If you are in the US, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are huge days for online and big box stores. The savings can be enormous if you play your cards right. After searching far and wide I've curated the best offers I believe will elevate your craft and business.

BUSINESS

Psychology For Photographers is offering Irresistible Words for $199 and Portfolio to Profit Engine for $109 or get both for $299.

Joy Vertz offers $50 off her popular course, Referral Plan That Works

WORKFLOW & SALES

Queensberry Albums offers you 40% off the first year of any annual paid plan for Workspace

Preveal is being offered at a steep discount at $25 $49 – grab this!

ShootProof is offering its 1500 image plan at only $35 (regularly $100)

Jared Bauman's new Wedding and Portrait Email Templates – use: black2013friday

PHOTO EDUCATION & TUTORIALS

Photography Concentrate – 40% off all ebooks and tutorials

Modern Tog has several products for sale for a limited time:

Easy Client Manager at 66% off

Easy Client & Money Manager – $50 off

Easy Client & Money Manager + Photography Pricing Guide – $50 off

The Go To Guide To Client Emails – $50 off

Photographer's Questionnaire Library – 59% off

Enter here for The Modern Tog's iMac Giveaway

DESIGN TEMPLATES & SOFTWARE

Fundy Software is offering 30% off on the following products:

Album Builder
Blog Collage
Image Brander

BUSINESS FORMS

Business Forms By Nifty Knowledge Rocks – 75% off – use: “blackfriday”

Rachel Brenke's The Law Tog is offering 30% off of all of her business forms – use: “BlackFri30”

WEB RELATED

Get 27% off the awesome Photocrati theme

NextGen Galery Pro, one of the best known WordPres gallery plugins is 25% off for a limited time

Gravity Forms – one of the most crucial WordPress plugins you need to use on your site. Use: “wpbeginner”

Flothemes – Use: 25GOODNESS to receive 25% off any Flothemes WordPress theme

SEO Cookbook by Photography Spark: Easy Recipes To Rank Higher – $60 off –

LIGHTROOM PRESETS & PHOTOSHOP ACTIONS

Totally Rad – 35% off all presets and actions

Mastin Labs – 50% off the Portra 400 Preset Pack – film emulation at its best!

VSCO Presets

Adobe Cloud – Photoshop & Lightroom for $9.99/month

Code + Hustle – Storyboard and Batch+ at insane prices!

WEB HOSTING

WPEngine – Tiffinbox is hosted here! Totally awesome customer support. Get this if you can!

Small Orange – my headshot portrait site, Connecticut Headshots, is hosted here. Very reasonable monthly rates and also prompt email based support.

BlueHost – my old host but an old favorite if you are starting out.

HostGator – a well known low-cost web host that is quite popular as well.

BOOKS

Craft & Vision books are all 50% off for a very limited time

Simple SLR Complete e-book bundle

Christopher O’Donnell Ebooks:

The Art of Color Processing
The Golden Hours
The Golden Hour Portfolio
The Art of Bokeh
The Portfolio of Bokeh
The Complete Ebook Collection

Angela Pointon's ebook will get you thinking about how you are Worth More

Create, share and learn lighting at Strobox through their e-books that are now all $4.75 each.

Strobox Volume 1
Strobox Volume 2
Strobox Volume 3

Which vendors would you like to see here? Whom am I missing? Let me know in the comments below. I will do my best to include them as I update this post today, Black Friday and through Cyber Monday. So, please bookmark this post and keep coming back as I find other awesome deals for you.

Thank you again for supporting Tiffinbox!

Friends from Inspire Photo Retreats, welcome!! Read the post, watch the interview below and then scroll down some more for some special offers just for you!

Gary Vaynerchuk knows a thing or two about selling wine. But he also knows how you (yes, you) can stand out in a noisy, social world. He has even written a book about it and it comes out today!

Gary is an energetic entrepreneur who someday wants to own the NY Jets. He is also frenetically involved in social media. Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr are his chosen platforms and he dominates each one like no other. I've been following him online, watching his videos (about wine or running business) and have read his books, Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion & The Thank You Economy, cover to cover. I love his tell-it-like-it-is style of writing and his fearlessness to experiment to see what works and what doesn't.

Like the last time, when Gary launched his book, The Thank You Economy, I had the opportunity to sit down with him to about his new book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How To Tell Your Story In A Noisy, Social World.

Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook launches today, so if you get the chance, buy it right away. Make it part of your winter reading.

Here, however thanks to this interview's sponsors, ShootProof & Queensberry Albums, you now have a chance to win ONE of 50 copies that will be given away.

Simply follow these 5 steps to be entered into the drawing:

1) Post a comment or ask a question that's pertinent to this new book below (include a valid email address)
2) LIKE Tiffinbox on Facebook – http://facebook.com/tiffinboxmedia
3) LIKE ShootProof on Facebook – http://facebook.com/shootproof
4) LIKE Queensberry on Facebook – http://facebook.com/queensberryalbums
5) Share This Post on your Twitter or Faceboook accounts and use these hashtags – #tiffinbox #jjjrh

Winners will be notified by email. So, please include an email in the comments section below. If you don't have a valid email address or if I can't contact you, you forfeit the book and it will be shipped to the next person I choose.

Good luck and happy reading!

If a piece of software is in beta, I usually wait for it to launch and only then post about it. That's probably because I have been burned before. An enthusiastic developer emailed me (now years ago) and told me about a program that on paper looked great but what I didn't realize was it hadn't found any funding and it wasn't even being tested. It was a bit of a pipe dream, but I was much too eager to announce it and so I did. Well, when it never came to pass, I looked a little foolish. But live and learn, right?

This time, though, I made very sure that the piece of software I was approached about was legit and it was being beta tested.

About a year ago, Daniel Usenko, a photographer based in Seattle, Washington, released two tutorials for wedding photographers (though after viewing them, I've to say that they apply to portrait photographers as well): The Perfect Shot & The Perfect Edit (use TIFFINBOX to get those at 50% off).

I get the distinct feeling that Daniel is the kind of guy who sees a problem and is off looking for a solution right away. Take a look at the clips on the page showing you both tutorials and I am willing to bet you'll learn something new.

Now, Daniel is tinkering with album design and wants to make that process fast and as painless as possible. I suspect it was a slow and agonizing for him personally and he figured out a solution. Well, that solution is called SmartAlbums. Check out the demos below:

The 1-minute version:

SmartAlbums 1-Minute Demo from Pixellu on Vimeo.

The 5-minute version:

SmartAlbums Beta Demo (5 min) from Pixellu on Vimeo.

This is still in beta, but Daniel tells me that it will ship in two to five weeks. In other words, by the end of this year! Sign up to beta test it here.

In the next few weeks, I am going to interview Daniel. Do me a favor please. Once you get access to this program, please use it. Then come back here and comment. What did you like about it? What could be different or better? Your questions will help me during my chat with him. So will you do that for me? This is where you beta test SmartAlbums.

Jenika McDavitt's seminal From Portfolio To Profit Engine: How To Build An Absolutely Irresistible Photography Website turned heads and made a slew of photographers reconsider how they were designing their websites, who they were designing it for and why current “templates” were essentially failing at converting your visitors to clients.

If you think of “Irresistible Website” as the container, what should go into it are obviously your irresistible images and your irresistible words. Right?

So you say you are all set with your website. How about your blog? How is your pricing worded?

A few months ago, after I read Jenika's e-book (yep, totally irresistible writing in there) How Clients Make Decisions About Money, I changed the way I presented my pricing and immediately saw positive results. Over the summer, I enrolled in Jenika's first “Persuasive Writing” course and learned, perhaps for the first time, how words and images can be married to each other and live happily ever after on my site.

The new course, Irresistible Words, is essentially an off-shoot of the more expensive offering: “Persuasive Writing.” Why is “Irresistible Words” less expensive you ask? Well, for one, it's a self-study course. “Persuasive Writing” involved more one-on-one hand-holding by Jenika and she could only limit that to a small number of eager students like me. While she will be offering “Persuasive Writing” or a course like that in the future, if you need to get started on your web copy, your blog posts, your pricing verbiage, or anything word related, I highly recommend you jump in before November 6 (when the price is going up) and buy “Irresistible Words” for $119.

If you don't have From Portfolio To Profit Engine: How To Build An Absolutely Irresistible Photography Website, this might be a great time to get both that and Irresistible Words for $249 (by November 6, 2013).

On November 7, the price for each returns to $249. So, buy it now!

If you are revamping your website, this might be just the thing for you. Just beginning in photography, these two products are going to lay the foundation for a truly remarkable career in this business. In fact, I've told Jenika a number of times that I wished I had had access to these resources when I was starting in the photography business some 18 years ago.

Look, it's no accident that Jenika's website Psychology For Photographers ranks so highly for its content. Her website is one of a handful that I read everyday. She practices what she preaches, giving real-life examples and solutions.

In my mind, there is no better resource for photographers that bridges the business of photography to the client experience. Win more clients who are a good fit for you, then you get to stay in business. Trust me, I know.

I chatted with Jenika about Irresistible Words and Irresistible Website and how photographers can use both to restructure their businesses. Check it out below:

Amanda Kraft is a photographer and holistic health coaching living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She photographs high school seniors and recently created Stop Editing, Start Living to help creative professionals regain control of their businesses, so they can live the life they have always dreamed of. Most days she can be found coaching her clients, preparing gourmet dinner, relaxing with her husband or enjoying the open road in her jeep. Read part 1, part 2 and part 3 of this series before continuing ahead.

Visualizing A New YOU!

We've discussed taking back control of your schedule, setting up boundaries and now getting back to the basics of eating.

Remember it took you awhile to reach this point in your life and an overnight fix isn't the answer. You will need to chip away each day until you find the right work/life balance for you. What works for me and my family might not be right for yours. It's going to take a bit of trial and error, until you are headed in the direction of your desired goals. Hopefully my suggestions have put you closer to finding the balance.

It is easy to become consumed with our businesses that we forgot that they are only an extension of who we are. We are on some level or another deeper than our craft. If you are unsure of who you are without your photography, graphic design, web design or videography business than one exercise I suggest you do is create a vision board.

Schedule a “personal day”, listen to your favorite music and day dream about the life you want to live, remove your business from the picture. Simply focus on everything that you want to experience, own and embrace in your life. Take those dreams and put them on paper: maybe you want to vacation in Hawaii during the off season in a little hut on a cliff overlooking the ocean, learn to paddle board, treat yourself to a designer purse, fit into your skinny jeans again. Whatever your dreams are, find photographs that represent what you desire and incorporate them to your board.

Each day, when working at my desk my vision board is within sights and it is amazing all of the “visions” I have included that have come to fruition. Think back to when you started your business and you created some sort of vision for your business from the logo, website style, colors and tag lines. It's time to use the same concept for creating the vision for your life. 

I hope you have found this series helpful to you and that some or all of it has resonated with you. If you would like to learn more, I am here to help you. Feel free to contact me through my website.

I am also giving away one seat to my next Stop Editing, Start Living workshop. To enter, simply follow the prompts below to follow both me and Seshu on Twitter and LIKE both of our Facebook pages. One random winner will be drawn on September 30th.

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