Not everyone can afford access to Adobe Creative Cloud or similar design software. If you are looking for some free options, take a look at the Free Resources section of this manual. Canva and Adobe Express are apps that offer a “forever free” basic option.
If the free versions of Canva and Adobe Express don’t have what you need, you can look into their premium subscriptions. Or, you can give Venngage a try. Venngage offers tons of templates to help you make infographics, visual reports, mind-maps and more.
Free Resources
There is an overwhelming amount of advertising and sales resources online. A simple search will bring up blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, articles, newsletters and more! The list below has some great beginner resources to help you manage your tasks, meet your sponsorship revenue goals, design attractive sales collateral, and to learn new skills.
📅 Project & Calendar Management
Asana
What It Is
Cloud-based task and project management software with desktop and mobile apps.
Why It’s Great
Asana offers a free forever basic option that is great for all types of task and project management. Asana features different views including lists, boards, and timelines. You can create detailed “tasks” under custom built projects. Larger tasks can have subtasks assigned.
Calendly
What It Is
Calendly connects to your email calendar, providing you with a “hub” for scheduling emails. You set up a meeting, send a link, and the person you want to meet with gets to schedule a time that works for them.
Why It’s Great
Calendly takes into account your day-to-day schedule and any meetings already scheduled. It’s a great way to eliminate the back-and-forth email game. Setting up Calendly is simple and you can create unlimited one-on-one events. The base tier of Calendly is always free, and if you need more features you can move up to the Essentials tier for under $10/month.
📈 Data
Google Analytics
What It Is
Google Analytics is one of the best ways to access the data your potential sponsors want to see.
Why It’s Great
Basic audience demographics (city, age range, gender) help subscribers know if your audience is a fit for them. Website views, pages per session, time spent on a page all help sponsors know how many views they can expect from advertising with you.
✍️ Headline Writing
Coschedule Headline Studio
What It Is
Headline studio is an online tool that grades your headlines on word balance, headline type, sentiment, word count, skimmability, and more.
Why It’s Great
Co-Schedule will tell you how appealing overall your headline is (out of 100). A red score is low, yellow is ok, a headline that is in the green is a good headline. The headlines also include suggestions on what edits to make to increase your score. Co-Schedule also offers “word banks” that help you include Power & Emotional words.
HubSpot
What It Is
This client relationship management (CRM) tool.
Why It’s Great
Hubspot has a forever free option that allows three users to track and manage deals in a customizable sales pipeline. You can create tasks with a deadline that email you on a deadline so you don’t lose track of leads. You can also see a Deal history, track emails/phone calls/meetings.
HubSpot Academy
A bonus! HubSpot Academy offers a variety of courses in marketing, sales, service, and more. You can receive certifications and learn new skills for free. If you’re new to sales and you’re struggling to understand the different types of leads and what to do with them, this is a great place to start.
👾 Graphics Creation
Canva
What It Is
Canva is a simple to use and free website/app that will let you create images for articles, emails, and social channels. It has templates, you can add/edit text, and more. While the basic tier is free, if you need more options you can subscribe to the premium version.
Why It’s Great
Canva has a large database of fonts, font styles, images/graphics, and templates that make designing eye-catching graphics a breeze. You can use it on your desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone.
Adobe Express
What It Is
Similar to Canva, Adobe Express is a website/app that lets you create simple custom graphics.
Why It’s Great
Adobe Express has a free option that includes professionally designed templates and assets for social media content, logos, and more. It includes properly sized projects for a wide range of uses.
🖊️ Fonts
Google Fonts
What It Is
A huge font catalog that invites users to explore, sort, and test fonts -- and allows you to download entire font families.
Why It’s Great
All Google fonts are open source and enhanced for web, making your website faster. The catalog supports over 135 languages.
🦄 Icons & Illustration
Flaticon
What It Is
Access to free icons and stickers.
Why It’s Great
Sign up is super easy with Google, and Flaticon has a massive database of more than 7.6M vector icons and stickers. While Flaticon does have paid and premium features, it has a ton that are free.
Attribution
Free users are expected to attribute the author when using a Flaticon resource. The website shows how to do this and gives some examples.
The Noun Project
What It Is
Similar to Flaticon, it allows you to access free icons
Why It’s Great
It allows you to download both PNG and vector format. Vector format ensures a high quality display of icons on your designs and website
Attribution
Free users are expected to attribute the author.
Blush
What It Is
A free illustration repository, with different styles.
Why It’s Great
It allows you to combine elements to create an unique illustration and download it in a high quality PNG -- or vector format if you are familiar with Figma or Sketch!
unDraw
What It Is
Similar to Blush, a free illustration repository
Why It’s Great
It allows you to change the accent color at the website so you don't need to edit it to match your brand. Files are PNG and vector (SVG)
📷 Stock Photography
Unsplash
What It Is
A free stock photography website with over 3M high-resolution images.
Why It’s Great
Unsplash features a huge library of stock images for free that don’t look like traditional stock images! No permission is needed, although the photographers appreciate attribution when possible.
Pexels
What It Is
Similar to Unsplash, Pexels is a free stock photo site. Royalty free images & videos shared by creators.
Why It’s Great
Just like Unplash, Pexel features a huge library of stock images for free. No permission is needed, although the photographers appreciate attribution when possible.
Nappy
What It Is
Similar to Unsplash and Pexels, Nappy is a free stock photo site.
Why It’s Great
Nappy provides beautiful, high-res photos of black and brown people. Nappy makes it easy for companies to be purposeful about representation in their designs, presentations, and advertisements.
Vice's Gender Spectrum Collection
What It Is
A stock photo library featuring images of trans and non-binary models
Why It’s Great
This collection represents members of these communities beyond the clichés!
Pixabay
What It Is
Pixabay is a free stock photo site.
Why It’s Great
Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing royalty free images, videos and music. All content is released under the Pixabay License, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist - even for commercial purposes.
🎨 Colour Palettes
Coolors
What It Is
Coolors is an automatic colour palette generator.
Why It’s Great
This tool allows you to generate perfect matching colors in seconds. Even if you are not so skilled in design!
Colormind
What It Is
Similar to Coolors, Colormind is a colour scheme generator that creates beautiful colour palettes in one click. It can also extract a colour palette from an uploaded image.
Why It’s Great
Colormind automatically applies your generated colour palette to a mock landing page. This allows you to see your colour palette in action and decide if your colours would work well on a site!
Venngage
What It Is
One of the many tool that Venngage offers is a colour palette generator similar to Coolors and Colormind, but with a focus on accessibilty.
Why It’s Great
The color pairings follow WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.1 AA, based on a contrast ratio of 4.5:1. The pairings have sufficient contrast for use with normal text, large text and graphics.
Newsletters
There are several newsletters geared towards independent publishers and journalist entrepreneurs. The following are email newsletters with great information and resources.
Wondertools by Jeremy Caplan
Each week you’ll receive one note with useful sites & resources to save you time. Avoid missing out on new things that might benefit you. Rather than spending hours trying to figure out which site is the best for X, get a single weekly email to help you stay updated. It’ll help you do what you do a little more creatively.
Simon Owens’ Media Newsletter
Simon Owens is a longtime journalist, marketer, and PR professional. He began his career as a newspaper reporter covering local government in Virginia. In 2008, he moved to Washington, DC to work at a marketing agency while simultaneously serving as an associate editor at PBS’ MediaShift. He has conducted PR, content marketing, and social media strategy for dozens of companies, organizations, and individuals, including Google, Comcast, Forbes, ESPN, C-SPAN, and Nike. For two years he was an assistant managing editor at US News & World Report. While there, he built out the company’s then-nascent social media presence. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Politico, Scientific American, Forbes, Harvard’s Nieman Lab, The Next Web, Daily Dot, PBS.org, and US News & World Report.
He now edits an industry newsletter that covers everything from the Creator Economy to traditional media. He also hosts The Business of Content, a podcast about how publishers create, distribute, and monetize digital content.
The Rebooting by Brian Morrissey
WTF is SEO? by Jessie Willms and Shelby Blackley
WTF is SEO? is a newsletter for news publishers. It helps you - whether your publication knows all the things about search or it’s just you doing it all - understand, prioritize and make actionable growth for your outlet.
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