where can i go to learn about the basics of internet marketing? do i start with that? Backlinking? SEO? Affiliate marketing? Can anyone direct me towards a very beginner guide? I'd like to search, but i don't know what're the fundamentals that I should even be searching for...
start seo, than you will have the diea to discover affiliate marketing working with your seo work that you should have mastered by that time. I wont discribe everything just use my keyword to search on this topic 1. keyword research 2. website 3. content (articles) 4. backlinks 4.5 quality backlink after you have some revenur to cover your domain names cost and host, add product related to your website, and some cpa by that time. will take you aprox 2yrs to be very good, and dont buy every software software, use those and youll have a great start: scrapebox thebestspinner linkwheel builder / saenuke 35$/50k live xrumer profile service.
I'd recommend setting yourself up something that you can afford to completely fuck up on, like a squidoo lense, blogger/wordpress site or a facebook page (both of which can gain page rank), pick a niche that you can write, install some kind of analytics software and attempt to get it ranked. You'll learn more from a month of doing that than you would in 4 months reading crappy ebooks and beginners guides. Try to remember that those that can DO those that can't TEACH! Simply put, 90% of what you find in those guides is either out of date or made up. (That said, it's still worth reading what goes on at BHW, but always take it with a LARGE grain of salt) Once you've got a bit of traffic and a steady stream of analytics coming in you'll be able to see how the business actually works, then you'll begin to notice just how much crap is said on the various black hat forums and I'd say you're ready to begin with a proper site then Or if you're a real jammy sod like me, what you can do is fall into a job doing SEO knowing nothing and learn on someone else's clock (Not as lucky as it sounds though, you would not believe how little the people providing business to business training know about the market!)
As pasdoy offered good advice and explained above, " keyword to search on this topic", use the search feature of this bbs with his keywords offered, this could be more specific to you needs in your quest for answers, /2c.
As you are new in this work I will suggest you to go through the SEO book, this book is very good for new SEO.