Kevin Simpson argues a person's own name is the most influential word in English, more powerful than "free" or "thank you." The Chimney Cleaning Association of America collected named fireplace stories, and after publishing 50, monthly traffic jumped from one visitor to 500-1,000 per day.
So I want to start off with a question. Does anyone here know the two most influential words in the English language? And before you blurt it out, because I can just feel that blurt coming. I mean, you can look at yourself right back there. You can see that you want to talk. Mike, we just want to talk. These words are so powerful that if they were in today's newspaper, you would go out. I guarantee you go out and buy the paper. You'd probably buy ten copies of it. And if it was on television, you heard these two words. That becomes the most interesting television show ever. Or if we're in a conversation and you hear these two words mentioned, you're listening to that conversation, not me. Does anyone know what those two words are? Free. Free. Okay. What else? Your name. Your name. Oh, I like you. Why don't you take the stage? It ends up. It is your name. How old are you? I'm 14. Think about that. Good job. Good job. Yeah. That's amazing. Good. It took me 14 years of studying this to figure that out. All right. Your own name is the most influential words in the English language. If you see your name in the newspaper, oh, my God, that's an interesting paper. All of a sudden. And you are buying 10 copies for yourself, your spouse, your mom, your dad, everyone you know, look at this. The article's so interesting. I was crocheting under the picture, right? Or if we're in a conversation and your name pops up, all of a sudden, you're like, mm, that's interesting. What are they talking about? And you're looking at me, but you're listening to that. Our own names are the most influential words in the English language. More than free, more than thank you, more than sex. But that's pretty close. So tip number one in behavioral psychology is recognizing that our own names are the most influential words in the English language or any language. If you want to have prospects and clients and business running to you, start talking about them and put their names on the site. So my company was engaged by the Chimney Cleaning association of America. Believe it or not, that's a real association. If you're not familiar or a member, is there any members? So the Chimney Cleaning association of America calls and says, shockingly, we have a marketing problem because no one cleans their chimneys. No one knows they need it. And the even bigger problem that the Chimney Cleaning association members have is when they do their service, they're wearing, like, black clothing. You can't even see them. They're on your roof with, like, a spongy thing. You don't even see them. And their mascot's Mary freaking Poppins. I mean, it's a tough business to be in. So when they call this. We went through different behavioral techniques and we talked about names and said, how can we use names to start growing our members businesses? And here's what we did. We reached out to all these different customers, past customers, all three of them that have gone in the past, and prospects, and said, we want to know about your experience in front of the fireplace. Because ultimately, people don't care about what we do. They care about the benefit of what we do that brings to them. So no one cares so much about a clean chimney. We don't want a fire in our house. I mean, our house on fire. But we do want a nice warm fireplace. So we talk about the benefit. So people start submitting stories. Anniversaries and celebrations, birthday parties, sweet 16. It's the big rave now. And one story that was just amazing was this young girl who was 14, and she writes in that her father passed away in front of the fireplace, but the whole family was there together. And in that moment, when he took his final breath, the fire stoked. And she said in that moment, she knew God existed. And I was like, wow. Wow. So these stories came in and we gave people attribution. We put their names. So what do you think happened when we posted the first 50 stories on the Chimney Cleaning association site? This was a website, a business that was attracting about one visitor a month. All of a sudden, shockingly, not 50 people came that day. About 500 people visited the website that day. The next day we had 600 and then 1,000, because people started reaching out, saying, I love these stories. I'm reading. I want to share my fireplace moment. And they started contributing their stories. So in your business, start using their name. Thank you very, very. The stores. And I know definitely.
