I'm sure this kind of question gets asked a lot.

[Edward]

So, here's my deal. I'm an owner of a brick and mortar service company. We do fire and flood restoration, mold removal, that sort of thing. It's a family business that I inherited, and it pays my bills, but I hate it. When you've been forced into a business from the time you're a young child, it's hard to look favorably on it. I actually found this place doing some research on upping my SEO game for my company's site, but I am truly inspired by what I see here. A whole community of zealous, energetic, and knowledgeable people sharing their triumphs and failures. I love it.
But, I'm a complete neophyte in this world. I've spent my entire life around the internet, but I never once learned how to use it for anything more useful than entertainment. Keeping in mind that I know next to nothing, where's a good place to get a base education on the IM world? Even a lot of the posts in the Orientation Forum are kind of flying over my head, so I've got to start somewhere.
It's funny, I'm only 30 years old, and feel like an old man just being introduced to a new technology for the first time!

 

[c4yrslf12]

First of all, welcome. The first place among many of your resources should be right here at BuSo. But as you said, this place isn't the first place consumers go since most of us are (and have been) active in online marketing for a while.

where's a good place to get a base education on the IM world?

To better answer this question, maybe give us a little more? What are you looking to do with IM? Grow your current business? Start an e-commerce? Do you have a product you'd like to market?

The niche you choose and the style of marketing alone will help us to help you narrow your focus.

BuSo has guys who do strictly affiliate sales, local SEO, lead generation, product-to-market, and more.

 

[Broland]

Hey glad you're inspired and hopefully motivated. That's a good niche and you can really clean up with SEO. CPC's are crazy high usually and there can be some tough competition but pays off exponetially.

There is a ton you can read on the web on forums like this. I've made a lot of posts under the same name Broland if you're intersted in Local SEO stuff. But there is also a lot of misinformation out there. I stick to a few reliable people and my own testing and research. I mainly share good stuff on Skype now in small trusted groups. I think you'll get the most from things like that chatting or working for a bit with people that are doing what you wanna do. Send me a PM if you wanna connect with a Skype group or two.

 

[Edward]

Thanks! To answer your question, c4yrslf12, I'm not 100% sure what I'm looking for right now. Ideally, I'd like to find something that I could replace my current job with totally. But I'd just be happy to make a little extra money on the side for now, get my feet wet. I feel like, as Broland mentioned, SEO might be a good place to start, as that's what led me here in the first place. I've wasted tons of money on hiring SEO guys, and got less than mediocre results. So I decided to learn it myself. I figure if I can do it successfully for my company, in my industry, which is pretty specialized, I can make it work for others as well. And then hopefully I could phase out having to go out and clean sewage out of people's basements entirely!

 

[Ryuzaki]

If I was going to give a quick overview of the SEO game to a completely new beginner (forgive me if you're not this new), I'd say the following:

1) You need to know how to buy a domain from a registrar. I prefer NameCheap.

2) You'll need to rent a server. If you're new, you can settle for "shared hosting" from one of many places. You'll do best for yourself if you find a host that provides cPanel and not one of their own screwy interfaces. Hostgator is still a great option.

3) You'll need to know how to find out what your server's "nameservers" are and how to log back into the registrar and set these nameservers up so that your domain points users to your website on the server.

4) You'll probably want to start with a content management system such as Wordpress. This will let you build a website that's far more advanced than you could without HTML/CSS/PHP knowledge. You can install "themes" that will design your site for you. It's widely supported with lots of themes and plugins that extend functionality.

5) Take the time to learn about on-page optimization. Doing this right is critical to ranking. Under-doing it will make your job 1000x harder, and over-doing it will make your job impossible. You want to learn about how to research keywords, find the one you want to target, and how to use it on your page to send the right signals to the search engines that says "hey, I should be ranking for this specific term."

6) Your efforts will then have to shift to off-page optimization. This is where links come in. You're going to see a lot of talk about spam, using exact anchors, tiering links, and other types of manipulation. My advice to you is to ignore all of that. Your only goal should be doing real marketing that results in people linking to you however they want to do it. Those are going to be the links that bring the results. Spam is tempting and can bring temporary results, but you'll be sacrificing your website or causing yourself a huge headache and regret in trying to get it unpenalized.


That's a decent outline. #4, 5, and 6 will be pretty intensive in terms of learning how to do it all properly. Don't go astray into the realms of over-optimization and you'll do just fine. Good luck!

 

[Edward]

Thank you, Ryuzaki. I'm currently at step 5. I had someone re-build my website last year, and they did an all right job of it, but they didn't really do any of the SEO they were supposed to. So my business is more or less invisible on the search engines right now. That's why I decided to start learning a couple of weeks ago. So now I'm just trying to figure out how to do on page optimization. I've received some basic education on the subject over at /r/SEO, which is eventually what led me here. Thanks for the link about on-page optimization. It looks incredibly useful, and I can't wait to pore over that more in-depth.

 

[Postmortis]

If you're totally new to SEO, check out the following beginners guides:
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
Reading the above guide was the very first thing I did when I started about 3-4 years ago.
While I stopped using their tools for quite a while now, their blog does contain the occasional gem.

A bit more advanced:
http://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-seo/

Then there's Backlinko, a site I'm quite fond of. Below are some recent posts of him that are worth reading:
http://backlinko.com/seo-copywriting (if you're planning on rewriting the website's content)
http://backlinko.com/conversion-rate-optimization (beast of a post on CRO)

If you ever have any SEO questions, feel free to ask it here. After lurking for quite some time now I decided to make an account as there really is an awesome community here.

 

[Michael Decker]

I am also 30 and there are so many things that I am just 'entering' into as well.

From my experience and reading the posts above just literally pick one of them and TAKE ACTION.

Don't worry about doing it perfect, just take action. The universe has a funny way of making order out of chaos and you need action to create that type of a stir :-)

Good luck!