Black Friday, the time of the year where people go crazy looking around for good deals, and with good reason. Merchants tend to lower prices a lot, sometimes between 50%-70%, which is awesome for consumers.
I mean, who doesn't like a good discount?
And for us creators, this is an awesome time to invest on whatever we are working on! After all, we tend to spend quite some money building our projects.
For that purpose, I decided to compile a list of products that are worth keeping an eye on for Black Friday. As I'm writing, it's not black friday yet, so some products might not be in sale yet, so keep that in mind.
Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. Meaning, at no cost to you, I will earn some coffee money whenever you decide to make a purchase through my links. This is my way of fueling Creator's Keep to keep creating content for you with the best of my abilities.
Suggestions for Black Friday 2019
Learning
Skillshare
For those who love to work on their skills and to get new ones, Skillshare is a great way to do so.
Skillshare is an online course platform where anyone can create online courses and share their knowledge with the world.
Skillshare
They have a ton of courses available in every genre and you can access all of them through a monthly subscription.
When you hear that "anyone can create an online course" on Skillshare, you might think that the quality of the content is crap. But this is couldn't be further from the truth.
It's true that some courses might suck, but the majority of them are really good! Creators usually put quite some effort on these courses because Skillshare pays them according with how many minutes students spent watching their content.
If you want to know more about being a teacher on Skillshare, you can learn more here.
Now, I'm not a teacher there, but I surely am a student! I got with hundreds of hours sunked on Skillshare, and I can't vouch enough for this service.
As of this day, Skillshare didn't release any kind of hint for a Black Friday promotion, but they might! So, if you are interested on this service, it might be worth it keeping an eye on their website.
Meanwhile, if you would like to try Skillshare for free, you can get a 2-month free trial by clicking here.
Pro-Tip: Did you know that you can get an additional free month on Skillshare? Yes, I'm talking about a 3-month trial! Here is what you have to do:
- when your 2-months free trial are coming to an end, go to your account settings and "cancel" your subscription one day before trial expiration;
- While cancelling, Skillshare will ask you if you need more time to consider continuing with them, and they will give you an additional month!
Note: this tip is applicable as of this date (25/11/2019). This might not be true in the future.
Audible
I'm really passionate about Audible, and if you read my article about getting more time to learn everyday, you know where I'm getting at.
Audible
Audible is one of my main sources of learning through listening to audiobooks.
The fact that you get to do your learning in a structured way is quite interesting to me since you don't need to plan your learning. Well, that's one of the reasons that makes audiobooks so worth it, besides the original content.
If you don't know how Audible works, here it goes.
Audible is a service that provides you with an insane amount of professionally voiced audiobooks, owned by Amazon. It's a subscription-based service, so once you are subscribed, you will get:
- a substantial discount on every purchase you make on the Audible store while subscribed;
- a free audiobook of your choice (1 free credit per month = any book you want) and 2 Audible Originals each month;
- if you don't like the book your purchased, they'll give you a refund (that's an Amazon company for you)
Audible Homepage
One feature that I really love on it is the capability of downloading your audiobooks into your phone. This way you'll be able to save some mobile data.
Sound good, right?
Now, if you are interested on this service, Black Friday may be a great opportunity for you to get your hands on some Audiobooks.
Usually, Audible offers a 30-days free trial for you to check if this service is what you are looking for. But for this occasion, they are teasing some good discounts for Black Friday, so stay tuned for some nice deals!
Productivity
Headphones
I believe that listening to audio content is one of the best ways to learn, even when you feel like you don't have enough time to do so.
For that purpose, I'm quite bullish on wireless headphones. They provide you hands-free listening experience, comfort and quality too. Sometimes, they also have a built-in microphone which is a must for me.
Besides, you can just leave your phone somewhere at your house or office and keep listening while moving.
Sony WH-CH500
Last Black Friday I bought a pair of Sony WH-CH500 at 30€ (60€ retail at the time), and 1 year later I can say that I'm truly happy with my purchase.
These on-ear headphones feature a nice built-in microphone, NFC connection, 20 hours of battery (which lasts a week for me, give or take) and surprisingly good sound quality for the price point. Oh, and let me tell you, the bass you get is amazing for the price!
Since then, Sony released a new version of these headphones, the WH-CH510. It seems like they improved the battery life up to 35 hours and now it connects via USB-C.
Sony WH_CH510
So if I was in your shoes and wanted to buy some price to performance on-ear headphones, I would look for Black Friday deals for Sony WH-CH510.
If you are looking for some affordable noise-cancelling wireless headphones, I would recommend to look for deals for the Sony WH-CH700N.
Sony WH-CH700N
These over-ear headphones feature NFC connection, 35 hours of battery and quite the comfort! Besides, it's quality is quite good for the price point.
Even though I don't own these headphones, I had the opportunity to try them since a friend owns a pair. And I must say that I was quite satisfied with the experience back then!
As I'm writing this post, I asked her what she thought about these headphones one year later. She replied that they are as good as new. The battery is still the same as when she bought.
But if you are willing to spend quite the buck on some top-tier noise-cancelling wireless headphones, check out this article from whathifi, where they rank their Best over-ear headphones for 2019.
Spoilers: the one at the top is the Sony WH-1000XM3.
Ecobooks
This is one of my latest discoveries and I believe that this is worth mentioning.
Personally, I use notepads in order to organize my day. And yes, the paper ones! Even though I use Google Keep for certain tasks, I do all my organizing and journaling on paper (here is why).
But the problem is that every notepad comes to an end eventually, and this is not eco-friendly at all.
Introducing Ecobooks. These are notepads with reusable pages that work just like whiteboards. You can write on it's pages like a regular notepad but the interesting part is that you can erase them.
These notepads usually come with a free mobile app for you to scan your pages and store them on cloud servers, on your Evernote, e-mail, etc.
Cool, right?
Now, there are quite some ecobooks out there, but from what I saw, there are two brands worth mentioning: Rocketbook and Infinitebook.
While Rocketbook seem to be the most established option worldwide, Infinitebook is a Portuguese product supported by Amazon, which is quite interesting.
To be honest, I don't own any of these products, but I'm looking to get my hands in one of these on Black Friday.
Are you?
Website Creation
If you are interested in creating your own website, I recommend that you do so by creating a self-hosted Wordpress Website.
Note: you can learn more on why I endorse this option here.
The main advantage for a self-hosting website is that you will have total control over your website's files, and that is crucial!
The alternative is to have other people host for you (like on Wix), which is don't recommend at all. It's the same thing as handing your car keys to someone to drive you around.
Nothing is stopping them to run away with you car.
Website Hosting
If you go for a self-hosted Wordpress Website, you have 2 alternatives:
- You buy any host and then you'll have to install Wordpress manually (here is a tutorial to do this).
- You buy a Wordpress prepared host, and it will install Wordpress automatically for you in an easy way, such as Bluehost.
I'm huge advocate of giving people options to choose from. But I must admit that Bluehost is making it difficult to look the other way in this Black Friday.
Bluehost Homepage
For those who don't know, Bluehost is the biggest hosting service out there for those who wish to create Wordpress websites. Why?
They work closely with Wordpress to bring the best experience possible to their customers when self-hosting a Wordpress website.
And you can see that with how simple it is to setup Wordpress on their website. It's just a simple process of clicking next and choose your template.
DONE.
Now business-wise, they have multiple hosting plans, but if you are just interested in building one website, the basic plan should be enough.
Bluehost Plans
They also give you the option to choose the duration of the subscription (12, 24 or 36 months). Of course, you'll pay less the longer you subscribe.
Also, in every plan, they offer a free domain (you know, your www.something.com), which is quite nice.
It's worth mentioning that, even though they show you the prices per month, you'll have to pay the subscription in full, so keep this in mind.
Now, for this Black Friday, Bluehost is are offering discounts up to 60%, depending on what you buy! So I believe that this is an interesting offer to consider if you wish to build your own wordpress website!
Pro-tip: When checking out on Bluehost, make sure to deactivate everything on Package Extras except for Domain Privacy + Protection. This will mask your hosting information on whois, like your name and address, which are required by law to be registered on your domain.
Premium Wordpress Theme
It's true that you can build your Wordpress Website with free themes, for sure. But sometimes you'll have to put extra time and effort in order to make sure that your website is as you envisioned
This is why Premium Themes exist: you are exchanging your money for time and ensured quality. And yes, I'm a huge advocate for premium themes since I have quite some experience modding free themes.
And believe me, I'd rather spend 60$ on a Premium Theme than waste a lot of time making sure my free theme is looking nice and functioning well.
For this matter, my biggest recommendation for premium themes on this Black Friday is to keep an eye on Divi, by Elegant Themes.
Divi Homepage
Now, I don't own Divi myself but I had the opportunity to work with this multipurpose theme once. And I must say that this is the best theme I ever used! It's really intuitive and it does almost everything!
So much so that my web skills felt kind of useless for a second.
Divi features a really powerful page builder and has a crazy amount of pre-built layouts which look great! And besides, they have quite some premium plugins for e-mail marketing, blogging and social media sharing.
Business-wise this is how Divi works:
- Yearly Access - for 89$ (yearly subscription), you'll get access to the theme and all plugins, unlimited website usage and support during your subscription;
- Lifetime Access - for 249$ (1-time payment), you'll get access to the theme and all plugins forever, as well as lifetime support and unlimited websites.
Divi Price Plans
Personally, I'm looking forward to Black Friday to see if Divi gets a nice discount on the Lifetime Access, and I recommend for you to do the same!
Computer Hardware
Are you looking to upgrade your Desktop? Then I got you covered as well!
Here are some pc parts worth looking for on this Black Friday.
CPU
Look into AMD's Ryzen 3rd series. I mean, it's so good that Intel is having a hard time coming up with better deals. Also, their price-performance is out of this world! I mean...
CPU Benchmark - https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
At this time, I'd recommend checking one of these (starting with the cheapest):
- AMD Ryzen 5 3600 - This is a great low budget option. It is a 7nm, 6-core, 12 threads CPU with 32MB of L3 Cache with a base clock of 3.6GHz up to 4.2GHz max clock! You can get this CPU for around $194.
- AMD Ryzen 7 3700X vs AMD Ryzen 7 3800X - These series are quite similar in some regards. Both are 7nm, 8-core, 16-thread CPUs with 32mb L3 Cache. The main difference is the power consumption (3700x - 65W TDP & 3800x - 105W TDP) and the CPU clocks (3700x: 3.6GHz - 4.4 GHz, 3800x: 3.9GHz - 4.5GHz). You can usually get a 3700x for 330$ and a 3800x for 400$. So, which one is the better? Here is a video more in depth about this. But I would say the one with biggest discount on Black Friday!
- AMD Ryzen 9 3900X - This one is an absolute beast! For around $580 you get one of the best CPU's out there, according to cpubenchmark. It is a 7nm, 12 cores, 24 threads monster with 64mb L3 Cache, base clock of 3.6GHz up to 4.4GHz Max Boost Clock! This CPU is the reason Intel is speachless for consumer grade processors. So if you have the money, try to find a good deal for this one. You won't regret it!
Graphics Cards
This last year was kind of interesting regarding graphics cards. We got the RTX series from NVIDIA, as well as the GTX 1660 series also from NVIDIA. And these are precisely the cards I would look for deals (starting with the cheapest):
- NVIDIA GTX 1660 Super - it seems like a good option if you are in a budget, as it sits just a bit below NVIDIA GTX 1070 and NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti, yet being quite cheaper. But still, keep an eye on these other cards, as you'll never know if you can grab a nice deal;
- NVIDIA RTX 2070 Super - Seems like a good option to look for a deal, even though RTX 2070 should also be a nice option to look for.
- NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti - This is the best consumer card out there and also the most expensive one. So it should be a good idea to keep an eye on other variations of this card like the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Super.
Conclusion
There are a lot of good deals out there for you to leverage on the upcoming Black Friday, and some are already available to you right now! So I advise you to start with this list and keep searching for other deals until the big day.
What are you looking for to buy on Black Friday? Let me know as I'm quite curious!
I hope this post was useful to you and that you leverage this day to the best of your abilities!
Until next time!
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Posted from Creator's Keep | https://creatorskeep.com/black-friday/