Strategy & Best Practices

7 Ways to Create a Best Practice AppDirect Profile

By Paul Arnautoff / Aug 16, 2011

Over the past few months, many of our Developers have been asking about how they can improve upon their AppDirect Profile. After helping many of them with their content, we’ve decided to consolidate our list into 7 easy ways you can create a best practice profile for your application.

1- Leverage your existing Marketing Materials

Let’s face it, you know your brand and your story better than anybody else. To create the best representation of your product, we recommend you leverage your existing marketing materials on your own site. This way, you can maintain consistent branding and messaging across all channels of distribution. As we always say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

2- Import existing Questions & Answers and Reviews

When you first create your profile, two very important sections of your profile will be empty: Questions and Reviews. To alleviate this temporary void, we invite you to import any existing Q&A’s and Reviews you may have for your product. Furthermore, if you have an existing Get Satisfaction community, let us know and we’ll link your community to your app profile. Your potential customers will thank you for the additional info with increased app subscriptions!

3- When it comes to resources, more is more

Resources are arguably the most important pieces of information on your application profile. Chances are, you’ve made some great videos and screenshots showcasing your product’s greatest strengths. Don’t be shy; this is your chance to tell your whole story.

4- Get Mobile

Week in and week out, one of the most common questions we hear from our users is “Does this application have a mobile version?” If you can answer this question in the affirmative, we recommend you share this information on your profile. We’ve found that the “Features” section is the best place to add this, as performed by Wistia in the picture above.

5- Optimize your photos

Great pictures are the best way to add color and spice up your application profile. Take it from Salespod above; they've shown their customers immediately that their application is optimized for every browser possible. To help optimize your images, we’ve created a list of the different sizing guidelines so you can get the most out of the space provided:

• Overview: 350 x 315
• Profile logo: 300 x 112
• Listing logo: 64 x 64
• Screenshots: 600 x 600
• Features screenshot: 600 x 600

6- Pick 4 to 6 Benefits for the front page

Generally, your application profile should showcase 4-6 “Benefits” on the main page. These are meant to be high level reasons why your application is useful. This is in contrast to the “Features” you can also add, which are meant to be more specific components of your product and should be introduced later in the evaluation process. We’ve found that if introduced too early, the meaning of Features can be lost. For this reason, stick to 4-6 high level Benefits for your profile page and keep it simple!

7- The squeaky wheel gets the grease

We are always striving to improve the developer experience on AppDirect and we would be glad to hear your feedback. If you have any suggestions or any features you would like us to add on the App Profiles, please let us know!

Do you have a business application that you’d like to distribute through our network of app stores? Feel free to register as a developer on AppDirect and create your product profile! If your application meets our syndication criteria, we’ll follow up with you regarding the next steps so you can benefit from an audience of thousands of new potential customers!