It would be nice to always attract the clients you want.

But in reality, you attract the clients your marketing resonates with.

On Sunday my email was about stupid marketing mistakes I've made. I got a lot of messages back from people talking about similar mistakes they'd made, or just to say how nice it was to hear the honest truth.

I know that some people's marketing seems to be an edited highlight reel of success after success. Others go the other way and want to talk to you about their traumatic childhood and rollercoaster ride of a life all the time.

I'm kind of somewhere in the middle. I like to hear the real stories of what happens in marketing and business because I find that useful and relatable. But I don't need motivating by someone's “rags-to-riches, if I can do it so can you” life story.

So I market in the the way I like to be marketed to.

I happen to talk about my family every now and then. And football. And daily life. But if you don't want to, that's fine. It means your marketing will resonate more with people who aren't interested in that side of things either – so it's probably a good fit.

In theory you should market in the way your target clients like to be marketed to. But I feel that marketing in a way that you wouldn't respond to yourself is very difficult.

So I've decided that there are enough people a bit like me that I'll make them my target clients so I can market in a way I'm 100% comfortable with:)

That way the marketing I do is marketing that resonates with people I like.

And on the darker side, if you copy the marketing style of an internet guru who talks about nothing but getting huge riches with little effort, you'll probably attract the same sort of clients as they do: people who want to get huge riches for little effort.

Because that's who that style of marketing resonates with.

I guess what I'm trying to say is there are many different ways to do good marketing, so pick one that's true to you.

Just because someone says a particular way of marketing is “best practice” or you can just copy it and get results doesn't mean it's going to work well for you.

Within the broad church of good marketing there's lots of room for you to do things your own way.