As many developers keep on asking me how I reached the rankings I have now for MyTravelPhilippines, I would like to share the marketing/launch strategy that we did. The strategy is not new. I’ve read from numerous iphone developer blogs who have a few apps in the store about cross app promotion. But how do you really do it?

On Dec 2009, I have released the “Philippines 2010 Election Survey”. The red dot is on May 11 which is the actual elections for the Philippines. However after this event, you can see the downloads went down.. well because the elections are over…
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When the election results came out from the government, I immediately made the app, “Philippines 2010 Election Results”. I have launched this on June 26. I was hoping that most users would be eager to see the results and most did update to the new app. Within the updated app, I made a link to download “MyTravelPhilippines” in the appstore.
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The election app has a total of 4k users where 25% updated. Consequently, the “MyTravelPhilippines” eyeball did do the trick and on June 26 we had 849 downloads.
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The 849 downloads on June 26 was significant as it was able to push “MyTravelPhilippines” to rank #1(Free Philippines Travel Category) and rank #9 (Free Philippines Overall).
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In just two weeks, I was able to hit 5k mark for MyTravelPhilippines which took me 6 months to do in the Philippines Elections app.

What I’ve learned?
- Use an event, in this case the election results, to get most out of the updates.
- Cross app promotion works. It’s like migrating your users from one app to another.
- Application Visibility is very important. Try hard to make it to the Top 10 in that category. (Yes, I know its easier said that done.. but really aim for this..)

What I’ve missed?
Application updates to keep the app alive. This would help in “the download and never open again or open occasionally syndrome”. At the time of this writing, I am currently trying to do this as I could see the graph is slowly trending down. What I should have anticipated is to keep at least one version higher (1.1) and uploading the older version(1.0) on the store. The timing of this updates could be periodical–after 3 weeks, a month or an event. But with the limited resources that we had, only a two man team, and no marketing $$$ expense at all in ads, it was a great experience.