It is wonderful that the Internet makes it so easy to obtain information, tips, recommendations, and other learning opportunities to enhance your digital marketing knowledge and skills, which will help grow your business. Also, there are many free or inexpensive webinars and meet-ups, where you can get the advice from industry professionals.

I’m on the both sides of the debate; I seek information and tips, and also provide information and advices, and am well aware that not all recommendations apply to everyone. Here are 3 tips for sorting through the flood of information you receive online and offline.

Fact-based advice vs. Experience-based advice

The advice or tips can be based on the fact or his or her experiences.

In general, fact based advice is applicable to most people, but you really need to think about how the experience based advice can work for you or not.

For example, if a person explains how to set up geographic targeting using Google Webmaster Tools, or talks about the latest regulation changes made to the International Trade, those are fact based advice and information that are applicable to everyone.

While it is always helpful to hear about someone’s success story such as their AB testing results, you may have different outcomes due to different settings, different target audience, etc. If the advice you heard motivates you, you should conduct your own AB testing to find out what works for your business.

Industry specific advice vs. General advice

The market landscape and the target audience behaviors can be quite different from industry to industry. Because of the differences, many wonderful tips out there are only applicable to specific industry.

If the advice is based on the E-commerce campaign success during the last holiday season, it is probably not applicable to your B2B campaign, at least without some modifications for your business type and your target audiences.

Even within the E-commerce industry, you cannot take the advice at face value. For example, a person from big famous brand may say that their bulk of marketing campaigns successes come from branded terms, it is apparent that small-medium sized businesses with no brand awareness can depend on their marketing campaigns to drive the majority of their traffic with branded terms.

Applicable business sizes

Much advice, while great, may not work for other companies due to the differences in the size of business, budget, available resources, etc.

Recently, I heard a popular blogger presenting about blog writing for businesses. It was a wonderful presentation, however, most of the advice and her experiences with a team of dedicated writers were not applicable to room full of local small business owners.

While much of the advice and the information may not apply directly to you as they are given however, you can always learn from them. Whenever you hear someone’s success story, it is always a good idea to think about why it worked for them, and make necessary adjustments so that it will work for you.