Before you start with your development process, you need to know what your end goals are with your app. Be clear about what you are trying to achieve. Depending on your end goals, you will need to adjust your monetisation strategies.

If you are only interested in generating quick and easy income, the advertising model might be the best option for you. If you want to build a long lasting eCommerce business, you will look at a different monetisation method.

You need to evaluate how valuable your app will be to the market you are in. You might be competing with other apps in your niche that are already seeing a lot of success. You’ll need to determine what your app offers differently and what values you can offer. If your app is no different than the rest, it might be pointless to introduce just another app to the marketplace and niche. 

Not all monetisation strategies will work on all audiences. So, this why this is such an important step. You need to determine who your target audience is in order to determine what will work.  For example, gamers will click on video ads that offer rewards.

You need to know who your competitors are. This is important for any business not just for an app. You need to know what you are up against and look at what they are doing. 

If you’re planning to launch an app in a crowded marketplace, check who you are competing with and if you will be able to monetise your app in the end. 

You can whether your competitors are offering good user experience while running ads and if they are using a paid subscription model for example. 

The end goal will naturally be to be as profitable as possible with your app. In order for this to become a reality, you’ll need to define the number of users, conversion rate, average spending, and a predictive timeline to breakeven.

You’ll then want to be realistic and compare it with the current market sentiment and how other competitors are doing and if they are successful. 

In order to have an app that can easily be monetised, you’ll need to make sure your users can easily use your app. The only way to ensure that is the case, is to build a prototype and test it. Get feedback from people and change the app until you feel it is good enough to make money.

Your app users need to be able to understand what your app offers and how it works. They need to see how it will benefit them.

Using advertisements on your app is one of the easiest and most profitable ways to monetise your free app. You can display advertisements in your app via a third-party ad network.

The first answer anyone jumps to when they think about ways to make money from apps, is ads. This can include ads such as banner ads, in-feed video ads, and more.

There is an advantage of choosing this method, and this is high retention rates, as users receive a reward for watching these ads. The method works best in the gaming apps market, the gamer like free things, the effective cost per millie with this type of advertising is higher than for any other ad type.

You might be wondering what referral marketing means? Well, referral marketing usually includes a third-party product or service. You will use the third-party product or service as a way to optimise your app for revenue opportunities.

App publishers can promote or sell affiliates’ products or services based on the number of clicks or installs. You can use pop-up ads to promote someone else’s app or advertise products in your free app.

Using a subscription strategy is a method where app owners can choose to offer free content in their apps for a limited amount of time and then charge users a subscription fee that will allow them to access full content without any restrictions.

This is a popular and common technique used by the majority of free app publishers is to offer a free trial period and then charge the subscription fee to those who wish to continue to accessing and using the app.

The sponsorship method is less commonly used as the above mentioned strategies, but can be powerful if used correctly.

If the app owner have a powerful niche, and a great target audience, this can work well. You can partner with various businesses within your niche.

Before building the app, creating a list of organisations and brands that could benefit from the partnership is a good starting point.

Selling merchandise on your free app is a great an easy way in which you can make money. 

You might be wondering how you can actually make money this way? Well, online business can build free version of website app to sell physical goods such as toys, shirts, shoes, etc. these physical products can be sold directly to your app or via email marketing.

To encourage purchases, you can use a popular new strategy by using Amazon.

Amazon has started a service called Merch by Amazon. This allows anyone to create their artwork, upload it to their platform and promote their products. It is a win-win strategy for the app owners and app users.