Month: March 2017

Sarah Staar IM Newsletter – Special Announcement

by

LondonMeetupFor a few years, until I moved out of London, I ran a monthly Internet Marketing evening event that was free to attend for absolutely anyone.

I remember we started off in a room in a pub called The Shooting Star near Liverpool street station, and then via a few other venues we finished up in a bar near London Bridge station, and then we ran the last few at the Strand Palace hotel.

So now….

I am re-starting it !

The first meeting is being held on Monday the 8th May 2017 at the Strand Palace Hotel, starts 8 o clock..

London Meetup 🙂

The format is pretty much the same as before, a format that saw us grow to about 100 people per event and outgrow 3 venues !

It starts with a brief introduction, then either myself or a guest speaker will speak on a topic of relevance to the Internet Marketing community for between 30 and 45 minutes

Followed by Questions and Answers…

And then Networking….

Its free of charge, and no sales pitches or anything.

Everyone is welcome, from Newbie to Professional…

 

And There is More….

Okay…

I know not everyone lives in London and can make a Monday evening…

So…

I am going to be holding Meetups in other parts of the country as well…

Manchester probably

Glasgow probably

So anyone interested in a monthly meetup in those cities, please please let me know.

London Meetup 🙂

 

And There is Still More….

About 60% of my customers (that’s you !) live outside the UK.

So I am making both an offer and a challenge.

If you set up a monthly meetup in your city with a decent number of people attending each and every month, then I will visit you at least once a year.

So Australia, West coast USA, East coast USA, South Africa, here I am, call me….

But There is Facebook ……

Yes there is.

Now I know it’s a bit old fashioned of me but I believe that Facebook only works if you have already met somebody.

Because when you talk to them on Facebook you have the real person in your mind’s eye when you pop a message to them.

If you think about the “Know, Like, Trust” process for a moment then communicating with a real person who you have never met via Facebook is lacking something

And that’s why I believe in meeting people face-to-face.

So I better know who you are.

And you better know who I am.

And that’s why I am prepared to put a lot of time and travel into meeting you.

It’s all about the quality of the experience.

Traffic Technique no-one Teaches – But Me

This weekend I was running a 100 club workshop for my coaching students, and then later on I was speaking at a little seminar in the same hotel laid on by Ben Fathers.

And it reminded me of one of the first Internet Marketing events I went to.

I think it was a Mark Anastasi pitch-fest event in Earls Court  – London.

You know, one of those events where a succession of people speak for 90 minutes and try to sell a £2000 product.

And there were about 500 people in the audience,I remember thinking, “wow, there are so many buyers here, how can I contact them with a free offer to get on my mailing list”.

Being an upright and honest person I asked Mark if i could issue a flyer.

He said “NO, but you can give out business cards”

So I went back home, found a local printer who would give me fast turnround, and had 500 business cards printed, with the business name on the front, and a free offer on the back.

I went back to the event in the afternoon next day, and gave out something like around 400 business cards.

And you know what ?

About 300 of those people joined my list and took advantage of the free offer that weekend ! And many of those are still with me, almost a decade later…

And I tell people to do that even now. But no-one was doing it at Ben’s event..

I still do it. This what my current business card looks like.

 

 

My first free meet up is planned for Monday evening, 8 May.

London Meetup 🙂

 

Tools 

 

Grammarly

 (Eliminate grammar errors · Detect plagiarism · Easily improve any text)

A great suggestion by Nick who recommended this tool to me at Ben’s workshop this weekend.

Any tool which helps with spelling and grammar  I’m always interested in.

I’m currently using the free version which seems to work very well, I think I might try the paid version later this week…

Movies (Burt Reynolds week?)

I’ve got Almost 1500 movies In my movie collection at home.

burt reynoldsSometimes I like to watch  the old movies that I grew up with. So this week  I’ve been watching some Burt Reynolds movies.

You forget how good some of these films actually were, Deliverance for instance is still a fantastic movie even in 2017.

Burt Reynolds movies I’ve watched  this week,

Deliverance

Deliverance is still a powerful well-made film that doesn’t look out of date even today. Definitely worth  watching this film if you haven’t seen it before.

 

 

 

 

Smokey And The Bandit

Okay I must admit this is a bit of a cheesy movie, but it’s actually a film I’ve never seen from start to finish. I’ve only ever seen bits of it on TV. So this week I decided to sit down and watch the entire movie from start to finish and I have to say this film had me in fits of laughter which is always a good sign.

Boogie Nights

Any Burt Reynolds marathon wouldn’t be complete without probably the best film Burt Reynolds ever made – Boogie Nights. I just love this film and the amazing soundtrack, an amazing performance by Burt Reynolds and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

 

All the best,

 

 

Sarah Staar

Sarah Staar IM Newsletter – How Things Change

by

While I was doing some research for the Video Hacker Pro product I dug up lots of stuff about video.

 The most interesting was that more than 50% of video watched is on mobile devices, mainly smartphones.

And while a lot of it is short clips (under 10 minutes) more than half is videos of 30 minutes or longer.

And the reason why people are doing this is time-shifting.

If you are on a tube, bus, train, or just standing in a Starbucks queue, what is easier than just taking your headphones out and catching up on something ?

I know I download videos to my phone, either episodes from series, films, or instructional videos, and I watch them whenever I am in a waiting room – latterly when hanging around at an airport !!

 

Which has got me thinking….

 

How many of you are reading this Newsletter on your smartphone ?

How many of you are watching my videos on your smartphone ?

As you know, smartphones are becoming more and more common, for a lot of people it’s their main computer!!

smartphoneWhich probably explains why a few of you have emailed me and asked if I could create a Sarah Staar App.

No problem, this is something I’ve decided to put on the top of my to-do list.

But I need your help on this.

I don’t know what you guys might want to see in a Sarah Staar App ?

And what you would want to use it for ?

 

 

 

 

Some things that I think you might want are:

Easy access to my latest newsletters

Access to my newsletter archive

Weekly free Internet marketing videos

Audio Pod casts from Sarah Staar

Assume that the App will be free by the way…

So I can use your help!

I need to find out how many people would be interested in my new app…. So if this is something that interests you simply reply to this email, and insert the single word YES.

I will then get back to you and we can have a more focussed discussion about what you want to use it for and what you want it do !!

In preparation

I’m starting to get super excited as next week I get my new Tesla model S!

Now it doesn’t make much sense to get the car without having thought how you are going to charge it at home.

 

electricpointinstallSo in preparation I had a car charger installed in my driveway this morning!!

The guy that installed it said to me  “Sarah you now have a petrol station in your front garden”, which I thought was quite funny.

I opted to go for a Rolec home charging unit because of the modular design.

In this design the charger is made up of standard components which are available in pretty much any electrical wholesaler.

 

Most charges are sealed units and if something goes wrong when the warranty runs out you need to buy new charger!

 

Now, the great thing about having this charger installed was the government paid 75% of the installation cost!!

Which is great, but the application form for the government grant was a) very long and b) clearly hadn’t gone through the “Simple English” process !!

So it was a team effort with Dave and I filling the form out (on an

chargingpointIpad if you will)

This enabled me to get the 75% discount on the installation!!

Pretty cool considering that I also got a £5,000 grant from the government towards my new Tesla model S, and I don’t have to pay any road tax.

As a “by the way” I have also changed electricity supplier to Ecotricity, the main benefit being that I get to use a bunch of medium amperage chargers for free, and these chargers are scattered around the UK at more than 300 points.

 

 

 

 

How things change

When I first started marketing online I didn’t use Facebook, in fact I got all my information from Internet marketing forums, such as the Warrior Forum.

A couple of years ago the Warrior Forum was sold to “UpWork”  and, in my humble opinion, things started to go downhill.

Yesterday I logged onto the Warrior Forum, for the first time in six months and I was horrified.

The forum is now full of advertising, and they seem to have also removed forum signatures!!

It’s a real shame because the Warrior Forum used to be really good place to discover new marketing tactics.

Now it just seems to be full of junk.

Facebook groups seem to have taken over BUT I find Facebook Internet marketing groups a bit chaotic. It’s very difficult to find information, for instance with a forum you can do a simple keyword search for a topic and find all the forum threads to do with that subject.

You can’t really do this with Facebook.

I’m now in the process of looking for a new Internet marketing forum to join, or should I create my own??

Free Tools

Audio book app

Listen Audiobook Player

 

One of the things I love to do is listen to audiobooks, especially in the car. The service, or rather the app, which I use for this is called audible. It’s an Amazon service, which means you can buy audio books on Amazon and they are downloaded to the app on your phone.

The great thing is you can listen to the audio books at twice normal speed. Other cool features include things like, if you only listen to an hour of the audiobook, you can come back tomorrow, next week, or next year, and the App will remember where you last left off from.

For a long time now I’ve been looking for an app that would do a similar job except with downloaded MP3 audio files.

You see I’ve got loads of audio interviews, seminar recordings etc that I’d love to listen to in the car but it’s a bit impractical using the audio player that’s built into my phone.

Last week I discovered a brilliant new app called “listen audiobook player”. It costs about two dollars but is definitely worth the investment.

It seems to do all the things that audible does but with downloadable audio files, definitely well worth a look if you’ve got loads of audio files on your PC you’d love to listen to on your phone.

Must go now because I’ve just realised I spilt a small drop of coffee on my white sweater!!! I’d better run down to the washing machine!!

 

Talk soon,

 

Sarah Staar

Affiliate Formula X

A four-week training program teaching everything about affiliate marketing.

Income Blueprint Workshop

Recording of a live seminar with talks from experts in their fields of Internet marketing.

Get Organized Like A Staar

This course teaches you how to increase your productivity so you can spend more time doing the things that generate you income.

WSO Like a Staar

This teaches you how to set up a product to sell on the Warrior Forum.

Sarah Staar IM Newsletter – £23,000 in Cash ??

by

Last Sunday Dave and I were counting out and checking £23,000 on my Mums dining table, this is the story of how that came about…….

fueltesla

As you may know, dear reader, I am a bit of a fan of electric cars – quieter, faster, and self driving, and especially since my road trip to Scotland and back in a Tesla last year.

So I am afraid it was time to say goodbye to the trusty Evoque, the car that featured in countless sales videos !

 

My first thought was Land Rover would surely give me a good price for my car?

A local dealer offered me just £20,000 in November (yes 4 months ago !!) which was, frankly, something of an insult.

Okay, so my second thought was I would simply trade my Range Rover in when I collected my new car (a new Tesla Model S).

Tesla were very upfront with me and told me that they would only give me what the car would fetch at auction – which would probably be around £20,000.

So I decided to sell my car privately and listed it on eBay and AutoTrader.

After two weeks, I didn’t have one single enquiry from AutoTrader  – however, I had lots of interest from eBay, but still no bids..

And then I started to notice lots of negative stuff in the news about diesel cars….

(The Evoque was diesel engined)

– UK Pollution problems

– VW diesel gate

– Deaths caused by  Diesel fumes – nitrogen oxide, on today’s tv

  breakfast news

– Should there be a UK diesel scrappage scheme, on today’s tv

   breakfast news

– Pollution outside schools

There are talks about banning diesel cars from some cities, or at least bringing in a very expensive tax if you drive your diesel vehicle in the centre of town.

This made me incredibly worried about selling my car, would it affect the value?

Could I sell the car at a sensible price?

Had I left it too late to sell my diesel Evoque?

Then finally last weekend I got a phone call from somebody who said they would like to view my car and if it was OK they would buy it on the spot !! RESULT !!

So Sunday evening at 6 PM, Dave, my mother, and I, were all sitting around the kitchen table wondering who was going to turn up to view my car.

Then my mother asked, thoughtfully, how are they going to pay for the car?

So I replied,  “with a bank transfer of course, how else would they pay for the car?”

To which Mum responded “what if they want to pay with cash?”

And my comment was “Nah, who on earth these days would turn up with £23,000 in cash ?”

Well I think I spoke too soon. This young couple turned up to view the car, they took a quick look at the car, didn’t even do a test drive, and said they would take it.

And they said they would pay for it with cash…….

The husband pulled out 2 supermarket carrier bags full of money…….

Evoquemoney

And then we realised it was all in £20 notes !

(UK banks restrict  £50 notes because of money-laundering regulations)

We all spent the next two hours counting £23,000 in cash! I had to check every single note with a security pen! Good thing I had one lying around…

 

 

Strange isn’t it ? We are all so used to Internet banking and the cashless card-based economy it really throws you when someone reverts to cash…..

Large amounts of it….

In small denomination notes…..

And the twist in the tale is………

It turns out this couple had recently sold their Chinese restaurant.

I asked them what they do now and they said they had a YouTube channel which they make an income from advertising.

It’s quite an interesting YouTube channel, it’s a channel which shows you how to make Chinese cakes and sweets.

This is their YouTube channel –

We then proceeded to have a lengthy conversation all about YouTube marketing, funny how things turn out…

 

I’m looking for 10 more people to beta test my new product

I just finished putting together a brand-new product called Video Hacker Pro.

 

 

Video Hacker Pro shows you how to generate high quality traffic for as little as three cents per click.

I’m really just looking for a few beta testers. If you want to get video hacker pro before everybody else have a look at the video below.

Click here to watch the video 🙂

 

London Workshop  (Laptop Lifestyle Bootcamp)

I want you to set aside 2 days at the end of March.

Because I am speaking at a 2 day workshop in London run by a friend of mine Ben.

Laptop Lifestyle Bootcamp 🙂

The speaker list is pretty good, with a bunch of people that deliver great content and are really interesting.

When I started out I went to a lot of workshops, and the bit I really enjoyed was talking to all the other people that were there, because they were at the same level I was.

Its called networking !

Its also a great opportunity to get away from the computer, lift your head up, and find out what other people are doing.

laptoplifestyleAnd refresh your thinking, shift your horizons.

And while it’s not a holiday, don’t you deserve to give yourself a bit of a break from the daily grind.

And of course you can get to ask questions of the speakers.

I am going to be there and this is your opportunity to come and see me face-to-face and ask me any questions you have buzzing around.

And for those of you who remember my business card strategy……

Here is your opportunity !

See you on the 24th – 26 March.

Laptop Lifestyle Bootcamp 🙂

Movies

A Street Cat  Named Bob

streetcatnamedbob

This is a real feel good movie, a must see, and it’s a true story!!

This is a story about a recovering drug addict living on the streets of London. After a chance encounter with a ginger cat who he decides to name Bob, the busker begins to turn his life around largely thanks to this new feline friendship.

The two soon become a hit with tourists and onlookers due to the extraordinary trust shown between one another, with videos of the pair going viral on the YouTube.

I got the book and the film is really good !

 

 

 

All the best,

 

Sarah Staar