Is It hard to promote mobile apps? - Build'n Run

Disclaimer : English is not my native language, I’ve never lived in an english speaking country, I am self taught. I do my best to write the best english I can (believe me I put a lot of effort in correcting typo). But it happens more often that I would like. So please be tolerant. Thanks in advance.

3 Week already, 0$ income what are we doing wrong?

If you’ve been following up, you should know that we launched our first mobile game on the Play Store since 3 weeks now (Empire of Sudoku – Single player edition). I had big hope for the game to be a success on the release date; but seems like overnight success is not for everyone.

We are still under 100 active installs. And I am a bit disappointed. I am disappointed because we’ve put so much effort into launching this game (All details on the android Sudoku game are here). I like to believe that we’ve taken the design of a simple puzzle game to a next level.
I’ve read many books on how to market a mobile games, we’ve tried many things; but nothing seems to work.

What we’ve done

• Send the app to review websites: You rarely get reply; and we you finally get featured on one of them; It is sad to say that the thousands download you expect are not there.
• Advertise the game on game related forums: You get a mere 20 download out of 4 forums.
• Post the App on Google+ communities.
• Create the teaser video and post it on youtube: See the video here.
• We got our app posted on two facebook page thanks to a friend (the facebook page was all about Android Smartphones) with more than 200k users each: This is the bigest surprise here (less than 20 downloads from those two posts). Does facebook pages really help drive trafic?

Now I am starting to doubt that all those strategies effectiveness. Have you been there and done that?
We’ll keep doing the same for another month and see how it turns out. I’ll post any update on what really work and what don’t. So stay tuned.

Now this is not our first mobile apps, we’ve made some in the past that got after a few months (without any advertisement) 30k downloads. I know that sometimes it takes time to get traction. But what is intriguing is how those overnight successes really happen. Everyday you got one app or two that come out of the blue and get more than 10k download the day of launch. Or you got that low quality game, whose design barely stand that is the #1 in its category.

What else should we try ?

I would like to know what is your experience promoting android mobile apps, game specially.

BTW: Stay tuned for the realease of the 1.0 version of LiberTweet : Post unlimited tweets and DM from within your browser or android phone. Now This is not anything like TwitLonger.