5 Reasons to Use WordPress for Marketing Your iPhone, Android or iPad Application

You’ve had a eureka moment and with necessity being the mother invention, you find yourself one day saying, “there should be an app that does this”. After researching the mobile application market, you find that currently no application exists and you have a golden opportunity to seize a first move advantage. And so you embark on the journey of application development from start to finish and finally receive the email notification stating that your app has been approved and is available for purchase in the iTunes App Store or the Android Market. All you need to do now is sit back and let your app do the rest of the work. Not so fast. Maybe such would be the case if you were one of only a handful of developers competing for real estate in the iTunes homepage, but these days, the landscape has become extremely crowded and competitive and it does not seem to show any signs of slowing down soon. Time to rethink your online marketing strategy.

That’s right, marketing strategy. Think of your app, as an investment, or a business. And just like any other business, it would not be wise to rely solely on an app store directory to bring traffic to your products. Likewise, just like many other businesses, it would be a good idea to have a website whose sole purpose is market your iPhone apps and or Android applications. Lastly, just like any other business, it would be a good idea to have a marketing strategy for your app. This is where Wordpress comes in to the picture.

Wordpress – not just a website, but a marketing strategy

For those you who think WordPress is just for blogs – think again because it’s one of the most powerful CMS platforms you can use to build a website for marketing mobile apps. By choosing to use Wordpress to help you market your iPhone or Android application, you’re gaining access to one of the most powerful open source developer bases around to help you increase your sites functionality, while reducing your IT costs and headaches!

1. Search Engine Optimization

I’m putting this at the top of the list because it’s the one question everyone asks the day their site launches. While it’s not the only driving factor for building traffic, it is a marketing technique everyone can wrap their head around right off the bat (unlike SMM, Social Media Marketing & Inbound Marketing – more on that later). However, understanding and knowing how to optimize a site are not one and the same. Fortunately for you though, Wordpress’ clean code makes it easy for search engines to find relevant content on your site and therefore hopefully helping to increase your sites visibility. Don’t just take my word for that though. Check out what Google has to say about this.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-for-bloggers/

Of course simply using WP is not going to solve all of you SEO needs, but it will give you a good clean base to build off of. While there are many optimizers who promise you the world, keep in mind that results are often quite difficult to quantify at times. If this is your first site, I would suggest getting familiar WordPress’ SEO functionality before outsourcing something a WP plugin can do for you at a fraction of the cost.

2. Ease of Use

I’ve been designing and developing websites since 1999. Back then, that was a big deal. Today, it’s just a part of business, like having a phone number. And just like my phone, I don’t want to have to worry about the nuts and bolts of my site, nor do I want that to occupy a good part of my day. That’s the ease of use that WordPress offers. The ability to update and modify your content, switch designs and theme and or extend it with plugins all of which can be managed from a well thought out administrator’s control panel.

3. Plugins and Open Source Development

Have you seen that Verizon commercial where they show you what happens when you tap into the power of their network and they illustrate the point with an army of people behind one individual? Well that’s kind of what you get when you’re working with open source tools that have a solid developer base like that of Wordpress. As this developer base continues to grow so does the availability of add-ons, both free and paid which is why you can see such diversity in WP powered sites ranging from simple personal blogs to complex e-commerce driven communities and down to our specific focus WordPress powered web sites for marketing iPhone, iPad and Android applications.

I’ll be discussing this topic more in depth in an upcoming article that focuses variety of plugins and premium themes that are available for Wordpress powered sites.

4. Support

Because of Wordpress’ overwhelming popularity among developers and end users you can be rest assured that finding the support for whatever hurdles you may come across will not be all that difficult. The support forums on WordPress.org are extremely active which makes getting the information you need in a timely manner quite feasible. In addition to the WP site, there are also several premium membership sites that offer support as well as a plethora of freelancers who are available to help you address your support needs on a case by case basis.

Its widespread use means that most of your add-ons (if gathered from the appropriate source) will work out of the box with end user functionality taken into consideration – meaning the plugin settings can be adjusted from a control panel.

5. Social Media and Inbound Marketing

Wordpress offers publishers the ability to interact with their audience through social media using functionality that ranges from simple commenting to seamless integration with platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. By engaging your audience in this manner your content can live wherever the conversation is taking place online through the simple use of RSS feeds ( a standard feature in Wordpress ). Other functions such as recommendations and social bookmarking can easily be added to any Wordpress site by simply adding a plugin or two.

Social media and inbound marketing are two of the most talked about promotion strategies for increasing exposure for Android, iPhone and iPad apps in their respective market places. The important issue here is to know that WP has you covered if you need to hit the ground running with a SMM plan. While that plan can always be fine tuned and tweaked according to your applications’ needs, considering the cost (free) this one is gonna get you the most bang for your buck.

Social media and inbound marketing are two massive topics in which we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. For more on this topic please refer to my piece on inbound marketing for iPhone apps and Android applications here.

In Summary

If you’re thinking about building a website for your iPhone, iPad app or Android application I hope that I’ve been able to at least have you consider using WordPress. I’ve only mentioned five reasons to use Wordpress to build your app site, but the reality is that I can name 20 or 30 more! Consider this list as an introductory one and by no means a comprehensive one. The five topics mentioned here can be ordered in a variety of ways in terms of priority depending on how you look it. Personally I would say that for my needs they’re all interdependent.