Reading

Start by reading all of the offical blogs and learning centers. Go Google ‘AdWords Offical blog’, ‘Yahoo Search Marketing blog’, etc. Find the offical blogs and subscribe to them. Read through the official learning centers to get a basic background of best practices, search engine editorial guidelines and more. Here’s a freebie…I’d start with the Google AdWords learning center.

PPCHero is an excellent pay per click blog…you’ll accumulate more blogs to read as your knowledge grows. I don’t want a beginner to get paralyzed with too much reading.

This is about DOING. Formulate your own opinions – every piece of advice you read may or may not be true, so test it out yourself if you can.

Don’t get certified

Meaningless

Getting certified used to be cool. It’s not anymore. If you can show a business owner or a website owner what you have DONE, show them your work, then you are showing more competence than one who simply learns the material to take a certification test.

For me, seeing a certification on a resume is meaningless. I. don’t. care.

Show me, don’t tell me

If you can’t tell, the bottom line is that I want beginners to show me what they have done and what they can do. Don’t tell me. Show me. Showing me is more convincing than telling me. The account doesn’t have to be clean or employ 100% of all the best practices out there. What’s important is that you simply know your way around a little bit and that you have the initiative to DO it.