• The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, July 15, 2009 1:08 PM

There are now more than 65,000 free and paid applications in Apple's App Store, which makes standing out a tough task for app makers. As such, developers are increasingly coming up with various ways to make a splash, The Wall Street Journal says, employing everything from temporary discounts to guerilla marketing tactics.

For example, PopCap Games saw its popular title Peggle shoot up from No. 60 in paid apps to No. 2 in 24 hours by cutting the price of the game to $0.99 from $4.99 for four days. The company declined to provide revenue figures but said that sales during the discount period increased 20 to 25 times the previous volume.

Apple, of course, gets 30% of all third-party app sales. On Tuesday, the iPhone maker said that customers had downloaded more than 1.5 billion free and paid apps so far. "The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality," Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs said in a press release. "With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up."

The key to success with the App Store is to appear on the list of top-ranked apps compiled by Apple. People also find apps through keyword searches or by browsing categories. "If it appears in the top 100, then everybody will see it," said Vijay Chattha, head of VSC Consulting, which is launching a business to help iPhone app developers promote their wares.

Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal »