Free tools to build your football brand online

Yvan Delia-Lavictoire

Starting a business or side hustle in the football industry can be seen as a daunting task, but with the right online presence, you can make a big impact. Through your online presence, you can establish trust, share your message consistently, create a strong brand, and let’s be honest, convert your followers into clients.

Social media is an important component of your online presence, but it also creates reel (get it?) frustration as the platform's objectives and algorithm change. While they are great for building an audience, you should also explore building on platforms on which you have more control and ownership.

This would also help reduce the pressure of social media on your business performance and help you focus on improving your service to present and future customers.

There are multiple ways to build an online presence for a business in sports, and there are just as many tools out there.

If you are testing a new business idea, bootstrapping your business to the max or starting a side hustle with $0, then you might enjoy this list of free and very efficient tools.

While these tools also offer paid plans, their free options are great to kickstart your journey as a business in the football industry. No credit card is required to access and use these tools.

If you're looking to build a football side hustle, these articles might also be relevant:

Notion

I'll start with one of my favourite tools of the last few years. It’s been nothing short of a gamechanger for my productivity and focus.

Notion is a digital workspace that can expand based on your needs. You can create lists, tables, calendars, checklists, libraries of documentation, client-facing pages and so much more.

The Personal Use plan is more than enough to help you get started on Notion, and also grants you access to their template library, tutorials and webinars.

From a professional point of view, I have used Notion mostly as a project managing tool for myself and my clients. I have recently started documenting all my business processes so that this information can be accessible to future collaborators.

I also use Notion as a content calendar for Lavictoire and the brands I work with. It gives me a great overview of what I need to work on.

One of the things I love about Notion is its very minimalist view which helps focus on the task at hand, especially when it comes to writing articles, or finding new content ideas for the next month.

The free plan gives you access to loads of ready-to-use templates, ranging from project tracking to task management and expense tracking.

As a business or side hustle in football, you could use Notion to:

List all your tasks and track them
Build a content calendar and follow their statuses
Draft your articles
Share knowledge with other people in your space
Build a 5-year roadmap for your business
Write and track your meeting notes
Build a client portal for each client and project
Build a mini Company intranet where you help future employees with onboarding
Organize all your documents and templates
Create an inventory of all the tools and accesses that you need for your business

Click here to learn more about Notion

Canva

Oh, I know I'm getting hate mail from my graphic designer friends for this. Hear me out.

I have been on the anti-Canva train before so I know what it feels like. Then, I decided to sign up and well, I kinda never looked back.

Full disclaimer - It is not a graphic design tool. If you're an experienced designer, you'll know what I'm talking about.

If you are a football enthusiast who just wants to create content, visuals, documents or presentation decks for your business idea, then Canva is the way to go.

It's something that I have said multiple times before, but you need 0 skills as a graphic designer to get started on Canva. Again, see this as a massive opportunity for you, especially if you are getting started on your business and don't have the budget to hire external help or have a graphic designer produce all your assets.

I use Canva every day, to create my social media assets from Twitter images to Instagram Reels. I got started using their Free plan and upgraded recently to their Pro plan so that I could upload custom fonts, and create Brand Kits for myself and my clients.

Again, if you're getting started or focusing on keeping expenses at 0$, then have a look at Canva for all your visual needs.

One of the great things about Canva is that you don't need to know the ideal image size for every social media platform. They have presets and templates that you can simply use to create your visuals, documents or presentation decks.

As a business or side hustle in football, you could use Canva to:

Create all your social media graphics and videos
Build your Business Plan
Prepare your presentation decks
Write your internal documents
Create your business card
Create promotional flyers for events
Design Youtube thumbnails

Trust me, there are a lot more options but I will let you discover that.

Click here to learn more about Canva

Podia

Podia is one of those flying under-the-radar platforms that has so much to offer. Podia is a website-building tool that has a Free plan, on which you can create a full website, offer one digital download, launch one coaching service and build one community.

Yup, you read that right.

That free plan also includes access to their email marketing plan where you can send emails to your subscribers and clients.

Podia has been for me a great asset in building digital products, courses, and online coaching. I’ve used the platform to perform all three and it has been a successful journey so far. As a perfectionist, I am very appreciative of its simple yet easy-to-use interface. Y

As a business or side hustle in football, you could use Podia to:

Build your first website
Offer a community for your clients
Offer one digital service as a consultant
Create a digital product that people can buy (ie. eBook, Template, Spreadsheets, etc)
Offer a freebie to email subscribers

Click here to learn more about Podia

MailerLite

MailerLite is an email marketing tool that you can use free of charge to build up your email list.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. While social media is great to build your audience, it's much more valuable to get their email addresses.Email marketing is still an underrated tool, especially in the sports industry where so much of the attention is on social media. If you can build your online presence through email marketing, then you are potentially putting yourself (and your business!) in a great position for success.

As far as email marketing goes, MailerLite offers a lot more on its Free Plan than other tools in the same category.

That free plan gives you the ability to send up to 12,000 emails per month to a maximum of 1,000 subscribers.

MailerLite stands out from the lot because of its automation capabilities. You can create email sequences, such as a welcome journey, an onboarding sequence for clients or a weekly check-in for your subscribers. Usually, automation is a premium feature for most email marketing tools.

Through that free plan, you can also create a full website using the Mailerlite platform and 10 additional custom landing pages that you can use to acquire new leads.

As a business or side hustle in football, you could use Mailerlite to:

Build your subscribers list
Create a welcome journey for your subscribers
Create an onboarding sequence for clients
Launch a website, with blog articles
Schedule and send weekly newsletters
Create multiple landing pages for each category of potential clients
Build a lead magnet to acquire new leads

MailerLite has premium plans which provide advanced options such as removing the Mailerlite logo on emails and scheduling emails based on your audience's time zones.

However, if you are looking to keep things at an extremely low cost, MailerLite is a great Kickstarter comprehensive tool that can help you build an audience without spending a dollar.

Click here to learn more about Mailerlite