People have downloaded your mobile app, great but you’re not making any chips? Well here are a few reasons why, read them, and turn those frown into upside downs.

Mistakes Companies Make when Monetizing Mobile Apps

Mistake one. You decided to go for advertising. But who on earth will click on a mobile ad that will take them to “cheap flights to Rio de Janeiro” – mobile advertising as a whole does not currently work. No one in their right mind will want to go to a new website to spend time looking over A,B,C,D,E when they want the app to give them their info there and now.

Mistake two. App sales. While putting a price tag on your application may seem like a good idea, you’ve got to think, will anyone actually pay for it? As the app developer you think your app is probably better than it really is in actuality, and a 2.99 price tag on it may be too much. Now if you’re app is something like an internet updated timetable for trains on the London Underground, or something that helps hack life and make it a tad bit easier, then great, you can charge, but be sure that the price you’re asking is worth it.

Mistake three. Giving away value added services for free. You sold the app, and now you made a few bucks, great, but that’s a one off sale, and your cash flow is limited to how many people buy your products how many times. Instead of selling the app, give it away and charge for value added services. What do we mean?

Look at TapTap Revenge, a silly guitar hero type music game for the iPhone, some songs are given away for free to the consumer and are typically promotional songs that the record company pays Tapulous to publicize, the consumer wins by recieveing more content, the record company wins by increasing awareness of the new album / artist, and Tapulous wins by getting a few bucks.

But the buck doesn’t stop there, the company also offers the consumer premium content that they have to pay to download, these being known artists and new chart topping songs. The price is equivalent to iTunes, but again, everyone wins.

Again, when we say free we don’t just mean the end user, free may also relate to a B2B service. Say you plug into an augmented reality (AR) app that you download for free as a user, that app should have a strong B2B model where hotels/restaurants/stores can purchase a listings in the AR.

Mistake Four. You business model doesn’t allow you to monetize. More often than you would think people develop applications that simply cannot be monitized, how does this happen. The value proposition is not there, and it has a weak business model. Read all about it here. Always remember, a broken business model is a lot harder to fix when there’s a product, than to think of a good business model and build a product around it.

Mistake Five. You’ve thunk like an engineer and developed for the wrong platform. Every mobile developer I’ve ever spoken to loved Android. It’s open, its flexibile, it’s easy to develop for, it’s based on Linux, and has great overall functionality. Great! but who uses it? Currently the iPhone leads the global bandwith game globally, it’s app store offers the most products and is easily accessible and available, and is currently the market leader.

So, do you develop a pay to pay software product for a platform that is not the industry leader in terms of consumer apps, or do you go for the big market, where you will have more potential clients. The answer seems obvious, yet engineers are developing for the wrong platforms because they think those platforms are better. Was Beta-max a better product than VHS, it sure was, but who won out in the end. VHS. Consumer acceptance is key.

So how do we monetize an application.

Don’t go for advertising, it’s broken. Price your app accordingly, or give it away if you rely of B2B sales. Sell add on/value added services with your app. Think about your ideas business model before devoting resources to it. And finally offer your products to those that can actually drink from them, meaning, high consumer acceptance, and penetration.