Before you decide to make money selling apps, you will need to decide which market you are most interested in. You can make apps for the iPhone, for the Android mobile platform, for Facebook and others. It is probably more profitable to create apps for the more popular platforms though.

Applications need to be useful, or fun, or even a bit crazy, to get the attention of the people who will potentially be buying them. Useful apps generally sell best, though some games, like Trism - a Bejeweled look-alike and act-alike game - have done extremely well.

You need to grab attention from an audience that can be fickle, transient and just downright hard to please at times. However, if you do strike the right note for them, they will reward you handsomely, as they have done to others who were able to gauge the market just right.

You can make money with your app without actually selling it. You can give it away free! The idea hare is to develop an app that is useful in some way, or at least is an app that people want to keep. You can then make money by embedding advertising in the app.

This works well when the combination is right. People don't feel they are being sold to as the main focus is always the app itself. The advertising should come over as an incidental part of it. When an ad doesn't look like or behave too much like an ad, it often works better, giving a much better return in the long term.

Another similar way to make money through an app is to make it so that those wishing to download it have to fill in some basic information. This is in effect a way to build a list. Once you have the email addresses and names of a reasonable number of people, you can send them the occasional mailing with offers that they might be interested in.

One other way to make money selling apps is to create a selling system that involves a subscription model. The actual app can be distributed and installed free, but in order to use the app, a subscription code will be needed. This tends to work quite well as people feel they are getting to try it out free first, though strictly speaking, they are not really.

Never spam the list. An offer once a week is about right. The offers can be your own products, or you can promote other people's products as an affiliate for a commission. You should even send out useful information that has no offer in it occasionally. If you can build trust this way, a percentage of those on your list will buy your offers occasionally.

Pricing your app is vitally important to your success, or otherwise. Check out the competition and see what they are pricing their similar apps at. Try to set a more attractive price, but don't make it too low as that is really quite pointless. Certainly, don't price it too high or no one will buy it.