Do You Know These Insider Secrets?

What are insider secrets? Sometimes they are techniques that most people (except the "insiders") don't know, like how to subliminally persuade people. Other secrets can save you money once you know them, like the first one of the following five secrets.

Five Insider Secrets

1. Why has 3,000 miles become the standard for oil change frequency in cars? This is an insider secret that is hidden in plain view. It's right there in your owners manual for your car. Auto makers recommend an oil change every 5,000 or 6,000 miles. Since most cars are under warranty through many oil changes, they wouldn't recommend such an interval if they thought it wasn't often enough.

Getting an oil change every three thousand miles is a marketing idea from the oil change industry. Of course you could reduce wear on the engine if you changed the oil every 100 miles, right? The problem with that is that the small extra savings on wear couldn't compare to the cost of the changes. The appropriate balance for cheapest overall maintenance is the manufacturer's recommendation. Drive your car for 100,000 miles and this little secret can save you $500.

2. Sunflower oil is used, along with parsley, in at least one commercial bad breath treatment. They also both work individually, in their natural forms. Chewing on a sprig of parsley will freshen your breath immediately. Eating raw sunflower seeds will freshen your breath, and the oil absorbs odors that may emanate from your stomach as well. Roasted sunflower seeds tend to cause bad breath, by the way, so stick to the raw ones.

Try brushing your tongue too. One experiment showed that brushing just teeth reduced odor by 25%. Brushing the tongue reduced odor by 75%. Do both to reduce odor by 85%.

3. Why do real estate agents sometimes advertise their listings without prices? Is this a better way to sell the client's house? Not at all. Many home buyers will skip right over the ads with no prices. There are enough to look at that don't waste their time, because they do have the prices.

The reason agents do this is to get people to call out of curiosity. They know that most who call will not be interested or qualified to buy that particular home, but they can be sold something else. In other words, this is a prospecting tool for the agent! Demand that the price be put in the advertisements for your home, if you want the best chance to sell it.

4. Here is an insider's secret from the beer industry. In numerous blind taste tests, researchers find that draft beer tastes better to most people than the bottled version of the same beers. The bottle in front of them as a matter of identity for consumers ("I'm a Bud man"), or so they don't appear cheap. Unless telling the world your brand of beer is important to who you are, why not drink the better beer for less?

5. Good salesmen often use a technique called "mirroring and matching." They match the pace of your speech, sit like you do, use your words, and even try to mirror your facial expressions. This is a highly effective technique for establishing rapport and trust. You just feel better about a person who seems a lot like you. You can try this technique yourself, or at least remember this insider secret, to protect yourself the next time you buy a car or other expensive item.