The Puzzler's Guide/Intro/General Strategies

First off, DON'T PANIC! The main thing to remember is that puzzles, no matter how hard they profess to be, want to be solved. As such, what you may think of as "impossible" on first sight may contain many more clues, hints and possibly useful bits of information which will all make solving the puzzle a whole lot easier. (Of course, you might still need to do some hard work, but we can't just sit around thinking all day now, can we?)

The first thing to do then is to work out what the puzzle wants you to do. With easy puzzles, this is usually spelled out rather obviously. e.g. "What comes next?", "Who dunnit?" etc. If there's no obvious puzzle to begin with, then you already know one thing you're looking for - a question. This is important - interpreting "random" information is a lot (or bit) easier if you know what kind of thing you're looking for - whether it's a word, a sentence, or even a picture or a reference to something else.

So if you're lucky and you have a question, a good next step is actually not a step at all. It is an anti-step. This unstep is: don't jump to assumptions, at least not too quickly. It's easy, oh so easy, to start working on a puzzle after reading the question too quickly, and then realising - once you've used up your 3 daily guesses - that it actually wanted THIS, not THAT. Take your time, read the question. Make sure you know what you're looking for.