Who says your free app won’t make money? Many of the top-earning apps are free apps and they make more money than a lot of these paid apps. Knowing that there are very few people downloading a paid app, you can still make apps or have a web and app agency create a free one for you that actually makes money for you!
Here are 10 ways your free app make money.
1) In-App Purchases – Of course you can get a free app but it might be kind of hard to keep leveling up and stuff like that in your app. Also, it might take too long so you might spend a little money to get some coins or get some other stuff that allows you to play the game better to upgrade faster whatever it is that you’re trying to do within the game or the app.
Pokemon Go is a very popular app and it’s got millions and millions of downloads as you can see but it’s one example of a free app that’s very popular and makes a lot of money off of in-app purchases. So you buy all these different things they have like a little store within the app that allows you to buy upgrades and things that you need within the app that help you when you’re playing the game or if you run out of a resource you can buy that within the in-app purchases.
There’s a lot of different things that you can purchase with an app for different price points and that’s how free apps make their money.
2) Ads – When you’re using say the ESPN app for instance you you see that the app is free you download it you spend time looking at scores you spend time watching news about sports but you’ll see an ad between some of the scores. You might see a little ad right in the middle of a Dodgers and the Red Sox game. If you click that ad they get paid; if there’s an ad in a video a lot of times they’ll have videos in these ESPN updates and stuff and they’ll have these videos where there’s a quick ad before the actual video and they get paid from all these different ads within their videos and when you click these ads they get paid!
3) Sponsorships – Example is Evernote, they actually did a sponsorship deal with post-it notes. Post-it notes is the actual company that does these sticky notes so they basically include these digital versions of their post-it sticky notes within the Evernote app because it’s kind of a note-taking app for business and productivity so they feature these post-it notes within them and it gets brand awareness and makes people see posted within that app so they get more branding, they get more sales and more clients because it’s related to their business! Post-it would pay Evernote a certain amount of money to get featured within the Evernote app so you know you get the deal that way! Even though it’s a free app you can have sponsorships where you just feature other businesses and other companies within your app in exchange for them paying you a certain amount.
4) Affiliate income – When you sign up with a company like Amazon affiliate or the Apple affiliate or the Clickbank affiliate where you promote products and you get paid when people buy through your link which can be housed from your free app. From your app, make money from affiliate income by basically advertising cool retail products and stuff like that where people can earn referral commissions from you. They also might get this stuff for a discount or something that they can make money from when they click the link from your app because the app sends them referral links and makes money for your free app which is very popular nowadays.
5) Amazon Underground – This is basically a whole separate app store that makes you avoid all ads within the app the app has to be free; so you can’t make it a paid app you can’t have it paid to download; and you can’t have in-app purchases so you get rid of everything that would basically make money with the app and Amazon in return allows people to download these 100% free apps with no catch and you get paid as the developer! The more people use the app, the more money you can earn. In other words if people use it for hours every day for a long period of time you’re going to make quite a bit of money from that app. If it’s pretty popular and otherwise if you have an app that’s not used very much and people barely spend any time on it you’re not going to make much money! It all has to do with how much people actually use the app.
6) Product Sales – There’s different ways to do this of course you have like the eBay app or eBay gets paid off of every time you buy a product on the eBay app and it’s a free app Amazon has an app where you can buy stuff there pretty much any retail business has an app where you can buy stuff on your phone and they get paid off of those product sales. That’s another thing if you’re any kind of e-commerce business you can make money just through having a easy way for people to access the inventory through an app and buy stuff there instead of buying it on your website or on your or at your store! There’s also merch by Amazon which allows you to make t-shirts and sell retail products based on your app. If your app is popular like a dragon veil then you can have these products made like t-shirts and sell them with an app as well and it’s all fulfilled by Amazon and they just get a percentage of the sales you make through Amazon. There are different ways to do it but you can just sell ecommerce type stuff within the app and just make money off of whatever it is you’re selling!
7) Subscriptions – For instance the Kardashian sisters, they’re very popular and they are trying every way they can it seems like to build on their popularity and one thing they do is they each have their own app now and by doing this they have a free app and they’ll probably give you some free beauty tutorials and fashion advice and stuff like that within the app but to get all of their tips to get all of the inside looks and videos and stuff like that, that’s going on in their lives you have to pay a $2.99 a month subscription! They download the app for free, they might get a little bit of content but to get most of it and get the premium content, they have to actually pay a subscription. It’s a cheap subscription but if you have millions of people downloading the apps then it really adds up!
8) Freemium – Basically means you have a really great free product like Evernote where people can use the free app and if they love it they might need to upgrade their storage space or they might want to get another feature like being able to share their notes with other people and Evernote gives you a chance on just about every page of their app at the bottom you can see a button to click on to upgrade the app. To do so, you’ll need to pay a monthly subscription which gets you more storage and the ability to share notes and stuff like that for Evernote. So that’s another thing you can do to make money, is to charge an upgrade fee if they need the additional features that the really awesome free version doesn’t give them. Do make sure that the free is high quality as well.
9) Email Marketing – You can also make money from email marketing. You can build a list by say using Facebook SDK to make it to where your apps actually get facebook profile signups. If you
want them to sign up to use your app or to make an account to use your app one way you can do it is to put in thevFacebook SDK code within the development of app and it allows you to get people to sign in using Facebook on your app so that way you collect their email address that they associate with their Facebook account. Also you can use something like weed lair which is like a third party thing that allows you to collect emails through your app as well.
There are different ways to do this or you can just have a place where you can create an account just like you would on a regular website and you collect these emails and you might offer everything for free and not even have any ads or anything but when you collect people’s emails a person’s email is usually very valuable to your business because then you can use it to sell solo ads if people want to market to your email list you can promote your coupons or promote different products and services through the email list! you can get them to see your blog content so you can send them for traffic to your blog.
10) Cost Per Install (CPI) – A cost per install is basically when you get paid every time someone installs the app so play Haven is an example of this. They have a network where if you play play Haven and is featured within your app and you get so much money every time someone installs the app so it’s just another way to make money and it’s all based on you know making an app popular; in helping play Haven become more popular and hope they’ll pay you
for just getting results and getting people to install it.
While we all can be creative with what we want our app to be, one definitely needs all the help he can get to make the app as good as it is, as profitable as it is. And this is where trustworthy web and app agencies come in. We’d love to work with you. – thebmscompany.com
