This was one of the mantras for the early adopters of mobile apps, and it posited the idea that if an app was published in front of an audience in the app store, it would immediately become insanely popular and would guarantee your company’s ROI. Now with more than 2 million apps in multiple app ecosystems, being unique, valuable, and adhering to best practices in user interface design are integrally important in achieving success in publishing your app.

One of the biggest frustrations that can happen after you’ve put in the long time and effort of building an app is the pain of learning that your app’s been rejected. The long hours, the sleepless nights, the weeks or months of your life that you’ve put into this – not to mention the financial cost or investors you have backing this venture – there’s a lot of pressure riding on the moment your application goes live. For many individuals, companies, and organizations, it’s totally unacceptable for something like this to go so disastrously wrong.

As aforementioned, there are rules and procedures that need to be followed with impeccable detail in order to be accepted by Google Play. We’ve broken them down into a 7-step checklist. They are as follows:

1. Create a Developer Account using a Google Account. There is a small registration fee of $25. Fill out the form with all requested information and accept the developer agreement. It can take up to 48 hours for your registration to fully process.

Note: If you plan to sell your app or provide in-app purchases, you will need a merchant account. This will allow you to create a payment center where you manage all monthly sales.

2 The next step is to create the app. Go to the section, “All Applications” and click “Create Application”. From there you set your default language and then choose a title for your app. After these items are completed, finish filling out the details of your app listing.

3 From here, you will need to create an app release. Select your app, then on the left-hand side of the menu, click “Release management” then choose “App releases”. There are four options here which are an internal test, closed test, open test and production release. These allow you to test your app to various users before you make your app live to the public.

4 Now is the time to upload the Android Package Kit (APK). Follow the instructions on the screen from here and click save.

5 Select the content rating and price. If you are unsure about what your content rating classification would be, be sure to refer to the questionnaire located at the store in the left menu called “Content rating”.

You will now need to set up the pricing and distribution. Setting up the price for your app is important because if it is set to free, you cannot change it to paid later. If you decide to change it in the future, you’ll have to repeat this process again and specify the free vs. the premium version in the app store. The distribution should also be determined at this time.

6 Double check that you have a green checkmark on all the steps before finalizing and rolling your app out. You should also perform a review to see if there are any issues or items missed before the final roll out. If you encounter any issues at this time, consult with your developer or application development team to ensure all bugs are stomped on and glitches smoothed out.

7 Once you are all set, click “Confirm rollout”. Now you have a live app, congratulations! Feel the glorious warmth of accomplishment bubbling up in your chest as you download it to your mobile device and demonstrate it to your friends and family at dinner parties and other events. Building an app isn’t easy, nor should it be taken lightly.

Part 1: Keyword and Content Audit Tools

Google Alerts – This handy research tool will alert you to specific topics, keywords, or brands that appear on the search engine’s results. Creating an alert will trigger an email containing the information that you are looking to discover as it is published in real time. This can be particularly handy if you’re looking for breaking news, or recent articles to inspire new content from.

Google Keyword Planner – This tool will show trends and keyword data to help you plan what kind of content you want to produce, and how difficult it will be to attact traffic for it. It provides the number of searches for certain keywords and the cost per click if buying ads. This can be useful if you’re gearing up content centered around an event, or have a lot of competition surrounding a certain topic.

iSpionage – This 3rd party tool is great to search competitor data. You can uncover information about your competitors such as, what keywords they are targeting,  see if they are spending money on paid search, plus even see their advertising copy.

Spyfu – This is another useful tool that provides more insights into competitor content and strategies. Like many other of these tools, Spyfu is a subscription-based model and the number of tools and features you can access will depend on the membership level you have.

Part 2: Content Generation Tools

We also have a handful of writing tools we like to use when creating content.

Feedly – You choose the topics you’re targeting, and Feedly builds feeds based on those topics. You can find related and fresh content with this tool, helping you generate ideas not only for your assignment in hand but for future planning as well.

Hubspot – This is a tool that can help by automatically generating a week’s worth of ideas for blog posts. It is simple to use – simply inputting a few nouns, the tool produces topics almost instantly.

Grammarly – This is a wonderful tool for proofreading your content. You can either sign into the website and copy and paste your content, or you can download the Chrome extension, which integrates with Gmail, and tons of other apps for seamless on-the-go editing.

Yoast SEO – This is a plugin for websites that indicates whether or not your post content is properly optimized.

Part 3: Promoting and Measuring Content Effectiveness

We have a couple of favorite tools to promote and measure our content.

CoSchedule – This tool is amazing at scheduling content to go to social media pages, blogs, or emails. You can create campaigns within the dashboard itself, assign tasks to team members, and even create an approval process within your team.

Google Analytics – This tool is both free and is priceless. You can gather great insights from the data it provides. We use this tool all the time. You can see which pages convert the best, and provide new forms of content to complement what’s already working for your business.

What if you have a hard time explaining what your company does in a few words, then you likely have a brand alignment issue. No matter how complex your business, service, or product is, there should be a way to explain it simply. More importantly, why does your company exist? What unique problem does it solve? Why would someone hire your company instead of the competition? If you cannot answer these questions, you may need to wonder indeed if your company even needs to exist in the first place.

Simon Sinek’s famous allegory of the golden circle applies perfectly to how a brand is. On the outer circle, it explains what a company does. The middle circle explains how a company does it. The core of the circle should address the crux of our discussion here: why does the company do it? 

Brands that have longevity and have stood the test of time always understood and were able to explain their “why”.

Can you?

In the age of digital media, brands have been able to take the center stage on a shoestring budget compared to before. In the past, only big brands and companies could afford traditional media – the 30 second Superbowl commercial, or another prized television spot. Startups could never dream of national brand recognition through guerrilla marketing and tiny ad spends.

Those days are now over. Social media advertising and influencer marketing have opened the stage for smaller companies to get in front of their target audiences and deliver the right message at the right time. The virality of the Internet and the democratizing of content production has given people with a purpose a platform to become household names. With that has come shorter attention spans, greater competition, and increasing need to innovate and be unique within the marketplace, offer the best products or the best service or the best price, or quickly be passed up.

For that reason, no matter how established your enterprise is, or how loyal you may think your customers are, you can never rely on the days of former glory to hold your brand up. Think about big retailers such as Toys R Us or Blockbuster who failed to innovate themselves and were forced to the brink of extinction and beyond by failing to adapt.

Go or Grow – your audience is changing, aging, changing their minds, and if you fail to follow suit, be prepared to be forgotten.

Just like real life, people won’t remember what you said, or what you did. But what will always resound with them is how you made them feel.

For that reason, practicing excellent customer service at every touchpoint you have with your audience is an integral aspect of building and maintaining a brand. Every interaction should be consistent, regardless of the platform. Your tone and messaging should be the same whether a customer calls your sales department or receives a reply from your company’s Facebook Messenger.

At Powered Labs, we provide an array of consulting and brand development services to position your enterprise-level organization for success. Our goal is to help leverage our skills to help businesses flourish and grow, overcome obstacles, and unleash new possibilities for future growth.

In recent years, tons of people have been jumping onto the app-design bandwagon, expecting to become millionaires with the next big app trend, sadly unprepared and realizing too soon that the pretty picture isn’t so pretty when reality hits.

Creating an app may appear easy and carefree to some who have no experienced true entrepreneurship in life. This is quite the surprise and it is far from a pretty life that many successful app guru’s perceive. Designing and brainstorming an app requires the daily grind of the customer development process, customer service, knowledge of managing finances along with taxation, and even managing team expectations.

When something brings you passion and countless sleepless nights, just make the move. Often times, those sleepless nights bring forth million dollar ideas. Before making the final app development plunge, make sure you are able to answer a few questions on your app ideas.

If your thinking of creating a mobile app which also carries a high amount of competing apps with it, you probably have a good idea on your mind. Your idea may have a demand for the market you are shooting for. This will require you to brainstorm some more and identify what would make your product stand out against the competitors along with a reasoning as to why consumers should buy from your apps instead of thousands of others within the same app market.

If you are coming out with a totally new app which will create a new market of consumers, it may take a bit more time and effort to create a reason of use and create a bit of difficulty establishing your buying demographic.

Being an entrepreneur is a long journey, it’s not just a one stop destination. Entrepreneurship is like a rock-star on tour, it’s constant travel, show after show. It’s not an overnight achievement, time, patience, and effort will breed ones success. If you aren’t ready to invest time, money and energy needed to develop your ideas into a reality, then you probably shouldn’t start building your empire just yet. Your empire may crumble without readiness.

If you’re ready to travel on a journey for a long-haul, you probably should begin your adventure and make your ideas into a successful reality.

Most important question of all, for the non-developing brainstormers who have amazing ideas for an app, are we right for you? App Development is the most critical step in the appearance and creation of your masterpiece. Most brainstormers make the mistake of spending too little on the app they want created and setting aside a larger amount for the app marketing.

What they don’t realize is that wasting a large amount of money on marketing is not going to get a consumer to stick to the app if it sucks. It’s best to invest that extra amount into a positive outcome. When your mind is a canvas, our computers become your masterpiece. We can bring life to your ideas, which will then bring delight your customers. It’s proven, great products will majorly reduce your marketing costs.

There has been a worldwide love and interest of the mobile app development world for years now. Whether it be for a business application or a mobile game application, apps keep users minds occupied and informed with the latest information.

How did we even function without apps? I can’t even remember the last time I didn’t have my phone strapped to my side like a child. Our mobile devices seem to be a major life necessity.

An App is simply an application software for mobile devices. Apps are computer generated programs developed for mobile devices such as iPhones, Smartphones, tablets, along with other mobile devices. It seems that in this present time, apps are the only way to make the most out of the smartphones. So how did mobile apps develop?

When you think about it, apps really make our lives easier. There are millions of apps available, that’s amazing considering how creative and versatile the varieties are. Social networks bring long distanced persons closer, travel apps allow you to book flights without a computer present, banking apps offer mobile checking, along with other varieties of apps which ease our lives. The Apple App store alone adds more than 20,000 apps every month!

According to research:

Total iPhone app downloads: 30 billion

Total Android app downloads: 15 billion

Average number of apps per smartphone user: 41

The mobile app market is seeing an increasing revenue of over $30 billion annually. In 2014, 138 million app downloads were recorded in just one year! It is estimated that 268 million will be downloaded by the year 2017!

According to recent reports, the year 2014 held a whopping 19 billion software developers around the world, by 2020, that number is said to flourish into 25 billion developers.

India, Russia, and China are the locations populating the majority of mobile app developers.

Many don’t realize how big of an industry mobile app development is. If it weren’t for our developers today, in the past, and in the future, we wouldn’t have the convenient technology that we rely on everyday. In my next post, I will explore the mobile app development landscapes.

Anyone who has paid a visit to the city of Pittsburgh knows how confusing and congested the roadways are. The three rivers that meet at the city provides drivers with a tangle of bridges, layered overpasses and lots of Pittsburghese road rage. Pittsburgh drivers are in a constant race with each other.

Surprisingly, Uber is planning on rolling out their first self-driven cars in the heart of Steel City.

As a part of the first phase of the new Uber experiential, random dispatch of the new self-driving cars will be implemented. Call up your ride with Uber as usual, and randomly you may get one of the self-driven Volvos. If you’re one of the lucky ones, your ride will be free! Plans are in the works for Uber to eventually partner with other automakers for creation of the driverless car.

Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute has been busy with working on autonomous vehicle research. Uber has hired experts in the area for the past few years. The next Uber rollout is somewhat of a beta test for the new technology.

There has been a recent popularity with making music electronically via computer programs such as Abelton Live and Logic. These require aspiring artist to lug around a bulky lap top that often can’t be positioned comfortably unless it is placed upon a flat service during travel (which many artists often do). Mobile devices are now coming into the music production view with a variety of applications that not only allow user to listen to music, but now allow user to make their own music. Here are a few of the best music production applications that are available for download in the Apple App Store or the Android Play Store.

The woes of a frequent traveler often involve a hungry stomach and a dying cell phone. Conveniently,free charging stations might seem like a golden relic, saving your day from pure phoneless boredom while waiting for a connecting flight. Chargers beware! These stations could result in a hacked phone.

Many public places that facilitate travelers often offer these free charging stations for your dying devices. In recent review, hackers now have the ability to rig these machines to track anything and everything contained within your device while it is on the charger. Brian Markus, CEO of cybersecurity company ‘Aries Security’ recently discovered the threat and stated that “if you go into your online banking application to take a photo of a check, well, that’s recorded… when you connect to your contacts, all of that is recorded.”

Cybercriminals hide HDMI splitters and recorders within the charging stations. Newer devices have the ability to share and stream media via HDMI onto a TV. Once the device is plugged in, the hacker has full rein to record everything done within the device without the owners knowledge. HDMI is usually automatically set to ‘enabled’ on smartphone devices. Markus discovered this threat by realizing that automatically enabled HDMI setting could pose a potential threat.

Besides Markus’s recent study, no victims have stepped forward. To protect yourself and your device, suppy your own charging cable and plug it directly into the charging stations outlet. Another alternative is carrying a fully charge battery pack with you. Don’t fall victim to a senseless crime. Protect yourself and your devices!