It's always nice to welcome someone new to the friendly, fun, exciting world of pin collecting/trading!
I am pretty new still myself--about 5 months now. I am still learning and evolving. My advice to you is SET A BUDGET. It's so overwhelming in the beginning, and trading privately at pin meets or over the boards or through pinpics can require a lot more/different kind of pin inventory than trading off of lanyards at the parks. It is very easy to want to be right in the thick of things and to do that you may find yourself wanting to buy a lot of pins, which is why I said set a budget. There are several ways to buy, including e-bay, and e-bay can be a good source, but do some observing of auctions first. New pins usually start out pretty high, but then come down in price as time goes by, and new pins come out. I like to go to "going, going, gone," and sometimes find good bargains on some pins that people have just missed.
Pinpics.com is an excellent resource to learn about pins--it's a database of well over 6000 pins, and you can learn what kind of pins you like, what kind of pins are hard to find, etc. Dizpins.com, and Dizneypins. com are both great sources for what pins are new/being released, as well as having archives of older pins release during the past months that you can look at. Dizpins also has a sale board and trading board, as well as our Disboard having a trading board.
I hope this is a good start; lots of other people will chime in with advice too. Do not hesitate to start any new thread with any other questions that might come up along the way.
Good luck, have fun, and welcome to the group!
