Hey friend, 

Are you over Barbiemania? Or are you still thinking pink?

I'm collecting data for a future article and wonder if you'd be willing to take 2-3 minutes to answer a few questions about the movie, whether you've seen it or not.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/WSPTH8B

My last Forbes article was about the movie, which I simply had to see because I wanted to write a story about it. It would have been disingenuous to write about Barbie without seeing the movie.

I've shared a preview of the article in this newsletter. 

I've also shared a light lesson on the language of blogging, plus a few of my top finds from the past two weeks.

Please enjoy this issue of Beyond Copy!

Renae :) 

Newsjacking Barbie: 5 Ways Your Brand Can Tap the Barbie Craze

Think Pink!

Unless you’ve been sequestered in a pink dreamhouse under a candy-cotton-colored sky, you’ve heard about Barbie, the blockbuster movie starring Margot Robbie as Stereotypical Barbie and Ryan Gosling as her BFF, Ken.

I confess that I wasn't impressed when interest in Barbie began to take off. “How dumb,” I thought, wondering who the producers targeted. Surely not someone from my generation; I’m a Gen Xer who grew up in the 1970s when Barbie was still a teenager.

But I couldn’t imagine Mattel and Warner Bros were targeting children unless the goal was to revitalize revenue by encouraging a new generation of kids to want to play with Barbie dolls.

As the release date approached and my newsfeeds overflowed with Barbie-related articles—many about Barbie and brand collaborations—I scratched my head.

• Burger King Brazil rolled out a bright pink sauce (yuck) for its new Pink Burger.
   
• Joybird created a Barbie-inspired line of fabrics and furniture.
   
• Social agency Eye Studio's colossal computer-generated ad showed what appeared to be a massive Barbie stepping out of a box next to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

The Language of Blogs

Sometimes I feel as if my fight to teach people how to talk about blogging is a lost cause. Even when I worked a full-time, remote job as a content marketing writer, and educated the content team on this very topic, they continued to use the language incorrectly.

"I need to write a blog," they'd say. "Oh, you're writing an entire blog? How many blog posts will be on it?" I'd think.

I know it's hard to break old habits. Or maybe people just don't care. Language is a living thing, after all. It morphs and changes all the time. 

Sigh. Sometimes I want to give up. Other times, like now, not so much :) So whether you use it or not, please enjoy this brief lesson on the language of blogs.

Speaking of blogging... if you need help with your blog posts... whether ghostwriting or editing, please get in touch. Blogging is one of my favorite activities, and I'd be delighted to help you use your blog to put your big, bold ideas out into the world, influencing and selling for you.  

Et Cetera

What to blog about — Sometimes even professional content folks struggle to figure out what to write about—even if they've created a card deck about blogging! No need to buy a deck, though, unless you really want to. Check out BlogAbout, a free tool that asks you to input a keyword, choose a keyword type, and then, voilà! You get a list of potential blog-post titles based on your selections. Enjoy!

HubSpot website grader — This free tool will grade your site on a Pass/Fail basis for page size, page speed, page requests, browser caching, image size, meta description, descriptive link text (versus "click here"), mobile performance, and more. You do have to give up your email for the results, but hey... when is "free" really "free? Try it.

PDF magic — For some reason, I had to log in to my old Adobe account this week. And I was surprised to find that you can do all sorts of stuff with PDFs in there—for free. For instance, combine PDFs, delete pages, extract pages, rotate pages, add protection, add signatures, and convert PDFs to JPGs, Word, and PPT. Check it out.

Eerily relevant content — If you want to create content that meets your prospects exactly where they are, check out AnswerThePublic. How it works? I'm writing pieces on email marketing, so I typed "email marketing" into the search bar. In return, I got this amazing image and links to 60 of 131 questions people are asking Google about email marketing. A free account gets you three searches a day. A $99 lifetime plan (I signed up) gives you 100 searches per day. Be amazed.
 

That's all for this week!

I'll be back again in the next two weeks with another issue of Beyond Copy.

Until then,

Write on!