RECENT POSTS FROM OUR BLOG

Eric Schmidt got it right when he said that Mobile is the future.

Well, the future is here and now. And the world is truly living in a mobile age -where everyone is using a Smartphone and tablet to run apps for everything.

And with that, every developer is shifting to mobile simply because that’s where the action is - (and also the money – ka-chin)

If you’re a developer thinking of creating the next best app (or game such as Floppy Bird), you’re facing a tough competition with thousands of apps in Google Play and Apple App Store. You’re just one app in an ocean of millions.

So before you start coding, here are some ideas you should consider:

1. Be Original – Don’t be a Copycat

If your app is really good, then there’s a very high chance that other developers will copy it. Everyone wants a piece of your app’s success. So developers are always on the lookout for competition, so being ripped off by others is a reality.

When launching your app, having good press and marketing campaign is really important. This puts your app on top of mind of everyone, and as a result – your app is visible compared to others.

Of course, if you have a lot of active users for your app, it will definitely get more positive reviews and ranking in the app store.

2. Your App is just one in a Million

For app developers, one of the biggest challenges is for their app to stand out from all the apps. With more than a million apps on app stores Apple and Android), its just becoming harder and harder to attract users to try out your app.

Well, to solve this, what you should do is to focus on app store optimization to improve the odds of success – making sure the app name, the icon, description and screenshots are all professionally made.

So you should really invest time and money to provide the best possible presentation for your app, so it immediately grabs the interest of users.

3. Do It Differently

For developers, the most common path to the top is through organic results. But that’s not really true. If you want your app to go viral, you have to put in the time the effort and creativity to get those downloads happening.

You start of by setting up a budget for your target users. You can also go the extra mile by studying your target users and creating user personas to get your launch campaign on track.

Another area that developers should look into is monetization. Be creative in doing this, and try to avoid the far too common approach of using flat boring banners. There are flashy ways to make a display banner look good; you just need to add more flair to it.

Surprisingly, a lot of app users are open to in-app advertising. If your app is good, and particularly solves a problem, users don’t mind having in app advertising shown to them once in a while.

A well packaged and coordinated press release, Blog post and video and generates revenue that blends well with the app user experience. So try it out.

4. Launch Timing is everything

When developing and launching your app, timing is essential. There are instances that if you launch the app too soon, and the market isn’t ready, it comes out as a flop. Or if you launch too late, the market is saturated with similar apps that your product is just a clone.

There are actually two windows on launch time that you should release your app. One is summer, where every kid in the nation is having their vacation – looking for fun apps. And during the December vacation, when people are glued to their Smartphone’s and devices. Use this leverage to boost your app before holidays to get a big surge of new users.

5. Does Your App Solve Anything?

Before you get started with your app, you have to ask yourself the following questions: “Does it solve any people’s problem?” Why should users download and use my app?

Because out of the millions of apps on the app store, not only do you have to make your app stand out, you make it by solving a specific user’s problem in their daily lives.

You have to think of situations where people would say. “I wish there’s an app for this problem” or something similar to that. If you can create an app that addresses people’s pain points, solves that – then you can be sure that users will download your app as soon as they find it.

So what do you guys think? What other things should you consider when developing a new mobile app?

Posted in Mobile Development on April 4, 2014 0

By: abdevlabs

If you’ve stumbled into this article, chances are, you’ve launched your startup / website and are looking for ways to acquire more traffic and visitors to your site.

As a startup founder / entrepreneurs, having a great product is awesome, but turning visitors into long term customers is better.
Gaining traffic (users) isn’t easy and requires a lot of time and commitment to make it work. So here are 10 steps to growth hack visitor acquisition for your site.

1. Create a Blog

This is by far the most suggested inbound marketing tactic for website owners. Having your own blog provides a platform where you can influence customers. By creating “value content” and publishing on a regular basis informs visitors that you’re in business to provide solutions taht will make their lives and business easier, and you plan to do it on a consistent basis.

Always remember that you objective is to increase activity and users, in order to do that – you need to create a community of loyal readers – helping them become successful on their own sites.
In time, these readers and visitors will become customers. Be honest and open about tactics and strategies that made you successful. Focus on problems that your potential customer may encounter and provide solutions.

2. Guest Posting

If having a blog is good, then posting on other people’s blogs is even better. Writing guest blogs puts your article (and name) in front of a new audience – some of them may not even know who you are up to that point. Doing this also helps you establish new relationships with similar blogger, and this increases your influence in your industry.

Just remember to kindly ask the host site to share your link back to your homepage/blog. The guest post article will now drive traffic back to your blog. Alright!

3. Invite Guest Bloggers

If you’ve participated as a guest blogger on other sites, now it’s time to invite notable bloggers to your site. Developing a mutual relationship with bloggers is a key element in increasing traffic and online exposure.

Another added benefit in adding guest bloggers to your blog is the diversity of content on your site. The more topics on your site, more people will be reading articles and hopefully sharing them to their circles. If you can get a guest post from an notable expert in your field, that will give your site a huge boost in traffic.

4. Create an Ebook

Yes. After you’ve done all the previous steps, it’s now time to create an ebook for your site. The thought of creating an ebook is really not a daunting task, you just need to focus on a specific topic from your blog and expound on it.

Another tactic you can do is to create a compilation of topics from your blog. Once you’ve compiled everything – hire a good graphics designer for the cover -and you’re all set!

5. Monitor your Brand

It’s important to listen to what people are saying about your company. There are several tools on how to do this: You can use Google Alerts to keep you posted on new content. You can also use Tweet Alarm to monitor conversations on Twitter. Another tool that you can use is Hyper Alerts.

Monitoring conversations about your brand can be helpful in creating content for your blog.

6. Start Conversations

Create a list of online places where you want to be active in. Check out the various communities on Quora, Google+ and LinkedIn and just join them. Don’t be a spammer to post ads back to your site. Take an active role in commenting, posting replies and adding value to conversations.

This is going to be a lot of work, but the connections (and traffic) you will gain is definitely worth it.

7. Create a Course

After creating a blog, being a guest blogger, and an ebook, the next logical step to build credibility is to create a course on educational sites such as Udemy, Udacity and Skillshare.

By creating a course and sharing your knowledge clearly demonstrates that you’re an expert in your field. This is one way to have a leg up over the competition.

8. Republish Content in Various Formats

Another tactic you can use is to republish your blog content in different formats such as a presentation, video, video and infographic. If you keep reposting your top content on sites such as YouTube, Slideshare, Wikipedia, Quora and Facebook, more traffic will come to your site.

8. SEO

SEO is not dead. Contrary to what a lot of people are saying, SEO is still an integral part in visitor acquisition.

Some key tips:

⁃   Use various Header (H1,H2, H2) sizes in the title tag to highlight keywords
⁃   Put keywords in the meta description section
⁃   For images, use ALT tags with keywords in it.
⁃   XML sitemap is a must
There are a lot of good SEO tips from sites such as MOZ.com. So be sure to check out their blog.

9. Get early adopters

Sites such as Beta.list and Startupli.st provide pre-launch, beta stage startups with a platform to get early adopters to their site.
People who are interested in your startup can join a mailing list, and will receive notifications one your startup is about to launch.

This is just the first 10 of our hacks for acquisition. Tune in for our next article of acquisition hacks.

How about you? What tactics are you using to improve customer acquisition?

Posted in Growth Hacking, Startup Lessons on March 31, 2014 0

By: abdevlabs

One of the biggest questions that startups deal with is how to improve their conversion rates. Let’s face it. Driving customers down the funnel isn’t easy, and closing that deal takes a lot of work.

Here are some important areas that you should work on to eliminate major roadblocks that are hindering your users from moving down the funnel.

1: Imitating the Big Boys (let’s say Amazon)

One of the easier things to do when setting up a website is to copy someone else’s work. It’s understandable since things are working out for a specific company, people will start copying the layout and flow of their website.

For example, a lot of people think that by simply copying the layout and design of Amazon’s site, they can duplicate the flow, experience and conversion easily. Amazon does takes it conversion process easily and have invested time money to improve conversion.

But you also have to be aware of the following:

Brand Recognition – Amazon has been around for so long that they have become THE place to shop for items. People know about them, as they are by now a household name. And when people come into their site, they expect superb customer service.
Multiple Traffic Sources – Companies like Amazon have built a reputable presence online – and with that comes multiple sources of traffic. When people use search engines like Google to search for a product, most will see products from Amazon on top of the list. And what this means is that the conversion process has already started (even before clicking on the link)
Duplicating Site Errors – Successful companies and their websites are not perfect. So if you intend to copy their site (and everything about their system), you also copy their mistakes in the process. Having the same hosting and cloud provider, can cause the same problems if it goes down. So blindly following and copying sites does have it’s downsides too!
Different Brand Strategy – Other companies have different objectives, strategies, affiliations, partnerships and competition. You have to be aware that copying can also cause confusion to customers.

With those four items being discussed, it’s still a good tactic to observe and get inspiration from others. But before doing anything – be sure to check your own objectives, goals and plans for your site. The best advice is to Always Be Testing.

2. Multiple Text Fields

There’s a lot of things that has been advised to website owners about limiting additional navigation, multiple call to actions texts and hovering distraction to improve conversion rates. But another new roadblock is starting to appear in several websites. In the quest of learning more about the customer, multiple text/form fields are showing up on Landing Pages and Purchase

forms.

Limiting the number of text fields is important.

Why? Because most purchases and transactions nowadays are being done using smartphones and tablets. Filling up forms and tapping the screen multiple times just detracts the fun out of buying the product.

There’s really one rule for this: Keep It Simple. Try to minimise the number of fields that your customer has to go through.

3. What? No Paypal?

This has got to be a totally shocker for some people. But yes. there are still some sites that do not have Paypal.

Not using Paypal as one of the payment options can cost your site orders. (I for one have skipped several purchases due to this) Some people would much rather pay other options, and are not willing to share their credit card information.

Did you know that 67% of shopping carts are abandoned during checkouts? Though there are several reasons for this, but having a complete payment option helps conversions.

4. Ready to buy… Wait this link doesn’t work!

I’m sure this has happened to a lot of people by now. You’re looking at some items hoping to buy something online, you click the image and it goes straight to this page – Error 404 – Page not Found.

Frustrating isn’t it.

Though this may be a simple technical glitch, but if people are clicking on the link, going to an error page- chances are – they’er going to your competitor’s site. You just lost a customer, buddy!

Make sure that all links are working on your site. My suggestion is to be view the website from your customer’s perspective. Be objective – and this will improve your conversion rates.

So we’ve discussed some points on how to improve conversion rates? Any other ideas? We’d love to hear about it!

Posted in Conversion Optimization, Startup Lessons on March 29, 2014 0

By: abdevlabs

UX stands for “user experience” and it’s a vital term to know if you want your own site to be successful. For more on this concept and how it can be applied to your business website, take a look at the following “UX 101: What is User Experience?” infographic:

Explore more visuals like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.

Posted in Uncategorized, UX - User Experience on March 27, 2014 0

By: abdevlabs

A growth hacker’s primary goal is to drive people down the funnel.

In the startup world, there’s quite a buzz with the term growth hacking?

What is Growth Hacking?

The term is first coined by Sean Ellis, who defined a growth hacker as “a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth”

It simply means hacking growth. How can you grow your startup’s user base to ensure your startup and product’s success. A growth hacker is somebody who uses various marketing and coding skills to grow and retain users.

The Importance of User Growth

Growth is important because customers are the lifeline of a startup. If there are no customers for your startup, then it’s destined to fail. And most startups fail not because of product development, but rather due to the lack of customers.

To further understand, Growth Hacking, let’s take a look at the Growth Hacker Funnel. (derived from Dave McClure’s AARRR Startup Metric Model)

Step 1: Acquisition – How Do Your Users Find You?

The first stage is very essential. With acquisition, you’re using any and every channel to get to your website and product. It basically involves getting people to your product that don’t know about you.

Tactics: Blogs, Guest Blogging, Social Media, SEO, Infographics, Network Invitations, Contests, Podcasting, Display Ads

Step 2: Activation – Do users have a great first experience?

Now, at this stage, we’re assuming you have visitors to your site. The questions is, how do you turn your visitors into active members?

Once people are on your site, list down what actions do they need to do to get to the next stage of the funnel. Structure your website in a way that guides user experience.

You have to “convert” them from being a chance visitor to being an active user. If you’re offering a product or service, try to have a quick video for them to view and find the “Aha” Moment.

Tactics: Onboarding, Explainer Videos, Landing Page, Gamification, Education, Ebooks Guides

Step 3: Retention – Do your users come back?

Now, how do you keep your users / visitors coming back to your site or use your product?

Keep your visitors by providing value – daily quality content on your blog, enticing social media network updates. Email Marketing and Retention goes hand in hand. Use emails to bring your visitors back to your site.

Tactics: Newsletters, Downloadable Ebooks, Invite only Webinars, Email, Alerts and Notifications

Step 4: Revenue – Your Paycheck.

If you’ve done a good job with the previous stages of the funnel – this is where it all leads. Do you want your customers to try out your service, download and buy your product? This is where your paycheck comes in.

Take note. If you’ve gathered as much feedback from the user. And implemented the Customer Development method by Steve Blank. You’ve got this covered.

Remember, don’t build a product that nobody wants.

Step 5: Referral – Does your users tell others?

The last and final stage is to for your users to invite their friends to join in. It’s best to provide a reward or an incentive for this.

Dropbox used a similar tactic when they first launched. For every user referral that signs up, the user will invite others to join, and will get additional storage. This is by far, the most simplest way to do it – a perfect win-win situation. More users for you / more storage for the users.

Tactic: Freebies for every 10 user signups, T-Shirt, Coupons, Discounts. Affiliate.

One last reminder. Testing, Testing and Testing.

With Growth Hacking, you have to check your analytics. Is your Acquisition tactics working? Which channels are you getting more hits? Is your bounce rate improving? Are you leading your visitors down the funnel, step by step?

The main ingredient for Growth Hacking:

You have to understand your users/ customers. Know what their pain point is, and solve their problem – make their life easier.

Another key thing is to understand and study your competitors, learn from their tactics by being a user. Go to their websites and analyze what tactics they use for each stage of funnel.

Growth Hacking means there are a lot of testing involved, and analytics is you need in measuring stick on how successful you are doing in each stage of the funnel.

If you follow all the steps above, there’s no doubt that you will increase user growth for your product / startup.

Posted in Growth Hacking, Startup Lessons on February 15, 2014 0

RECENT POSTS FROM OUR BLOG

5 Successful Tips for Mobile App Developers

1. Be Original – Don’t be a Copycat

2. Your App is just one in a Million

3. Do It Differently

4. Launch Timing is everything

5. Does Your App Solve Anything?

So what do you guys think? What other things should you consider when developing a new mobile app?

9 Simple Growth Hacks for Customer Acquisition

1. Create a Blog

2. Guest Posting

3. Invite Guest Bloggers

4. Create an Ebook

5. Monitor your Brand

6. Start Conversations

7. Create a Course

8. SEO

9. Get early adopters

4 Most Common Mistakes in Conversion Optimization

1: Imitating the Big Boys (let’s say Amazon)

2. Multiple Text Fields

3. What? No Paypal?

4. Ready to buy… Wait this link doesn’t work!

[Infographic] User Experience 101

The Basics of Growth Hacking

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