Earlier today I was listening to Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy Podcast, Show #740, and there were two callers taking about the marketing of their iPhone apps, as well as some comments made by Chris Marquardt, one of Leo’s regular guests, and as a result of the discussions, I am certain the marketing of my apps has been rather brain-dead.  The first of the two callers indicated that relying upon Apple to market your iPhone apps is a very bad idea, because the only way anyone is going to find your app is if they enter the app’s name, spelled exactly correctly.  Chris Marquardt, who also has an app in the iPhone App Store, said that one had to come up with a unique and memorable name.  His own app, Pocket Chris, teaches how to be a good photographer, and it has its very own website. as you can see.

In light of this good advice, when I look at my biggest-selling app’s name, Fraction Calculator, I cringe.  Go ahead and Google just that title.  You won’t find my app, but more’s the pity, there are large number of sites that these keywords bring in.  Even if my app were searchable in Google (which it might soon be), where will it be in the ranking?  10,001th? 

I will admit that not everyone needs a Fraction Calculator.  But of the 2 million Windows Phone 7 users out there, there’s bound to be many more than 34 that could use a Fraction Calculator!  How to get the word out, though? 

Seems I need to rename my products to be less prosaic and more memorable.  But what could I call the Fraction Calculator, besides what I’ve called it?  Its name says exactly what it is!  Here’s a list of brainstormed new names I came up with this afternoon:

• Pocket Fraction (a little bit of a ripoff?)
• Fraction Master
• Fractionater
• Traveling Fraction
• Traveling Fraction Master

You see where this is going?  Well, I am not so sure.  “Fractionator” suggests “Terminator”, or at least that’s what I was thinking at the time.  Heh.

But one of the other points that Marquardt made was that the name you choose needs to be registered as a domain name and have its own website, too!  Like his app has. 

Well, in between writing that last sentence and this one I went ahead and registered the domain “pocketfraction.com”.  It was available, sounded cool, and so I did it.  I have an idea that I might combine Fraction Calculator and Decimal 2 Fraction into one product using the new name. 

We shall see.

And I better get back to my Ham Radio Exam Prep app, too.