Black Friday Deals for Online Business

We’re all bombarded with deals this week. While it’s famous for buying gifts and the biggest TV you can fight your way to, there are some serious discounts on services that can help with your online business. 

For freelancers and self-employed folks, many of these may also serve as deductible business expenses.

If you’ve been thinking of setting up some online courses, getting hosting for your websites, having a better program to manage an email list and purchases, a calendar scheduling program for people to book time or lessons with you, this can be the time to do it. 

If you’re in a position to do it, getting annual (or longer) plans for many of these services during this week can legitimately save you 50% and more through the year. 

I have worked with a lot of different software tools out there through the process of helping colleagues and clients run online classes, classrooms, concerts and general business nuts-and-bolts online. 

On this page I’ll show you software I personally use and recommend that have steep discounts. 

HoSTING Plans, domains for your website

The steepest discounts you’ll ever find this week are often for hosting. 

I’ve used several, and here are the ones I recommend: 

SiteGround Hosting – The best hosting I have used so far. Not very expensive or super high-end, but solid, fast and reliable enough that I use them for sites that do business, like online classrooms with Digital Access Pass, this website you are currently on. 

Siteground has over 50% off hosting plans that you can lock in for multiple years. This is the cheapest way to do it if you are able.  Their Black Friday deals generally go live closer to the actual day

NameCheap Domains and Hosting- I recommend them for all buying of domain names. Very affordable hosting as well, I’ve never had any problems with them and still use them for one or two smaller sites that do not run anything intensive. 

Namecheap has hourly timed deals this weekend. You have to keep an eye on many of them but can legitimately be up to 90% or more off.  

Online course, classroom platforms and software

Platforms are where you log in to a site to use the service, and everything is taking place on their end. You do not have to install software on your own website or deal with any of those technical elements yourself.

Platforms generally charge more monthly or annually than software, and have less flexibility, but many people just need something that functions in the most direct way. The time and headache saving usually justifies the cost. 

Teachable – If you want to sell courses – where you record yourself teaching, upload materials and have a product that people can purchase, Teachable is a great way to do it. They make the tech side of creating the course extremely easy.

Teachable a platform.  It is probably the most simple and direct platform if you do not want to be dealing with much technology, where you can upload your content, set your prices, and have the money from the sales show up in your account. This lets you focus more on the creating and marketing of your course. 

 The Black Friday deals are up to almost 50% off annual plans 

Thinkific – Thinkific is also a platform. I have worked on one site that uses it to make more of an online classroom type of environment. It is pretty straightforward – I would say a bit more involved than Teachable but more flexible. Most relevant if you have a concept for more of an online environment.  

Digital Access Pass – DAP is software that you install on your own WordPress website, allowing you to turn it into something where you can sell products, memberships and much more. 

I personally use this for what I do. It is extremely versatile and powerful, and also very affordable for what it is. 

It requires much more technical know-how and setup than the platforms, and you have to be on top of updating it. Obviously it works well for me or I would have switched. 

You can read my thorough review and overview of DAP here. 

Digital Access Pass offers some pretty massive discounts this week including a lifetime offer, and I am very happy I took advantage of it previously. 

 Email list, management / crm

 The most well known, at least among musicians for a while has been MailChimp. 

Personally, I love and use ActiveCampaign: 

If you are going to get involved in selling anything online, want to be able to manage people and do automations (if they order X, they get emails Y-Z) — give subscribers tags so you can segment who should get what emails, change that if they click on certain links, and so on, I love how they handle this. 

I’ve been using them for some time now and am still extremely happy I switched. 

ActiveCampaign is doing 2 free months on the annual plan for this week

Questions?

If you have a question about any of these tools, let me know in the comments. 

There are a lot of valuable ways you can use them, you can see my Passive Income for Creatives videos here for some ideas and overall concept. In 2021 these may no longer be for free. One of the strategies is about how you can get commissions by becoming a partner with products or services you like, which I am employing in these links above.

Some of these tools like hosting your own site and email lists can be useful for this approach even if you do not yet intend to make your own products. 

Happy Holidays and please feel free to leave any questions, comments or other recommendations below.