Why Design Matters
The best idea can only go as far its design. In order to effectively monetize your Alexa skills, you need to design a skill that inspires your customers to want to keep coming back. It’s much easier to sell to a customer that has had a prior positive experience with your skill. This course walks you through the best practices, tips, and resources for designing a great monetized Alexa skill.
Seattle Super Trivia
For this course we created a sample skill, Seattle Super Trivia, to showcase the best practices for designing and building a monetized skill experience. Games are fun experiences that draw people in, stimulate the mind, regularly reward, provide value, and retain customers. So for this course, we chose to design and monetize a game. Seattle Super Trivia is a hypothetical trivia game that tests the customer’s knowledge of the dreary misty city known as Seattle. It offers 5 free trivia questions every day and a whole suite of premium add-on content that we’ll introduce to you throughout this course. It will be our reference point we’ll use to lay out the best practices that we’ll discuss throughout this course. Many of these practices can be used for all skills, not just games.
Design Well to Sell Effectively
In order to effectively monetize your Alexa skills, you need to build a skill that has great content that inspires customers to keep coming back for more. Your skill should have well-crafted dialog that mimics human conversational patterns with engaging and valuable interactions that retain customers over the long term.
With a stable foundation of good content, you’ll be able to effectively monetize premium content for your skill. A skill that encourages and rewards its customers for returning will ultimately retain and inspire continued use. It’s much easier to sell to a customer that has had a prior positive experience with your skill than one who is interacting with it for the first time. To keep customers coming back, you’ll need to commit to refreshing your content which retains its value to customers over time. Doing so will help build trust between your customers and your skill.
