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!

My friends Lauren & Rob Lim of Photography Concentrate are Canadians. And, they celebrated Thanksgiving back on October 14.

But for the US Thanksgiving holiday and for Black Friday and Cyber Monday especially, they wanted to do something special. They have gone ahead and offered all of you a 40% discount on ALL their tutorials and ebooks. This is huge and it isn't something they will likely repeat for another year.

Look, we all want to be better at photography than we were last year. At least, I would hope those of you who read Tiffinbox feel that way. From several of you who have privately emailed me and thanked me for introducing you to resource, a website or a tool that has elevated your craft or business, I know I am pretty good at curating the very best offers out there for you.

The tutorials and ebooks that Photography Concentrate has offered in the past have always been mentioned here because Lauren and Rob Lim consistently produce useful, actionable resources for photographers. Every ebook I receive from them is so full of incredible examples that are not only expressed succinctly but also illustrated beautifully.

These are books you will use over and over again. I promise. How do I know? Because I use them again and again all the time.

The sale starts on Black Friday (that's this Friday) and ends on December 2nd, Cyber Monday. Buy the e-book or tutorial you really need for yourself or your business.

And Lauren and Rob are sweetening the deal even more, giving you a chance at winning a $1000 shopping spree at B&H. Bookmark this post and come back here between Black Friday and Cyber Monday to buy your favorite Photography Concentrate e-book or tutorial. You won't regret it!

Learn more about this special, time-sensitive offer here.

Being a freelance photographer means always staying on top of things. You have to get to certain places at certain times, take care of your equipment and make sure your software is up to date among other things. But, have you been staying on top of your health insurance options? It is no secret that freelancers end up paying more money than a lot of other people on this front.

Thankfully, it looks like things might be turning around because of the Affordable Care Act, or ACA. If you haven't heard how this legislation is going to help you as a freelancer, you are missing out. A number of the plan's refinements to the healthcare system are great news for freelancers such as yourself. If you want to learn more about these changes and how you can get an affordable plan, read on.

Better Benefits, Better Plans

One of the most clear cut ways that the ACA is improving healthcare is through its mandated essential health benefits. These are ten categories of medical benefits that every plan will have to offer under the law. Even if you think that a cheap plan is your only option, the essential health benefits might not make it so bad. If you want to take a peek at what they are, visit this list at Healthcare.gov‘s glossary. Now, you have to be aware that these are categories of benefits, not exact medical services. What I mean by this is that the law does not actually list what medical services fall into these categories. The individual states are responsible for figuring those out.

A Range Of Coverage

Now that you know what the plans offer, it is time to look at the plans themselves. Most of the states have allowed their health insurance exchanges to be run by the federal government. The federal health insurance exchange can be found at Healthcare.gov. To see if your state runs its own exchange, take a look at the Kaiser Family Foundation‘s list here.

The exchanges have plans broken up into four levels known as Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. Bronze plans have the lowest premium, but also pay for the lowest percentage of medical costs. The Platinum plans fill in the other end of the spectrum, giving more coverage of costs for a higher premium. The Gold and Silver plans help even things out by giving you some middle ground options.

What's The Deal With Tax Subsidies?

As long as you make between 100 percent and 400 percent of the Federal Poverty Line, you stand to receive a potentially hefty federal health insurance subsidy on your exchange plan. The actual amount of the subsidy varies widely across that range of FPL and is calculated based on a number of different factors. It can't be said for sure exactly how much money you’ll save on your plan's premium, but the Kaiser Family Foundation‘s subsidy calculator can help you get a number to help with your planning.

Learn More And Make The Right Choice

Before you jump into things and make a purchase, you have to take a step back. Don't go and buy an actual plan until you know how much money you have spent in the past on medical bills and health insurance. This way, you can actually have a reference point when you are comparing costs. Next, make sure to ask yourself what exactly you need from your plan. Conditions that you and your family have, as well as your overall health, should be taken into account.

As open enrollment on the marketplace will continue for a while (until March 2014), it might be best to wait and do some more research on the ACA. The more information you have on this complex law, the easier it will be to choose a plan. You may want to think about talking to a licensed insurance broker. They know this thing better than just about anyone. When you finally think you have a good handle on the ACA, make your choice.

Michael Cahill is the editor of the Vista Health Solutions blog. He writes about the health care system, health insurance industry and the Affordable Care Act. Follow him on Twitter at @VistaHealthMike

So that Tiffinbox does provide its audience at least two opposing viewpoints of this rather contentious topic, I'm inviting one of you to step in and guest blog an article about the Affordable Care Act's weaknesses. If you are interested, pitch me the post using the guest blogging form.

Colin Breece co-founded ShootProof, an Atlanta, Georgia based company that is essentially an online image proofing solution for wedding and portrait photographers. Colin and his business partner Robert Swarthout are out to disrupt the current business model among online image proofing solutions. If you are using ZenFolio, Pictage or SmugMug, you may want to take a closer look at ShootProof.

Some of those other options charge you a monthly fee and a commission on any print sales. ShootProof levies absolutely no commission fees on what you sell. You get to keep 100% of your profits. There is, however, a set monthly charge depending on how many images you decide to store within the system. There are no contracts either. What's more, you get to customize the look of your gallery and online system based on your brand colors, logo and watermark. Wow!

Colin and I spoke briefly about the company, what it does for photographers and why it is significantly different from other online proofing solutions available in the market.

Full disclosure: This interview with Colin Breece was planned weeks before ShootProof decided to sponsor a special interview with entrepreneur/author/social media maven, Gary Vaynerchuk. I was really intrigued by how ShootProof approached online proofing: how they were more in sync with some of the best photo finishing labs such as ProDPI, Black River Imaging and Bay Photo Lab.

Incumbents are rarely disrupted by new technologies they can't catch up to, but instead by new business models they can't match. – Aaron Levie

The StudioProof Events Panel:

The StudioProof Orders Panel:

You see, often for working photographers like myself, our roadblock (or time suck, however you want to approach it) is getting those images to our printers and for those prints to reach our clients in a timely manner. If that's you too, give this chat I had with Colin a listen and sign up for an account (yes, they even offer a full-featured FREE account … crazy, huh?).

We talked about the application's integration with ShootDotEdit and their new mobile applications and how they in turn can bring more eyeballs to your galleries. We also talked about how ShootProof allows you to set your own prices and select the products that make your business special.

Got questions about ShootProof for Colin? Use the comment box below to ask. Don't be shy! Oh, also feel free to use “TIFFINBOX20” when you sign up and get 20% off for one year on any of the paid plans.

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: