Make your iPhone application famous

Recently Don turned me onto Stack Overflow a social network site designed for programmers to ask questions or to answer previously posted questions about (mostly) programming. Since I've been on it for some 21 days, I have enjoyed it greatly. I've asked questions and have had answers posted quickly, most of which concisely answering my question. I think I'm hooked.  As well as asking questions I do like to scour the site looking for newly posted questions that I can answer. One such question was "How to make a program you developed get famous?" Not only did I answer it, but it was both flagged as being the correct answer as well as the highest voted answer. Here is the excerpt from that posting:

Before I start with my points I'd like to say that your application needs to have a compelling story, a value add, a niche and that it fulfills a function that is necessary. If you have just an application that is like all of the others (like your competition) with no value add, ease of use, great user experience, etc... then it will be very hard for you to be heard above the noise.

First, you need to find what sites are talking about your competition. Once that is known approach them and see if they would do a review.

Second, if you have not already, contact a PR company and do a press release, be sure to focus on the applications target audience.

Third, send out samples or request to have your application reviewed by the same people who are reviewing the competitions applications. I find that when developing applications if I can ping reviewers in the technology section of some of the popular print and online magazines and the review is published you'll get great exposure.

Fourth, once you get the ball - run with it. Consider the feature list and upgrade path and try to time it with events that are near your applications market space. When updating (significantly) contact all of the same people who you contacted before and ping them again with why the new version deserves some notoriety or at least a review.

Fifth, once you do start getting press, use it to push it into the hands of others to review and talk about. If you can work the right angle and have a good story you can create a snowball effect and have some great press in a short amount of time.

Lastly, you'll need to have media available for people to see what it is that you are offering. If you have not already set up a channel on YouTube or one of the many other video hosting sites. Post at least one video of the application featuring some of the highlights. If you want to maximize your exposure and you have a significant feature list consider making multipule videos with two or three features with better coverage. But remember people have short attention spans and want to know as much as they can about something in the shortest amount of time.

Now there are many more thing that you can do to get your app, your company, and yourself noticed but I only had enough time to go into as much detail as I did.

I hope this information helps you in your promotion of your app and please feel free to comment if you can think of any other good tips. Cheers!