For any beginner, (and experienced professional as well), Moz is a good resource for learning about news and trends in online marketing. It used to be called SEOMoz, and now is just "Moz".
Each year they come out with a report, and the report on 2014 was filled out by a little under 4,000 professionals, and includes good information, on what people are doing, what people are earning, and what tools they are using.
This years' report had good information on salaries, including a helpful breakdown of what kind of salaries experienced people are earning, but also a sense of what you can expect to earn if you are getting into online marketing for the first time.
I also found it helpful to see coverage of the top 5 activities for online marketing, split between whether the activities are being done in-house, at an agency or independently.
See http://moz.com/industry-survey for more information.
Recommendations from Dr. Todd:
- Get a Gmail address (http://mail.google.com), learn how to use Google Calendar, and set a reminder to check Moz and other sites on a weekly or monthly basis, to help keep your knowledge current. Moz has a variety of tools and information, but they regularly post to their blogs: http://moz.com/blog
- Set a yearly reminder to check at the beginning of the year, for their yearly Industry Report
