Youtube Journey to Backpacking the World

Alright guys. I'm itching to begin with apps. I was being a little hesitant because I feel like I am abandoning my membership site, but I will try to avoid that. We all know that people typically give up right before striking gold, so why quit now that I have the site setup. I guess I just kind of lost my motivation for it. I want to see results, and who knows how long that could be with this membership site. So I'll continue trying to promote it and see what happens, but I'm diving head on into apps.

My first app is going to be a casino app on IOS. I like the idea of a casino app because they are addictive and people will pay real money for fake money which is awesome. I also just signed up for Revmob, Chartboost and Applovin. Gonna purchase an app template and start getting to work probably tonight or tomorrow.

EDIT: Just purchased the template. Gonna setup xcode now and see if I can figure everything out.

Game is done! Fully redesigned and ready to go. Surprisingly, I'm actually pretty proud of it considering I am in no way a designer. Thank god I have some basic photoshop/illustrator skills. The coding background definitely helped too! I really think apps is where it's at for me. The only downfall is the investment. I'm going to be sinking at least $200 in advertising for this app. Not to mention the cost of the source code was $100, which is CHEAP for an app source, and the developer account cost $100/year as well. Oh, and I also had to purchase stock graphics, which thankfully I got for pretty cheap.

I just purchased the developer account, so I will be waiting for it to get activated and I will submit my app for approval! Not sure what to do while I'm waiting. I can't exactly afford to start working on another game quite yet.

All in all, this app really didn't take me much time at all to reskin, but it's a very basic game. Future games I may have to hire a designer, but I'll still try to do what I can with what little design skills I have.

I'll keep you guys posted when the app goes live and I start advertising. Would like to make at least $10/day with this one app minimum, preferably $50. We'll see what happens!

Cheers,
xxf8xx

Ran into some roadblocks with the app. I still have to print and send some tax documents to Apple for my in-app purchases. I also have to figure out how to get in-app purchases to work period. Going to keep working at it today and hopefully figure everything out, then all that's left is to update some audio and make some icon graphics and submit (HOPEFULLY!).

Cheers,
xxf8xx

FatPenguin said:

Legit. Facebook ads are trash. Total garbage. And expensive.

Click to expand...

Actually they're really cheap if you know the ins and outs. Many people are reporting 3c installs that are targeted to their demographic. Worst case scenario I'm paying 30-50c/install, maybe a bit more, and if I can't push the cost down there's a member on here who optimizes ads to get the best possible cost. I'll keep you guys posted once the ad goes live.

Nice to hearing so far from you, many face this kinds of situation.
Never give up should be you motto, make a collection of good videos.
Waiting for next updates.

Ok I have everything figured out. I have to wait for the tax document to get to Apple, then they will initiate the paid apps contract. Once that's done my first IAP will get approved and I can add the rest and then test them with a test user account by clicking buy inside the app and then signing in while in the app. I don't think Apple even mentions that you have to sign in from within the app but apparently that's how it's done in case anyone needs to know.

So while I wait, I have some other stuff to do still, like boost some audio levels, find a new sound effect, create icons, etc... To bad I'll have that done before the weekend is even over. My mail probably won't even arrive for a week. Just going to have to play the waiting game I guess. Not sure what I'll be doing in the meantime when I have everything else done, maybe reply to some G Alerts for the membership site.

Cheers,
xxf8xx

Hey guys. Still waiting on tax documents to get approved. Right now I have 2 apps ready to go and am going to start working on another game today. I think this is my calling. Apps just make sense to me. With my developer background, basic design skills and extensive marketing knowledge, this is exactly what I want to do. This is the business I want to build and I can't wait to start getting apps live on the store.

This new game I will be working on is an infinite 2d side-scrolling runner game. I really like the idea of this game and can see a million different versions of this game in my head. If it works out nicely I'll probably end up churning out a few different games with the same code.

Anyway, back to work!

Cheers,
xxf8xx

Long time since my last post but I'm still kickin'! Here's the scoop: I'm still waiting for my paid apps contract to go in effect so I can release my first game I was working on that has in-app purchases. I'm starting to worry if they got my tax info or not. My side-scrolling game is awaiting approval and should be live very soon, and I have another app that's not a game that went live yesterday.

To my amazement, that app that went live already got 45 downloads yesterday! Not bad for having done zero promotion. Hopefully the downloads continue to pile up. The app has made a whopping 10 cents so far. It would be awesome if it could at least recoup the cost to make it which was only $30.

I'm also working on a Doodle Jump clone right now. All that needs to be done is Chartboost integration but I can't get it working for the life of me. I've emailed support and am waiting for a response which I'll most likely get tomorrow. I plan on cloning this game many, many times.

I'm also looking into some new games to make now. Might buy up a new source code sometime soon since I have nothing to do until I get Chartboost working.

Finally, I've started working on a business plan for my app business and want to apply for a business loan and take this business full-time. I'm not exactly sure if I will end up doing that, but I'm leaning towards the idea.

Anyway, I'll post back here when I have some more updates.

Quick update on my previous post:

2nd app is now live. WOO!
3rd app that needed Chartboost is now working, but it's not iPhone 5 ready, so I have to figure out what needs to be done to get it ready.
4th app is coming along nicely. I bought the source code for it on the day I made my last post and got to work right away. Chartboost is already integrated but I haven't tested it yet, but I'm sure it will work. All I need to do is replace some more graphics and hopefully be on my way.

The 1st app is still collecting dust while I want for my Paid Apps contract to go into effect. Who knows when that will be.

EDIT: Well that was easy! All I had to do was add a 4inch retina launcher image and boom, validation passed! Time to upload it, clone it and repeat many times over.

4th app is now being uploaded. The next step is to clone app #3 a bunch of times and then maybe setup some ad campaigns on fb.

I am thinking about posting screenshots from my AppAnnie dashboard here daily to show downloads/revenue. Might start doing that soon.

Cheers,
xxf8xx

Reskinned a jumper game today. Found out it was still not iPhone 5/4inch display ready because the images still didn't scale properly so I fixed that issue. Unfortunately the original game I submitted is already on it's way and I cannot figure out how to reject my own binary, so I will either have to wait for Apple to reject so I can resubmit, or they will approve it and I can just upload the new one immediately with the fixes.

Here are yesterday's stats:

Hi,
This apps publishing is interesting,
I got 3 questions for you
Where do you buy the game's source code? And how do you reskin them? Is there any tutorial on the internet I can read about reskinning apps and launching them?

Great, great journey, I took a while to read all posts but it worth.

one tip for the apps, you can put ads inside the app. Takeover or less intrusive formats.
You can also add a in-app option to the users pay if they dont want to see ads.

best of luck.

i jumped from page 1 to page 13 and it seems this isn't a YT journey anymore lol

just gonna ask you something, a question about an old topic. When u were doing CPA in youtube (1st page of this journey), were u doing BH or WH niches? And did u totally quite from CPA YT Promoting? If so, can u tell me why?

Thanks in advance

Lasaint said:

Hi,
This apps publishing is interesting,
I got 3 questions for you
Where do you buy the game's source code? And how do you reskin them? Is there any tutorial on the internet I can read about reskinning apps and launching them?

Click to expand...

I purchase the source codes from chupamobile. To reskin them I have just been purchasing stock graphics or using public domain graphics. A really good resource for graphics is the open game art website. To reskin an app you need to change all of the graphics. For all of my apps it never ended there though. I always seem to have issues with integrating ads and getting things working/positioned the way I like them, so it's great to have some coding experience.

If you want a tutorial, I know there is one on udemy. I haven't seen it personally though so I can't really vouch for how good it is, but it'll run you through all the steps it takes to reskin a game.

Rotudes said:

Great, great journey, I took a while to read all posts but it worth.

one tip for the apps, you can put ads inside the app. Takeover or less intrusive formats.
You can also add a in-app option to the users pay if they dont want to see ads.

best of luck.

Click to expand...

Glad you enjoyed the read!

Yes, I am already using ads in my apps. One of my games has in-app purchases as well but I am still waiting for my paid apps contract to go into effect with Apple so that I can set it all up and release it. As far as charging to remove ads, I'm not sure how I feel about that, because I would make more money off the ads than charging 99 cents. Maybe if I have multiple in-app purchases, if they purchase something that is 2.99, for instance some coins or some item or whatever, I might remove ads as a bonus for them.

rtraphic said:

i jumped from page 1 to page 13 and it seems this isn't a YT journey anymore lol

just gonna ask you something, a question about an old topic. When u were doing CPA in youtube (1st page of this journey), were u doing BH or WH niches? And did u totally quite from CPA YT Promoting? If so, can u tell me why?

Thanks in advance

Click to expand...

Yea, I have switched over now. Apps seems to be my calling and something I can make a legit business with.

With Youtube I was doing game hack videos. I made fake software and showed my screen using it. I stopped doing it because getting videos to stick is nearly impossible in that niche now since keywords like "hack" are allegedly blacklisted
and automatically send your videos into a spam queue for manual review IMO. But it's just way too frustrating to deal with all the accounts and proxies and yadda yadda. I'm over all that stuff.

You can also read in previous posts that I started doing Clickbank videos. I uploaded about 3k videos, and a huge portion of them stuck. Those videos are currently bringing in about 1-2 sales/month. If I had the time to keep doing CB videos I would, because it can be insanely profitable if I were to upload say, 100k videos. I am thinking about outsourcing the job when I have some more cash at my disposal. The main reason I stopped uploading CB videos was simply because it drives me insane uploading videos for 5 hours a day. I just can't handle that.

I wanted to start a real business. Something I can be proud of. When people ask me what I do for a living I don't want to tell them that I rip off other people's videos and profit from their work. I want to have my own products that I can demo and be proud of. The apps business is perfect for me. I love it. I have the coding knowledge already, and I know my way around photoshop. I can scale this business to the moon and then some too which is simply amazing. Everything just makes sense to me.

Anyway, I kind of went off on a tangent there, but hopefully that answers your question haha.

Cheers,
xxf8xx

xxf8xx said:

I wanted to start a real business. Something I can be proud of. When people ask me what I do for a living I don't want to tell them that I rip off other people's videos and profit from their work. I want to have my own products that I can demo and be proud of. The apps business is perfect for me. I love it. I have the coding knowledge already, and I know my way around photoshop. I can scale this business to the moon and then some too which is simply amazing. Everything just makes sense to me.

Click to expand...

I totally agree with you,
My main income right now is from incentive CPA with those blackhat niches. Eventhough I'm making a lot of money from it, somehow this kind of work just feel wrong.
That is why I'm now trying to get into Kindle ebook and mobile apps/games publishing.

I hope you get the biggest success from this journey.

xxf8xx said:

Yea, I have switched over now. Apps seems to be my calling and something I can make a legit business with.

With Youtube I was doing game hack videos. I made fake software and showed my screen using it. I stopped doing it because getting videos to stick is nearly impossible in that niche now since keywords like "hack" are allegedly blacklisted
and automatically send your videos into a spam queue for manual review IMO. But it's just way too frustrating to deal with all the accounts and proxies and yadda yadda. I'm over all that stuff.

You can also read in previous posts that I started doing Clickbank videos. I uploaded about 3k videos, and a huge portion of them stuck. Those videos are currently bringing in about 1-2 sales/month. If I had the time to keep doing CB videos I would, because it can be insanely profitable if I were to upload say, 100k videos. I am thinking about outsourcing the job when I have some more cash at my disposal. The main reason I stopped uploading CB videos was simply because it drives me insane uploading videos for 5 hours a day. I just can't handle that.

I wanted to start a real business. Something I can be proud of. When people ask me what I do for a living I don't want to tell them that I rip off other people's videos and profit from their work. I want to have my own products that I can demo and be proud of. The apps business is perfect for me. I love it. I have the coding knowledge already, and I know my way around photoshop. I can scale this business to the moon and then some too which is simply amazing. Everything just makes sense to me.

Anyway, I kind of went off on a tangent there, but hopefully that answers your question haha.

Cheers,
xxf8xx

Click to expand...

I'm happy u finally found some section where you really feel confortable in.

Gonna ask you some quest about CB vids. You said you had MVB, why were u having such big uploading queues? Also, i'm supposing that CB Product promotion isn't considered as blackhat, therefore i'm assuming that uploading atleast 50 vids in a single channel wouldn't have any risk since it would be a niche chanel (clickbank niche). As i said, i'm ASSUMING and i want you to correct me if i'm wrong (if you don't mind of course).

So, my questions are:

Is it okay to make channels with more than 50 vids in each one talking about clickbank/amazon products? Would they survive? Is youtube against affiliate links in video's description? If YT has no problem with that, considering it's whitehat, how many vids per day would be safe to upload? Becouse i have MVB Pro and i can easily add 50 vids in a single add into one account. Would it be safe to add 50 vids in one account if i take the needed time to get many subs+a nice channel design?

I'm insisting in YT since i can't afford learning SEO atm, so i want to use YT for CPA/PPD but you opened a good door saying that stuff about clickbank

I don't want to annoy you, feel free to respond and i wish you best of luck

rtraphic said:

I'm happy u finally found some section where you really feel confortable in.

Gonna ask you some quest about CB vids. You said you had MVB, why were u having such big uploading queues? Also, i'm supposing that CB Product promotion isn't considered as blackhat, therefore i'm assuming that uploading atleast 50 vids in a single channel wouldn't have any risk since it would be a niche chanel (clickbank niche). As i said, i'm ASSUMING and i want you to correct me if i'm wrong (if you don't mind of course).

So, my questions are:

Is it okay to make channels with more than 50 vids in each one talking about clickbank/amazon products? Would they survive? Is youtube against affiliate links in video's description? If YT has no problem with that, considering it's whitehat, how many vids per day would be safe to upload? Becouse i have MVB Pro and i can easily add 50 vids in a single add into one account. Would it be safe to add 50 vids in one account if i take the needed time to get many subs+a nice channel design?

I'm insisting in YT since i can't afford learning SEO atm, so i want to use YT for CPA/PPD but you opened a good door saying that stuff about clickbank

I don't want to annoy you, feel free to respond and i wish you best of luck

Click to expand...

I haven't done anything with YT in about 3-4 months now, so everything I say could be totally wrong. But with that said, I was uploading 100 videos/account no problem. I made my own accounts each on unique IPs and uploaded the videos using the same IP the account was created on. If you don't do that, your accounts probably won't survive for a very long time.

I don't know what Youtube's stance on affiliate links is, but these videos typically stay alive, so I think they are ok with it.

I'm not sure what you mean by uploading queue, but I built a bot to scrape videos that link to CB links, and then change all their links in the description to my own links, then I would download all the videos and reupload them.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
xxf8xx

Updated one of my games today to include Chartboost, but mostly to change the keywords. You have to upload a new version of the app to change the keywords so I figured I might as well integrate Chartboost. The previous keywords were doing nothing for me since I just picked random ones. This time I found a bunch of keywords with much smaller competition which will hopefully increase the downloads for this app.

All for today!

Cheers,
xxf8xx

It's been a while since my last update so I thought I'd come drop in for a sec.

I'm still continuing with apps. I currently have 6 apps that are live, and another one that will be live tonight or tomorrow. One of my apps went live yesterday. I really wasn't expecting it to do much since none of my other apps really took off, however to my surprise it got 360 downloads yesterday! That's incredible! Before that my most downloads from one app in a single day was around 150 if I remember correctly. It'll be interesting to see if this app generates some revenue.

As far as earnings go, I've made nearly $20 so far. Mostly it was from one install I got from one of my users clicking through an ad and downloading the app. For that one download I received $13, which was probably a mistake on the advertiser's end. Nonetheless, it still counts in my books.

Here's a screenshot of my App Annie account from yesterday:



I'll come back and report with some updates when bigger and better things start happening!

Cheers,
xxf8xx