Noob questions and advice

**RossDvd** · May 18th, 2010, 12:31 AM

Hi all

Im looking to start branching out my online activities from just poker and am keen to learn about web based business. I am however a complete noob at this.

How did everyone get started in web based business?

From a complete beginner starting point what would anyone recommend reading or learning? I really do mean complete basics here and nothing is going to be too trivial for me to learn at this point.

All advice is greatly appreciated,
Ross

**hooperman** · May 18th, 2010, 02:01 AM

Originally Posted by RossDvd

From a complete beginner starting point what would anyone recommend reading or learning?

I'd recommend getting stuck in and learning on the job. Pick a topic you're interested in/passionate about and create a website about it. Along the way you'll learn about SEO, analysing your traffic stats, promoting the site and monetising it. You could buy a domain, get Wordpress ( a blogging platform) installed and have a site out there in a few hours for very few $$$.

If you have any problems, this is a good place to ask about them.

**Alastair** · May 18th, 2010, 03:11 AM

I'm in a similar situation. I've picked up a fair bit of knowledge by reading threads on this forum. A few of the regular posters have blogs - URLs usually in the signature - those are pretty useful.

Also with regards to the technical skills. My advice would be install a copy of XAMPP on your windows pc. then install wordpress and play around with it. There are lots of getting started tutorials and wordpress tutorials out there. Then once you feel you have something worthwhile its fairly straight forward to transfer it to a webserver.

**Clinton** · May 22nd, 2010, 03:38 PM

I'm glad you mentioned that you found signatures useful, Alastair. In in the next week or two I'm hope to be getting in a fair few people who write regularly on the topics of website buying, selling and flipping. And I'll point them to this thread. The more they post, they more their signatures get seen and the more traffic they drive to their own sites.

RossDVD, I got started in this by accident. I was running a website for my company ten odd years ago and I leant a bit of SEO to get more traffic. When Adsense arrived, I was one of the early adopters and discovered the site could make more money from Adsense than the company was making in the main trading activity. So I bought another site. And another one.

I agree with hooperman - learning on the job exposes you to the real problems and snags that you'll have to solve as you go along. I would differ from hooperman in one respect - my advice would be to buy a site rather than start from scratch. Even if it's only a few hundred dollars, it's a lot easier to get going, see results and avoid disillusionment if you hit the road running. That has always been my preferred route. Of all the sites that have passed through my hands over the years, over 99% were sites somebody else started.