033 : Bestselling indie games with A Dark Room’s Amir Rajan

awake. head throbbing. vision blurry.

So begins one of the most unique games to ever hit the App Store. What follows is an experience that takes the player through a dystopian world that starts with the simple gathering of wood and slowly grows in scope to places you’d never expect.

Amir Rajan discovered the original web-based A Dark Room (developed by Michael Townsend) on Hacker News and knew it needed to be on mobile. He negotiated the rights to create the iOS app and began his journey into RubyMotion and Objective-C development. He shares how he promoted his app and what it felt like to have a meteoric rise to the top of the App Store.

You should listen to this episode if you’ve ever wondered what it takes to have a best-selling app.

NOTE: It’s highly recommend that you finish A Dark Room before listening to this episode!

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030 : A carefully crafted app launch with Jeremy Olson

Jeremy Olson Tapity It’s easy to look at somebody like Jeremy Olson and think, “wow, this guy came out of nowhere and just dominated the app scene!” His created his first app, Grades, while still in college, and it won him Apple’s prestigious Design Award in 2011. From there, he founded Tapity, an app development company that just launched its newest app Hours. He’s also the co-author of the popular App Design Handbook.

But creating a beautiful product is only one step in the process of releasing successful apps. In this interview, Jeremy takes me back to the beginning, and shares how he used a journal-like blog to make industry connections and build an audience before he even knew what he was doing. He also talks about turning app releases into launch events, which explains why Hours was covered by almost every major tech news website.

With over a million apps in the App Store, app success really is all about the launch. Jeremy shares exactly how he does it.

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Why you should always use the alt attribute

I noticed something strange this week when I was looking at my blog stats: I was getting traffic through direct referral from BuzzFeed.

How odd, I thought. What on Novice No Longer could possibly be relevant to BuzzFeed?

It wasn’t my homepage that was linked, but a specific article: Getting a busy and being social for the socially awkward.

The link was from an article titled 28 Problems Every Type-A Person Will Understand. It wasn’t until I viewed the article and got to number 18 that I realized the relevance — they weren’t linking to my article exactly, but to an image that I used in the article. They just wanted a picture of a busy calendar, which I included in my post.

I headed over to Google (using incognito) and did an image search for the words “busy calendar.” The picture from my blog that BuzzFeed used in its post was the first result.

So how did I get a picture for my blog to be the top image search result for a fairly common phrase (which ultimately resulted in a link from BuzzFeed)?

The answer is simple: alt attributes. Continue reading →

020 : Gotta keep hustling with Laura and Sara of DigitalFlash

Have you ever gone to an event and thought it was just “meh”? Maybe you signed up because of the awesome lineup of panelists, but the questions posed by the moderator were just boring and there wasn’t any opportunity to ask questions. Or maybe the food sucked and all you wanted was a drink.

Laura and Sara met at a networking event that just didn’t suit their tastes. But they didn’t let it bother them — they turned their experiences into opportunity. Both Sara and Laura knew that together, they could throw amazing events, and they did just that.

DigitalFlash grew out of a desire for the types of events that the cofounders wanted to attend, and people responded. In this podcast, the two co-founders share how their events grew and how they started creating digital experiences for larger companies. If you visited the Samsung booth at the 2014 SXSW, you were a part of their work.

These two women are the very definition of the word hustle — they even left a convention floor in Vegas to appear on this podcast! They never stop.

If you need some motivation to keep on keeping on, this is the episode for you.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:52 — 32.1MB) | Embed

Pitching journalists: 5 things your competitors aren’t doing

Pitch email writer's block

I got to see a lot of pitches when I was working full-time as a tech journalist. Every morning, my inbox would be filled with a new batch of people wanting my attention — everyone from major PR companies to sole entrepreneurs launching their first product (and I’m not the only one!).

More often than not, the pitch emails would be absolutely terrible. It wasn’t just the novices that were making mistakes — even major marketing companies would churn out terrible press releases. I often wished I could reach through the computer, grab them by the shoulders, and yell, “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!”

Instead, all I could do was hit the Archive button. And archive I did.

But all this incompetence is great news for you: with just a little bit of work, your pitch emails will be better than 95 percent of the competition.

If you want to drastically increase the effectiveness of your press emails, here are five things you should be doing. Continue reading →