Updated: March 7, 2021
Sarah Staar (not Sarah Star or Sarah Starr) is one of the UK’s most successful email and affiliate marketers.
She started out in 2003 by creating The Internet TV Stations Directory – a site which listed only proper broadband Internet TV stations.
When she added Adsense to the site, she started earning about $600 per month just from that one site.
She realised she could make more money by becoming an affiliate marketer and she now owns 50 or so web sites that sell a wide range of goods and services.
Promoting these sites effectively was her next step to boost her earnings, so she started advertising on Adwords/MSN/Yahoo and similar services.
She then realised that she was getting sales from drive-by customers. They’d buy a product and she’d never be able to communicate with or market to them again.
That’s when she turned her hand to list building. With an email list, she could market to subscribers again and again and not have to rely solely on buying advertising on other platforms.
Having those mailing lists meant that she owned and controlled her business rather than it being at the mercy of the advertising platforms or search engines.
If they decided to close her account or derank her sites, her business wouldn’t collapse overnight.
YouTube traffic has become her speciality.
She buys advertising there and it might surprise you to learn that ad clicks on YouTube are cheaper than ad clicks on Facebook. And the quality of traffic is better too.
In this video, Sarah Staar talks about why YouTube is her preferred advertising platform for building her lists and getting sales:
She has a free 7-part video course here about using YouTube to drive traffic – the strategies outlined are for driving traffic to affiliate offers but can also be used to drive traffic to your squeeze pages and landing pages to build your mailing lists:
Her paid course on using YouTube is no longer available but there’s a similar course available here, and an even more comprehensive course on driving traffic with YouTube can be found here.
After learning how to become successful online, she set up her “Sarah Staar Business School” which was a collection of all her training programs on various aspects of affiliate marketing.
Since originally writing this post, Sarah has stopped selling almost all of her products online. I don’t know why that is.
Sarah Staar Affiliate Marketing
There were a lot of products in the Sarah Staar affiliate marketing stable.
As well as teaching students how to market with YouTube, she also gave away a number of free reports and courses as well as selling training courses on different aspects of affiliate marketing. Here are some of them (currently still available – just be aware some of the information in them might be out of date now):
Free Books And Courses:
- 101 Ways to Get Free Traffic (free PDF report)
- 37 Free Marketing Tools (free PDF report)
- FREE Book & DVD! Online Income Builder – simple tweaks you can make to your website, so you can make more money now.
- FREE YouTube HiJack Video Course – make money from YouTube without uploading any videos.
- FREE Traffic Mastermind Video Course – how to get a lot of visitors to any web page within an hour.
- FREE Niche Profit Class – the secret system Sarah uses to find highly profitable niches.
- FREE How To Sell Affiliate Products Video Course – how to get instant traffic to an affiliate offer and be making sales within an hour.
- FREE Copy & Profit Video Course – how Sarah clones other people’s $1,000 a day affiliate campaigns.
Free Web Classes:
- Outsourcing – How to make 10 times more profit while working less than 4 hours per week, all on a shoestring budget.
Becoming An Affiliate
While Sarah Staar did run an affiliate program (it’s since been closed), it wasn’t one you could simply join.
It wasn’t even one where you had to buy or subscribe to a product before you could promote it yourself.
She called her affiliate program her “Licencing Partner Team”, and you had to pay a hefty fee to become an affiliate.
You needed to contact her and ask about becoming an affiliate.
One of her staff would then phone you and do a phone interview to see if you were a good match for the program.
If you were, then you’d be offered the opportunity to join at two different price points.
The lowest price you could join as an affiliate was $1,600.
This gave you 50% commissions on all products up to a maximum commission of $1,000 per product.
Most of Sarah’s products were less than $1,000 but she did have some high-end coaching programs (that cost several thousand dollars each) that were offered only to customers, not to the general public.
I don’t know the higher-price affiliate sign up fee, but being an affiliate at this level gave you 50% on everything that Sarah sold.
To be honest, you needed to be an experienced marketer with a track record for it to be worthwhile applying to be an affiliate.
Sarah was quite particular about who she let into her affiliate program.
That said, she provided a whole course just for her affiliates so they could learn how to make the most money selling her products.
As of 2021, her affiliate program has been closed down even for her existing affiliates.
I was one of her affiliates and, if an email about the affiliate program being shut down was sent out, I didn’t get it.
I only found out after checking for broken links on this site and finding some of the links to her products were coming up as dud.
While I can still log into the affiliate dashboard, many of the affiliate links there do lead to dead pages.
It was only after finding dud links in my affiliate backoffice and finding that the site that listed all her products for sale was offline and that her personal website was full of links that led to 404 pages that I contact her Helpdesk to find out what was going on.
The reply I got informed me that the affiliate program had been closed down.
There was no other information about why, or why Sarah’s other sites were either offline or dull of dead links.
So I’m in the dark as to what’s happened.
If you know anything about all this, please let me know in the comments below.
All the best,
Gary Nugent
Check out my Instagram posts and reels here:
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P.S.: Don't forget, if you want to create an internet income of your own, here's one of my recommended ways to do that:
Building a list is important and YouTube has alot of viewers so this makes so much sense. She buys ads that appear in the front of videos?
Yes, she does, Cynthia. Apparently those ads get the most response. She also buys ad placements at the top of the right sidebar, above the recommended videos list.
YouTube is a huge loss-maker for Google. They’re trying to get more advertisers on the platform, so as an incentive the ad prices are really cheap – about $0.01 to $0.05 per ad click or ad watch.
Sounds like a great offer and technique to use. I will look into this more in-depth, it is so great to be able to learn new things like this.
Thanks for sharing this with us!
All the best – Orion
Thanks for stopping by, Orion. It’s something I’m looking into now myself. I do use videos to drive traffic to my offers and squeeze pages but I haven’t used YouTube advertising platform myself yet. Sarah Staar gets great results from it so it might be time to start moving away from Facebook ads to Youtube ads. Or at least do a 50/50 test to see which one performs best.
I’m fairly awed by the people who figure this all out! Or maybe they bought the advice…thanks for writing about this lady, she is worthy of imitation!
Hi Dianne. I guess someone originally figured out the intricacies of list building and others have built upon it and, through their own testing, found other methods that work. What I’ve learned is that Sarah is very focused. Once she sets her mind on learning a skill or finding out how to make a traffic source work for her, she’s 100% committed until the end. She sees obstacles as challenges to be overcome rather than roadblocks that stop progress. It’s a great lesson to learn!
Hi Gary, we are just starting out with blogging, youtube and facebook, this is definitely a goal to reach for! Thank you for sharing this post.
Hey, Tara. Great to hear you found the post useful! 🙂
HI Gary,
Thanks for this post. I had not heard of Sarah Staar before. YouTube is massive and the thought of getting YouTube ads for I penny to 5 pennies per click sounds really cheap. Facebook could be as high as 1 dollar.
Sarah Staar really knows her stuff.
I am happy that I saw this information on YouTube Advertising.
Thanks for stopping by, Glenys. Yes, Sarah really knows her stuff. I’d never thought about buying ads on YouTube before I came across her courses.
Thanks to Sarah for this information about ‘YOU TUBE’. Everyone who reads it and enjoys your video will find themselves well-informed about your process for ads and videos, and their placement. Yes, I wanted your gift for more information, ‘You Tube Hyjack’, and gladly left my email after you presented it so well!
Thanks for visiting, Janice. Despite being one of the biggest sites on the planet, YouTube’s potential for driving traffic can be easily overlooked. Most people know about uploading videos to drive traffic. Not so many know about advertising on YouTube as another way to generate traffic. Sarah Staar’s the best I know at this strategy. 🙂
This Information is enlightening. I didn’t know YouTube ads were cheaper than FB ads. Thanks very much for this info. Will be taking a look at the videos to see what I can learn. Never thought about YouTube in that light since I don’t have a clue how to make and upload videos.
Hey, Oneil, thanks for stopping by. The simplest way to make videos is to record yourself talking on your phone. Create a free account on YouTube and upload your video. Read this free report for tip on how to rank your videos. If you don’t want to appear on camera, use an online video creation tool like Content Samurai – I have a review of it here.
Facebook ads used to be cheap but anyone who’s been using them knows that their costs are going up. So 1 to 5 cent clicks for ads on YouTube are pretty appealing!
Sarah Staar is an affiliate phenom out of the UK and has made quite the name for herself in e-mail marketing. I love the fact you incorporated her free 7 videos Youtube HiJack course with the review before you even mention her paid training. It shows you care about giving your readers value.
Thanks, Andy. I always try to present free options first so readers can get a flavor of the products and services that are available before they have to start thinking about getting out their credit cards.
Gary,
I just started using YouTube to get traffic to my website. I have not seen any results directly from YouTube, but my traffic has increased a bit from Google.
I will look into the free information that you have included in this article to see if I can amp up my efforts.
John
Thanks for stopping by, John. The beauty of uploading videos to YouTube is that they will also rank in the Google search engine. It’s actually easier to rank a video on page 1 of Google for a keyword than it is a blog post or website!
I know list building is an important part of online marketing – have not thought so much yet about using YouTube for this. Good idea and something I will look more into.
Had not heard about Sarah Staar before, but will check out the video you included to see if it might be worth taking her course.
Thanks,
Mike
Yeah, I only came across Sarah Staar recently myself, Mike. I bought her list building course and her YouTube course after getting the free courses she provides. Her free courses aside from the YouTube course I mentioned in my post are:
She also has two free webinars she regularly runs:
I’m just dipping my toes into YouTube advertising to see how that pans out for driving traffic to my offers and squeeze pages.
Just a word of caution about Sarah Staar. I too was initially very impressed with her products so decided to join her ‘Licenced Partner Team’ (LPT) in 2019.
I had great hopes of success due to what I had seen and heard of Sarah. After approx. three months of putting a lot of time and effort in to all her different training, and setting up different advertising campaigns, I was feeling a little disappointed with the results, as they were nowhere near what Sarah had advised that I should see after this length of time. I then received an email from Sarah, which she had sent out to all LPT members, advising that she was looking for a limited number of people to assist with establishing an advertising campaign that she had personally used and was now returning her a six-figure income.
After some thought I decided to give it a go as I still had trust in Sarah and her systems, and therefore believed the US$10,000 payable for Sarah to personally set up the campaign on Google Ads, YouTube, and Facebook would be worth it if I was receiving a six figure return within 6 months (as advised by Sarah).
After a couple of video conferences with Sarah I transferred the fee and looked forward to having the campaign set up quickly. That was in October 2019. Sarah initially set up a Google Ads campaign for me and attached one of her YouTube videos to it, but Google would not allow the ad due to some issues. I spent most of November 2019 sending emails to Sarah enquiring how it could be fixed.
I received several responses from Sarah advising; she had been sick, had to go overseas to a family event, had contacted Google for an update… But nothing further happened with the campaign, and Sarah then stopped responding to my emails.
By the end of December 2019 I had requested several times that Sarah refund the US$10,000 I had invested in this campaign if she was unable to complete it as promised, but still no response. I have contacted her assistant to confirm Sarah is receiving my emails and she has also forwarded on my requests to Sarah.
So now I am in a situation where I am US$10,000 in debt (as well as the amount I paid to join LPT) and Sarah is unwilling to respond to my emails or refund my investment.
This has been a very upsetting experience as $10,000 is a lot of money for me, and it has left me feeling very disillusioned with regards to Sarah’s integrity. I would hate the same thing to happen to anyone else, so please be cautious.
Thanks for your feedback, Paul, and talking about your experience with Sarah Staar.
I also signed up for her LPT, which isn’t cheap as you know, and got little results from the program, much like yourself.
I’ve never been comfortable with having to pay to join an affiliate program as, if it’s a successful program, the sales made by affiliates should cover any costs incurred by the vendor along with a healthy profit for them.
I also don’t like that the LPT program is tiered – the higher the tier you pay for, the more or the bigger commissions you earn. I signed up for LPT because Staar had fairly glowing reviews and a solid reputation.
I bought her YouTube Ads course but got a refund for it as I thought it was incomplete, based on what it was advertised to contain and there was an upsell for additional training that I thought should have been included in the advertised course. I’m now ambivalent about what she sells and how she sells it.
It seems we are not the only ones. I have contacted many people who signed up for her LPT and no one has made any money, but many have struggled to get a refund and feel ripped off, so you are lucky that you did.
Just to clarify, Paul. I didn’t ask for a refund for LPT but I did for her course about video marketing and video ads and I did get my money back. It’s too late for me to ask for a refund for LPT – it’s well over a year since I joined it. But it’s interesting that you say many others have had little or no success with her LPT program.