audience outside of your website, you should also
share it on Twitter, Facebook, and any other social
platforms used by your target audience.
• Who will produce your content? You? Not a problem
if you are a good writer, and you have the time. But
wouldn’t your time be better spent pitching to actual
clients? Consider using a freelance content writer
instead. There is no commitment in terms of how often
you use them, they are more affordable than you
imagine, and they are no longer that hard to find.
• How will you measure the results? Your content
marketing is not a failure if it isn’t generating leads,
increasing sales, bringing in more search traffic, etc. It
means you have not been paying attention to which
content does work. You need to track the results of
each piece of content to identify what your customers
respond to, and what generates the results you want.
Establish how you will measure the results, and how
those results will influence your content marketing
strategy as a whole.
Remember that content marketing is not limited only to
written articles. The content you ‘publish’ can also take
the form of infographics, short video’s, detailed how-to
guides, and even simple lists.

Social Media
Remember when we said it was unthinkable for any
business promoting a digital product or service to not
have a website? Well, the same applies to having a social
media presence. There are 15 social media platforms
attracting more than 15-million unique visitors each month,
but you don’t need to be active on all of them. You only
need to be active on those used by your target audience.
Where possible, use the same username on all platforms,
and this should also match your business name. Fill out
the profile for each in full – don’t skimp on any information
– and try using your company logo as the profile photo.
Just as you created a strategy for your content
marketing, you should create a strategy for your social
media presence. Use the same questions as before,
but remember that social media is not only for sharing
content but also for engaging with your audience. And
for capturing leads. Your strategy should also take into
account what processes you are going to put in place
to ensure you respond to any customer queries and
comments on social media, on time. It should also cover
which networks you are going to be active on and
whether you are going to advertise on any of them.

Paid Marketing
It is foolish to think that you can market your business
without spending a cent. Paid marketing helps make you
more visible to customers searching for businesses like
yours, it helps you stand out amongst your competition,
and it helps to keep you top-of-mind in potential
customers who aren’t yet ready to convert.
Paid marketing used to be limited to search engine
marketing (SEM) and banner ads, but it now includes
paid ads on social media. Aside from social media ads,
most ads are charged on a pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-
per-click (CPC) basis. CPC varies somewhat according to
industry, and the keywords/phrases you are targeting. But
it remains quite accessible to small businesses, with the
right approach.
The key to running successful – and affordable – PPC/
CPC and social media campaigns is to pay careful
attention to your targeting. In most instances, you are
trying to reach a smaller, more localized audience.
After identifying the brand specific words and long-tail
keywords you want to target in SEM, you then need to
decide on the geographical location you want to target.
You can then narrow your targeting further by looking
at what times your target audience is most active, and
what devices they use.

Step 4: Sales
Leads are not sales, so although your website is setup to
capture leads, you still need to nurture them through to a
sale. But not every potential customer is going to visit your
website or see your digital marketing. So we rely on three
methods to generate and nurture leads, and close sales:
• Lead nurturing email campaigns
• Phone calls
• Face-to-face meetings
The goal of your email campaign should always be to
convert a lead into a new customer, while you should use
phone calls as a route to setting up a meeting.
Lead Nurturing Through Email
Your website, as discussed earlier, gives potential
customers an opportunity to learn more about your
services. It also makes it possible for them to express
interest by giving you their email address, which should
then trigger your automated lead nurturing campaign. The
campaign should consist of the following:
• 3-4 emails sent out over a period of 2-3 weeks.
• 1-2 campaign-specific landing pages.
Structure your email campaign to first welcome the
customer with a brief introduction. The messages that
follow should be educational, informative, and include a
CTA that links to a specific landing page.

Step 4: Sales
Use services such as Unbounce, Leadpages, or Instapage
to create your landing page. They not only make it easy
to design effective landing pages but also to split testing,
allowing you to test pages with different layouts and text,
to see which leads to the most conversions.
The subject line of your email message is as important as
the message itself. Points to consider include:
• Use action verbs, such as Save, Start, Discover, and
Learn.
• Brevity. Your goal should be a subject line of 5-7 words.
• Make it sound human, and DON’T USE ALL CAPS.
• Try to incorporate an emotional appeal: curiosity,
urgency, joy, or enthusiasm. But make sure that what
the subject line teases or promises matches what the
message delivers.
Once you start measuring the results of your campaign,
you will be most interested in the click rates. Open rates
are important – after all, you want recipients to open
your email messages – but they mean very little if people
are not clicking on your CTA. As with everything you
measure, pay attention to what does and does not
work, so you know what to keep using, and what to
keep improving.

Step 4: Sales
Phone Calls
Very few people are naturally good at making phone
calls, especially as part of a sales pitch. Preparation and
practice help, along with a willingness to assess your own
“performance” afterward, learning from any mistakes you
make. You don’t want to sound like you’re reading from a
script, or that you’ve rehearsed the call, but you want your
call to have a sense of structure.
Open with a professional greeting – good morning, or
good afternoon – before introducing yourself and your
company. Not all products and services can be sold with a
phone call, and your objective is to schedule a meeting by
selling what your product will do for your potential client.
Try framing the purpose of your call as a question,
“If we can show you a way to retain more customers
and attract new ones, would that be something of
interest?”
thereby provoking interest. If the customer seems keen,
steer the conversation towards scheduling a meeting. And
once you have the opportunity to schedule a meeting,
do so by giving the customer two options, rather than
asking them when they would like to meet,
“Mr. Johnson, I can pop by your office at 2:15 p.m.
today to discuss this further. Or would 9:45 a.m.
tomorrow better suit your schedule?”
Regardless of whether you are able to schedule a
meeting or not, end the call by thanking them for their
time. And if you do manage to schedule a meeting,
send a meeting request via your calendar immediately
after ending the call.

Step 4: Sales
Face-to-Face Meetings
If you’re not quite used to with face-to-face meetings, they
can be every bit as intimidating as making that first phone
call. But again, preparation and practice help.
If you haven’t already done some research on your
potential client, and the industry they work in, now would
be a perfect time. Some of the points you should address
in your meeting include:
What an app could do for their business.
What unique benefits are key to them.
How an app could improve their bottom line.
and the more you know about their business and industry,
the more accurately you can state the above. Your
research should also help you clarify this person’s role in
the business. For very small businesses, you will likely be
meeting with the owner, who also makes all the decisions.
But for larger businesses, your first meeting might be with
someone who is part of the decision making process.
And how you present to a problem owner differs from
how you would present to a budget owner.Yours is a
product that is easier to sell through a demonstration,
so always have a demo app ready when meeting with
clients. If you are able to customize it to include their
own logo, etc. so much better. Don’t be afraid to show
them actual apps you have already launched, even if it
is for their competitor. Your presentation should include
all essential information while being as brief as possible.
But be prepared to answer any questions the client has,
even if they were already answered in the presentation.
Unless the client has already given a clear indication
during the meeting, don’t be afraid to end the meeting
by asking for their business.

Step 5: Post-Sales Support
A good app developer’s relationship with a client doesn’t
end once their app has been successfully launched. Each
sale you close will need a fair amount of effort on your
part, but it will all be for naught if your customers abandon
you, and their app, within the first month or two. A good
app developer retains customers by offering great post-
sales support in the form of:
• Assisting clients with their app marketing
• Advice on how to increase downloads
• Training clients on how to use the platform to update
content
• Advice on how to create and send push notifications
• Regular newsletter updates covering business tips,
platform updates, and general app advice
Much of this can be worked into your content marketing
strategy, with you publishing in-depth guides on these
topics. This doesn’t replace the need for occasional
one-on-one meetings with clients, where you give
personalized advice and training. But it will help establish
trust with potential clients, while also setting you up as a
subject-matter authority.
Compile a plan of what your post-sales support will
entail. Your plan should include:
• How frequently you will personally follow-up with
each client after their app has launched.
• What each follow-up will involve – will it address a
specific topic, or will it be a general follow-up only?
• What training will be available to clients?
• What topics will also be covered by in-depth guides
on your business website? Include proposed
publishing dates, updating these to the actual URL
once published.
• The schedule for your newsletters, along with
proposed subjects for each newsletter.

Step 6: Long-Term Marketing
Short-term marketing – in the form of paid advertising,
special email marketing campaigns, referrals, and
discounts – helps give short lived boosts to your sales,
while keeping you top-of-mind in potential customers.
But it is your long-term marketing efforts that will
contribute the most to the success of your business. While
your short-term marketing is designed to bring in new
clients, your long-term marketing not only brings in new
clients, but helps keep existing clients. Your long-term
marketing efforts should address the following:
SEO Management – This is an ongoing process, and a
vital one in terms of making your business discoverable to
new clients. Search engines are constantly adjusting their
search algorithms to ensure they always return the most
relevant results. At the same time, the way internet users
search for information is evolving. What this means for
you is that you need to be aware of significant changes
affected by popular search engines, particularly Google,
while also being aware of what words and phrases bring
in the most traffic to your website. Key points to look at
for website and SEO management are:
• Know your audience
• Know your competition
• Constantly optimize your content
• Measure your performance
Of course, you would much rather focus on closing
sales than obsess over keywords and SEO, but while
you should have no problem finding an agency or
freelancer to manage this for you, it helps if you have
some understanding of the principles and practices that
drive SEO management...

Step 6: Long-Term Marketing
Fresh Content – your content marketing strategy is a
very important part of long-term marketing. One of the
reasons the frequency of your content updates is included
in your strategy is because content marketing is ongoing.
It isn’t something you start, and then allow to fizzle out, so
trying to publish more frequently than you can manage is
like setting yourself up for failure. Publishing only twice
a month is still acceptable for small businesses, as long
as the schedule is consistent and – more importantly –
the content is always very topical and relevant to your
audience, or offers very valuable advice that they can use
immediately. Keep your audience engaged by sharing
relevant content from other websites via your Facebook
and Twitter account, and by punctuating your published
content with an email newsletter.
The emphasis is always on quality over quantity, because
valuable content not only keeps your existing customers
happy, it also draws in new customers. But do remember
that this is long-term marketing. Don’t give up on content
marketing because of the lack of immediate results, and
once you do start seeing results, you need to adjust
your content marketing strategy to focus on the type of
content that generates the best results.
Set benchmarks – one way of looking at benchmarks
is to think of them as rules for winning. You want
your business to succeed. You want to achieve the
benchmark stated in this article’s headline. But the only
way to do that is to set smaller benchmarks and to work
hard at achieving each of them. Start by setting a small,
realistic sales goal for each month, breaking this down
further into a sales goal for each week. Once you start
achieving your goal consistently, begin increasing it in
order to keep pushing yourself to grow. At the same
time, you should be benchmarking yourself against your
competitors. While benchmarking your performance
against them might not be realistic, you can benchmark
your practices, especially marketing, against them,
ensuring you don’t lag behind them and your industry
as a whole.

Conclusion
Success is never guaranteed, and it is impossible for one article to provide you with all the answers to
creating a winning business. But it is possible to combine industry knowledge with actual case studies,
to set out tried-and-tested methods for laying the foundation of a successful venture. These steps do
not provide you with a shortcut to making a six-figure income selling apps, but they do provide you with
a path to follow, with suggested actions for you to take. The willingness to explore each step further,
and the eagerness to put in the required effort, is all up to you.
Learn how to become an app reseller at appinstitute.com/resellers

How To Make a Six-Figure Income Selling Apps

More Related Content

How To Make a Six-Figure Income Selling Apps