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At last, after seemingly endless brainstorming, wireframing, coding, testing, bug-fixing, re-testing, submission to Apple, approval, and dealing with the awfulness that is iTunes Connect, it’s time to make your app available for sale. You’ve already prepared PR materials and targeted your audience, and now it’s time to embark on the final, most exciting phase of building an app: the launch.

Don’t kid yourself by thinking that once your app is available in the App Store you’ll be able to go on vacation and occasionally check your download figures and chart ranks while sipping a piña colada. Your work is far from done. Actually – and you had better sit down for this – it will never be done, for as long as the app is available for sale. That is, if you actually intend to make money from publishing apps.

Cheer up, though – one of the great things about the App Store…

So you’ve already created a killer app, and equally killer PR materials after reading Part I of this post. Now you need to find someone who cares enough to listen.

If your app provides value to its users and is competitively priced, then your audience is definitely out there, and it’s up to you to find it. Once you identify your audience, you’ll be ready to efficiently deploy your marketing and PR strategy. This post talks about some of the ways to get that done.

Target your audience

Every app requires some sort of targeting, whether it appeals to a mass audience or a narrow niche. The first step in targeting your audience happens when you build your product.

In order to convey your marketing messages efficiently, you should be spending a lot of your time communicating with the people who may potentially download your app, and little to no time…

Let’s face it. There are some harsh realities to being an independent app developer. To name just a few:

• Despite popular opinion, selling apps isn’t easy money
• There are approximately 1 bazillion titles in the App Store
• It’s seriously difficult to stand out in this market
• Many app developers don’t have extra cash lying around to fund heavy-duty PR campaigns

We all know this by now. So yes, your app is, by far, the greatest creation ever to grace the App Store, and it practically sells itself. But you’ll still need to work pretty hard to captivate users.

Drawing attention to your product requires public relations, and the costs of funding mainstream marketing and PR campaigns are completely out of reach for many developers, who are left to do it themselves.

This guide contains the basics you’ll need to spread awareness of your product, which in turn…