I subscribe to a lot of emails. Too many really.

But the upside is it lets me see a lot of different styles of marketing. Good and bad.

One style that I'm going to suggest you avoid yourself is “holier than thou” marketing.

Now no one sets out to sound pretentious or “holier than thou” in their marketing. Their goal, I believe, is a good one: to make their email more interesting and to build a bit of a bond with their readers by telling a personal story.

It's a tricky balance. One I've fallen foul of myself, I know.

If you're not careful, what happens is you end up with abominations like the email I got last week from a guy talking about how he had a tough decision to make and how he decided to be a good samaritan and help out someone in distress.

I'll spare you the details but the essence was “I was going along with my business, I saw someone having a problem, I could have ignored it, but I didn't, I helped him out. Sometimes in life you have to make a decision to do what's right even if it inconveniences you. You guys should do the same”.

There's nothing wrong with the lesson. And if you want to teach something, a personal story is a good way to do it. But the way it's told here basically sets the writer up as being better than his audience and implies they should be more like him.

No one really wants to be told you're better than them and they should be more like you.

As I say, that's probably not what the writer intended. He probably thought “how can I teach something useful and at that same time share a personal story that makes it more interesting”.

But if you're going to do that you have to be careful.

A better way to do it is to make someone else the hero of the story and have you as a witness. That way the audience sees you as someone like them, someone aspiring to be better. The lesson is a lesson for you too.

For example, I have quite a few stories where my wife Kathy is the hero and does something clever or courageous or kind. Because, well, she's kind of cleverer, more courageous and kinder than me so it's easy to find examples.

But you can use anyone you know or even don't know. The point is that you position yourself as a learner on the journey too, not at the peak of the mountain looking down on your audience.

Another way to do it is to tell a story about a mistake you made and how you recovered from it. Or how you overcame one of your flaws.

And when I talk about your mistakes and flaws I mean real ones. Not the “I work too hard” or “I care too much” nonsense from job interviews. 

If you tell a story about a big mistake you made it makes people feel a bit better about themselves. It reminds them you're human too, just like them.

Of course, you have to recover from it and show them what to do instead. And that lesson can't be something banal they already knew. It has to be new for them.

Again, easy for me, because I make lots of mistakes.

But the key thing is that you're not claiming to be perfect.

Look at all the popular heroes in literature or the movies. They all have flaws. They all make mistakes. They all have inner demons.

A “perfect” hero with no flaws is too unlike us. They make us feel bad about ourselves. We don't cheer when they win because it's a foregone conclusion. We don't learn from them because their lessons seem condescending.

If you're going to teach something through a personal story, make yourself the butt of the joke. Or the witness. 

Or at the very least do what Drayton Bird does. In order to avoid coming across as a show-off he uses lines like “I'm an absolute duffer at everything else in life, but what I am good at is marketing”.

By saying he's no good at anything else, his claim that he's brilliant at marketing becomes more believable. And he comes across as modest rather than a show-off.

No one likes a perfect hero that can do no wrong. And the truth is, that's not really you anyway. So share your stories in ways that reveal the truth, rather than trying to create a false image of perfection.