With so many developers out there trying to find the magic ingredient to massive success, surely there are hundreds of services aimed at the little guy who doesn’t have a big name yet.

Well, there are options, and I’ve tried a few, but if ever there’s a gap in the market for an entrepreneur to fill, getting small time Apps noticed would be it.

Google Adwords

The first path for many may be towards Google Adwords. Surely a network of ads that spans the globe will easily reach into every home and spread the news of your new app.

Unfortunately, there are a few things halting your success.  Firstly (and this goes for all advertising) your app is usually cheap – real cheap.  Somehow the iPhone App market has been driven into the ground.  If one takes a purely economical rational approach to buying apps, only one thing has to be asked – What else can I buy with my $0.99? And for most of the Apps out there for $0.99, you’re doing extremely well compared to what else that $0.99 would get you.  But customers aren’t happy.  Your App is in a no-mans land where unless you make an app that’s worth much more, satisfaction will be hard to come by.  

But all that aside, cheap apps don’t do so well when advertising via Google.  To get good ad positions, with high sale rates, you have to pay up to 25 or 35 cents per click.  And that just doesn’t add up. I’ve tried smaller click costs ($0.01) but they end up going to the wrong customers and I get a whopping 95% bounce rate on customers coming in on the ads. So Google isn’t the answer.

Admob Ads

The next big things is Admob.  Here you can create ads that appear only on iPhones, so you know people will be able to download your app.  So what did I find?  Firstly, ad click costs are much higher here.  The lowest you can go is $0.03.  So given an input of $50, I managed to get some 1600 clicks in just two minutes.  I was stoked!  1600 iPhone users interested in my ad.  And so quickly too!  But what did the sales data show?  Nothing.

Not even a little spike appeared in the sales data following the ads being placed on the network. Is this due to fraud?  Or just people not wanting to buy?  

Other

There are of course other options to advertising.  Pick an iPhone app site and they’ll usually have advertising options.  They can be quite a hefty outlay with no assurance that they will increase sales, so it’s a bit of a risk.  I haven’t tried any of these options, but if you have, please let us know what you found.

“When do I get paid?”, “When will Apple transfer my money?”, “Does iTunes Connect give me my money in one lump sum?”, “How long should I wait until inquiring about my money?”

Well, I can’t answer all of the questions, but I can shed some light with my experience with the whole deal.

Financial Reports

You must wait for these after the end of the fiscal month.  Note that this is not the same as the calendar month, so don’t assume that you’ll get paid earning up to the 30th or 31st. The reports will start coming in about 10 or 11 days after the end of the fiscal month and may take 3 or 4 days before all the reports are ready. 

You’ll get a report for each region.

• Australia
• US
• Canada
• UK
• Eurpoe
• Japan
• Rest Of World

Some have noted that they didn’t receive what they expected at all – some in the order of half of what they were expecting. My experience has been good though with differences only ranging in about +/- $5

Bank Payments

If a region reaches US$250 or more owing to you, then you can expect payment into the bank account you entered in iTunes Connect. Because each region is seperate, you will receive one payment from each of the regions that owe you more than US$250.  

Payment for me occured in 14 days after the reports were ready, but some have claimed that Apple only pays on the 2nd of the month (obviously not in my experience) 

Be warned that your bank may charge you steeply for incoming foreign currency transfers.  In my case I was charged $15 PER REGION.  So it really adds up if you’re not prepared.  Talk to your bank – if you’re rolling in cash they’ll be more than happy to come to an agreement

Well, it was almost that easy.

iTunes Connect hasn’t always been the speediest to reply to emails, and sometimes it’s hard to know if they’ve ignored you, your email was filtered, or if it’s still just in a queue.

My advice is to keep up the emails until you eventually get a reply.

Anyhow, after a couple of emails to itsbanking@apple.com, I got a reply with the following pdf in it (its-bank) with instructions to fill out, sign and fax or email a scan back to itsbanking@apple.com.

They also noted that once you’ve entered bank data into iTunesConnect, it will never show any changes to the details. And further to that they’ll never send you confirmation.

And to top it all off, the process of changing the details can take up to 10 working days. So make sure you get your new details in quickly if you plan on closing your bank account any time soon.

All in all, not too bad. They’re obviously run off their feet over there with the mass of developers and any financial change like this will take time, but it would be nice if they had a more robust way of contacting them.. And not replying to change reqests with any sort of confirmation is just a little rude. All I can do now is hope that I get paid.