It’s guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest post is from Justin P Lambert – Enjoy!

If you’re making an effort to create and distribute content these days, you know that standing out from the crowd is difficult.  There’s so much “me too” out there, and precious little that demands to be seen.

But success requires differentiation.  If you don’t stand out somehow, you may as well not try.

Fortunately, everyone has a tool at their disposal that can help them to stand out no matter how saturated their niche, no matter how talented their competition.  Even you have this tool sitting right there waiting to be used.

Your unique worldview – the way you see the world and your own place in it.

Your worldview involves aspects of your personality as well as your emotional connection to your environment and the people who inhabit it.

It’s formed – at least in part – by a combination of things like your upbringing and your background, but unlike so many factors that are out of your control, your worldview is one thing you have a lot of conscious control over.

As noted in one of the Core Tenets of The Worldview Exploration Project created by the Institute for Noetic Sciences,

“Worldviews not only impact how we understand and make sense of the world around us but also influence how we express ourselves in the world. The constellation of personal values, beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and ideas that make up our worldview have an affect on our goals and desires, relationships and behaviors. The more aware we become of our worldview and the worldviews of others, the more effectively we can navigate through life.”

For example, based on your background and upbringing, you may tend to be an optimist, or a pessimist. You may lean toward being altruistic and helpful, or selfish. You may be able to readily commit yourself to a cause or a project, or you may be easily bored and restless.

Your level of self-esteem, your personal inhibitions, and even your secret prejudices, all play a role in shaping your worldview, and all can be traced back to some aspect of your background or upbringing.

But in all these cases, unlike cultural or economic forces that changed who you were as your brain was developing, these aspects of your personality are yours to play with.

Despite your natural inclination, you can choose to be more positive, more generous, more goal-oriented. Regardless of what your parents did or didn’t do, you can choose to value yourself, to make smart choices, and to favor equality.

Your worldview is yours to create, not simply a product of your past that you have no control over.

And that makes it a powerful tool indeed!

How does this affect your content marketing?

There are a million different variations on this theme: what you’ve come from has combined to color your perspective on the world in a way that’s unique to you. And that perspective, in turn, colors everything you think, do, say… or create.

As in, content.

So, the point here is not just to try to change who you are or how you view the world. It’s not about trying to put that integral part of you into the background while you’re creating content so you can write or record something that you think is “more appropriate” or “politically correct”.

On the contrary!

This is about being aware of how your worldview is going to affect what you create, and using that knowledge to your advantage! Because your unique worldview is the basis of one of the most important ingredients you can add to a successful marketing strategy: your unique voice.

And more than many other tools at your disposal, your unique voice is crucial to creating engaging content that truly speaks to your target audience.

Justin P Lambert is a content marketing specialist, owner of Words That Begin With You, author of The Content Marketing Hurricane (available for free July 7-11, 2014), and Chief Meteorologist at the CMH Stormwatchers Community.