Let’s talk about some ways to MAKE money within a few weeks, or days even, of subscribing here at CartoonSmart. And by the way, all of these streams of income can be recurring. Time is one of your greatest assets, so whenever possible you want to spend your time on projects that make money long after you’ve finished!
Sell Stickers!
Developers love talking about the next big “app goldmine”, but I can say from first-hand experience, this IS one of those. Billions of text messages are sent every day, and last year Apple opened the door to users sending Stickers (and for us developers, we can sell sticker packs).
How to get in on this?
Your Yearly subscription includes an Xcode Starter Kit to give away AND sell stickers. You just drag and drop art in, and note whether its free or for sale as an In-App Purchase.
So all you need is art. But that’s easy. You can use art from stock sites like ShutterStock.com. We recommend searching for vector art, then adding simple animations to make your stickers really sell-able.
Plus there are a million times more artists out there than developers, so you can also find a talented, unique artist on a site like DeviantArt.com and pitch them a profit-share split on revenue from a pack they contribute their work toward.
How much can you expect to make?
We’ve posted a recent buyer testimonial (click here), which is right in line with some of the results we’ve seen here at CartoonSmart. Is every pack going to sell $300 in a month? Probably not. But these are easy to make (one to two day projects typically) so there’s power in numbers.
What’s your best advice to tap this goldmine?
The three F’s… The first F is for FREE! Selling sticker packs is 100% about getting a foot in the door. If people see your app is free, chances are they will download it. Because why the F not (another F). Then they will try it out by sending a sticker to a Friend (the last F). Every receiver of a sticker gets a link to download the same sticker pack, which is why stickers are by far the most viral type of app in the store. So that’s how you can turn 50 free downloads into thousands, and so on. Once a user has the pack installed, and IF you have some fun animated stickers, selling extra stickers should be a piece of cake “Here’s 10 free, get 30 more for $0.99”.
Any other advice?
We got an email recently from someone asking how to market their first Sticker Pack app. Should they spend money on Facebook ads, Twitter, Apple Search ads, etc.  Our advice is MOVE ON!  Forget about it for a few weeks. You’ll never be able to pay for the same amount of free exposure you get from the App Store. The store is actually really good at self-discovery, either from natural search results or through the “Apps other Users Purchased” section.  So in the same amount of time you could spend trying to drum up some very temporary click-throughs on Twitter or Facebook, you could simply make a new pack (with different search keywords) and double your exposure with that alone.
One pro tip. When filling in the meta data for your pack in iTunes connect, you only get a certain amount of text (like Twitter). So instead of this…
Irish, Ireland, lucky, fight, beer, drinking, green, clover, bag, pipe
Remove any spaces and do this…
Irish,Ireland,lucky,fight,beer,drinking,green,clover,bag,pipe