Take Joel Comm as an example. He’s an internet marketer who came up with a crazy idea for the ‘iFart Mobile’. He decided to put a team together to develop his app and then started marketing it using social media like Twitter, YouTube, blogging and more. Sales started trickling in at first. Then the viral effect kicked in as more people heard about the app. He sold 75 copies one day, 296 the next day, and 841 the day after that. So far so good, right? Sales were increasing every day.. now fast forward just a couple weeks later, and Joel pulled down 38,927 copies in a single day. That means he earned $27,249 in those 24 hours!

Then there’s Ethan Nicholas. He originally launched his iPhone app, iShoot, to lukewarm reviews and moderate downloads. Eventually his $2.99 iPhone game just faded away, buried under the rest of the new releases. Then Ethan did a simple thing that literally turned on the faucet. Shortly thereafter he sold $35,522.40 of his iShoot app in just one day.

These success stories are peaking the interest of software developers and marketers worldwide, including myself. How do you get into the market, even if you’re not a software developer?

Enter Simon Hodgkinson. He’s recently published a step by step guide that shows you exactly how to write an iphone app, regardless of whether you’re a professional software developer, marketer or have never written one line of code in your life. I picked it up, hoping to learn more about the market, especially since I’m not a Mac user or iPhone owner.

After going through the guide quickly, I went back over it another time since it had me racing with ideas after the first scan. It’s a thorough overview of the market, the applications that are popular, how to write an app, how to get an iphone app written (if you’re not a software developer), how to market it, the options and alternative revenue sources even if you decide not to write an iphone app.

I was able to walk away from the read with a good grasp of the market, what apps to consider, how to go about the process of getting an app written (since I’m not a software developer) and the steps to market an app and let it grow virally. Every question I had before reading it was answered in the book or follow up emails. I also appreciated the detail he went into regarding the process to apply to the Apple Developer program which is a crucial step.

It’s well written and Simon’s marketing background shows in the followup messages he sends after I purchased that adds additional ideas, tips and strategies not found in the book itself. Some of the topics he covers in the follow up messages include how to quickly get your iPhone app to market, more examples and secrets to popular iPhone apps, how to brainstorm app ideas, and many more. Some specific to iPhone apps, some to marketing, some to business. All of them were spot on and valuable.

This is not a technical how to write iPhone software book, it’s better. It covers all aspects, actually writing the software is only one part of entire picture. More importantly, Simon goes over everything from how to brainstorm ideas, to development, marketing, social media, promotion, viral applications, additional revenue sources and more.

The latest statistics show that in January of 2009, the App Store surpassed an amazing half a billion downloads, that’s 500,000,000! These numbers are staggering and if you’re looking for a growing market and a seemlessly unlimited potential for earnings, developing an iPhone app is something to consider. One of the reasons for such opportunity is that apps are normally priced quite low, most are under $10 and even more under $5. iPhone users are eager and willing to pay a few dollars for a fun or useful application. Combine that with a huge market of iPhone users and the Apple App Store being the only place to get apps currently, lays a market with great potential.

If you’re looking how to learn how to write an iPhone app, how to get one written and market it or just how to tap into the iPhone market, I highly recommend Simon’s book.

To learn more about the iPhone app market, visit his official web site.

How does it work?

Answer Analyst has two areas.

First, you can ask the software a question like “what is colon cancer?”. The application shows answers to that question in an organized format and then gives you the option to save any of the content.

Second, if you don’t have a good question to ask, you can put in your subject matter, like “prostate cancer” and Answer Analyst will list questions about the subject matter like “what is prostate cancer”, “how to treat prostate cancer”, etc. You can then chose the question that most suits your topic and let it research the answers.

After you find the answers and content you’re looking for, you can save them to your research screen where you can continue adding more answers until you’re done. You can copy and paste the research into any other application. You can also save the questions and keywords in a project for later use as well.

How can you use Answer Analyst?

One of the best uses I’ve found for this application is to be able to create content on any subject in just a matter of minutes. For example, if I were creating a blog post on the topic of health care, I could quickly gather bits of content on any health care subject. Then I’d copy and paste it into my blog editor or wordprocessor, and this is the important part, write my content in my own words modifying anything I collected, and have a blog post, article or content on any subject in just a matter of minutes.

Writing articles with Answer Analyst is easy. In fact, Answer Analyst is somewhat similar to Jonathan’s Instant Article Wizard Pro, which is designed to help you write articles on any subject in minutes, although it doesn’t go as far in the content research or editing features. Using the content from Answer Analyst you can get the basis for just about any type of article. Follow the simple formula of asking the question about the topic, defining the answer and providing several solutions to the question and you have an informative article.

Need a special report? Bonus report to offer those joining your list? Answer Analyst is a great tool for that too. Ask your questions and get all the answers you need to create a report in minutes.

What about Private Label Rights (PLR) content?

Answer Analyst is also a great tool to help customize and re-write private label content. Use it to ask more questions on the content topic, add and to or enhance the existing PLR content and you have custom content for articles, ebooks, blogs, autoresponders… anything you need.

Benefits?

The biggest benefits to this software is time savings and organization. You could research content on your own, but I estimated that you would normally spend 5 to 10 times as much time without an application like Answer Analyst. Using a software tool that organizes everything and keeps it at your fingertips is a real time saver, letting you spend less time on research and more time on generating revenue. You can easily write a dozen blog posts or articles in an hour, saving you money compared to paying for those services.

You can also use Answer Analyst to create backlinks to your sites. Backlinks?Yes.  Here’s how. Find blogs on topics related to your sites that don’t use the ‘nofollow tag’ using a program like Niche Blog Detective, and then make comments on any post. How? Use Answer Analyst to research the answer to any question or blog post topic, re-write it in your words and you have comments to post with a link back to your websites. Literally almost instant backlinks. And you can do this on most any topic since you have the research tool to find the answer in seconds.

The software is also a great tool for journalists, students, researchers and writers in addition to online marketers.

Any downsides?

I couldn’t find any. The software is well developed, is fast and upgrades automatically. Jonathan provides excellent support and the software is written to access a web based application in the back end so the ‘heavy lifting’ is done on his servers so it should run fast on any computer, regardless of the speed or configuration.

Here are a few screen shots from Answer Analyst:

Here are a few comments from Answer Analyst users:

Jon,

The Answer Analyst is just fantastic.

Less than 1 hour after getting the Answer Analyst I had produced a 5 page report for my site visitors. I have never found anything so quick and so easy.

Thank you Jon, you are the best.

Brian McQuirk

It took only a few minutes to answer the first question on a forum site, and soon I had answered 15 more. That is sixteen more backlinks from authority sites. So Quick and So Easy.

David Odell

To learn more visit the Answer Analyst web site.