The market for iPhone apps is huge at this moment in time! There are more than 50 million iPhones in circulation, yet only 85,000 apps in the iStore. Demand is currently out-weighing supply by a large factor which creates a huge opportunity for the business-savvy entrepreneur to make a killing.

Whether you’re a programmer or whether you’re simply a businessman who has access to outsourced developers, creating the application is only half the battle. Once it’s ready for release, we have to consider doing more than simply uploading it to Apples iStore in order to see a good return on our investment (whether time or money).

These are three tips that I hope you’ll find useful for promoting your iPhone apps.

Tip 1 – Build a Branded Website
The challenge when using iTunes is that we have very little control over the placement of our app. In order for our marketing efforts to be truly effective, we need a piece of Internet real estate over which we have complete control. By creating a website for our app (no matter how simple that site is) we suddenly regain control of our brand and have fixed location to which we can drive traffic. From here, it’s a simple matter to link back to the iStore in order for your customers to buy your iPhone app.

Tip 2 – Go Viral
If you’ve been around the Internet for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve heard the term “viral marketing”. This technique is all about encouraging people to tell others how great your app is and can be one of the most effective marketing methods in our arsenal. From a psychological perspective, we’re not just getting people to tell others that our app exists, we’re actually getting an implicit recommendation which carries huge weight.

You can implement this in a couple of ways:

• By using a “Tell-a-Friend” script on your website
• By using a similar technique from within the application itself

Either way, this shouldn’t be a difficult or costly addition from a development perspective, and the payback in terms of increased traffic will more than justify it.

Tip 3 – Make Use of Social Media
This follow on naturally from our previous tip to some extent, as we’re asking people to make a recommendation via such sites as Twitter and Facebook. However, we can take this to another level by utilising Social Media ourselves as an integrated part of our marketing.

For instance, you can talk about cool features of your app on Twitter, or you can create demo videos of your app in action and post them to YouTube. Whatever approach you prefer, it would be a mistake to ignore the power of social media in your marketing today.

Clearly, these 3 tips for promoting your iPhone apps are meant simply as an introduction. However, if you follow them, you’ll have a solid foundation on which to build the rest of your marketing. The most important thing right now is to get started and to take positive action to increasing your income by tapping the lucrative iPhone app market.