When you start a skill it's best to go to your guild and stick a practice point in it to get you started. You can start cold but you'll get a lot of failures before you get that first skill point. If you like you can slap a whole bunch of practice points in, although I think there is an upper limit in the low 20s past which you can't train them at the guild. Doing this should help you get a lower failure rate when you start making things. Personally I like the challenge of working the skill all the way up myself, so I normally start with the one point and then just live with the failures.
Learning ability is directly related to your intelligence, so if you have any nice +INT items make sure you have them on when you practice your skills. And if you normally wear any items that give you -INT, make sure you take them OFF for the duration! Additionally, high wisdom can cut down on the number of failures you get while practicing skills, so when swapping out your items bear this one in mind too and try and get the best combination of high INT and WIS. It can also be useful to have a high charisma score, as this will get you better prices for components from the vendors and give you better selling prices if you're trying to offload your results onto them. Given the cost of developing some of these skills every little helps here!
Many of the things you use to get started in a trade are found at quite low levels and can be a pain to go back for later when you get no experience for killing the monster that drops them. This is a list of some of the stuff worth stashing for later use.
Most smithing guides are written assuming that you are eventually going to be using the skill to make armour. I've been doing it primarily as a subsidiary skill to tailoring, so if this is also your goal you might find some useful tips here.
Some recommendations on a cheaper way to sew than the usual standard of patchwork armour.
Fishing
This is technically a trade skill although Verant level capped it when they realised that low levels were making too much money selling their fish back to the vendors! Not much to say about it except it's worth doing if you have the patience - you can practice a bunch of other things while fishing, or fish while medding! You can recoup the cost of poles and bait by selling the rusty daggers and old sandals that you catch. The fish scales you save for enduring breath spells. The fish you either sell to the vendors for a nice profit or you store to help keep your baking and brewing costs down later.
All my characters tend to bake as you can start early with stuff you find and it's relatively low cost.
Another good early starter that most of my characters indulge in. There's nothing quite like getting drunk on your own home brew!
Both my ranger and my druid are working on this skill. The ranger because she uses a lot of arrows and the druid 'cos she got tired of grouping with tanks that were always running out of arrows and didn't know how to make 'em!
Jewellery
My enchanter is definitely going to work at this one, but as yet doesn't have the money to buy components. As this is an expensive skill to develop I think I'm actually going to stick as many practice points in as I can afford before starting to try and keep the failure rates down. Stay tuned!
Alchemy
Alchemy is a shaman specific skill that becomes available at level 25. As my shaman hasn't yet reached double figures it's likely to be a while before I have any thoughts on this one!
Pottery
I actually got this skill up to 11 simply by making ceramic linings that I needed for smithing pie tins. Maybe one day I'll go back and work on it, but rumour has it that it can be quite a money sink. This is the skill needed for making vials required for the poison making skill.
Tinkering
I don't have any great interest in playing a gnome at this point, and as this skill is race specific I doubt I'll ever try it. If anyone has and would like to share their strategy, I'll happily post it.
Poison Making
This is a rogue specific skill. Currently I have no rogue characters so it's unlikely I'll be trying this one.
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