Nice welcome to Crypto Mining. Nice introductory article. I wrote something similar check it out. https://steemit.com/finance/@crypticj/how-to-buy-amazon-gift-card-for-92-off

I would recommend Gdax.com or coinbase no outgoing transaction fees/ also go to your settings > algorithms and uncheck all the algorithms that you don't want to mine with I strictly keep mine on "Equihash" as I have Nvidia GTX 1070