Small Business Web Tools for Video Music and Website Colors

If you want to make marketing videos for your small business, you need a great resource for affordable music. Is free affordable enough for you? You’ll love this no-cost royalty-free resource. Plus, if you see websites with colors that you love, and you want a quick way to find out what the exact hex value, this free Web tool does the trick.

Free Royalty-free Music for Small Business Videos

Incompetech

I want to share a royalty-free music website that I absolutely love and use. I make a lot of small business videos, and Incompetech has been one of my favorite Web tools for years. When you’re making a video, you simply have to nail the audio, and part of nailing the audio is incorporating nice music. Incompetech offers royalty free music – just about everything under the sun — but the best part about it? It’s free.

Incompetech.com

Figure 1: Incompetech.com

You can get as much or as little music as you want for absolutely free. The website asks you to just make a small donation — whatever you can, whenever you can – or not. You can still use the music. The site organizes its royalty free music in a great way: by a particular genre, by certain “feel,” or you can search by keyword.

Under “Feel” it lists lots of choices: action, aggressive, bouncy, calming, etc. Each category offers a bunch of musical pieces of music that you can listen to and sample them to hear what they’re all about. A piece called Sunshine is as nice as it sounds.

I searched by keyword for a piece called Deliberate Thought. I’ve used it over and over again whenever I want music that is non-linear. By non-linear I mean something that does not have a particular tune to it. Sometimes a tune can get in the way of what you’re trying to describe.

You can put a piece like Deliberate Though, or some other non-linear piece of music, in the background of a video when you’re explaining how a piece of work is done. It’s the kind of music that might play behind a person doing a piece of physical work, for example. It doesn’t detract from what they’re doing.

Once again, the beauty of what Incompetech does is the fellow who runs the site accepts donation when you can afford it. So if you go out and make some money with your video, send him a couple of dollars, whatever you can afford. That’s what I do, so go and check out Incompetech. There’s a bunch of other stuff too, but boy, free royalty-free music alone makes the site worth bookmarking.

How to Identify Website Colors

RedAlt

Have you ever visited a website and fallen instantly in love with the colors they use? The problem is how to identify those colors, right? Fret no more my dear friend, there’s a nifty Web resource that will come to the rescue for you, and it’s completely free.

The site is called RedAlt and the resource is called I Like Your Colors.

1: Visit RedAlt.com and click on I Like Your Colors — it’s the first option under Web Page Construction Tools.

2: At the bottom of the page you’ll find a box where you enter the URL of the Web page that you want to find the colors for.

RedAlt.com

Figure 2: RedAlt.com

The screenshot shows an example of what you’ll see. Obviously the range of colors will depend on the site that you select for evaluation. The values may seem like some weird kind of code, but any designer will know what to do with those codes. It’s a unique identifier for each exact color, a hex value I believe they call it.

Bear in mind that this resource does have a limitation — it can’t detect colors in graphics, only colors that are used to make up the page; or colors that are used in fonts.

In case you’re wondering about the legal or ethical implications of “borrowing” colors from another site, don’t worry. There’s no copyright on colors or even color combinations.

Andrew Lock is a self-described maverick marketer and the creator and host of Help! My Business Sucks, a free, weekly Web TV show full of practical small business marketing tips, advice and resources to help small businesses “get more done and have more fun.”

Do you have a comment or question about this article or other small business topics in general? Speak out in the SmallBusinessComputing.com Forums. Join the discussion today!

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