How do I load nestest ROM?

I finished writing my 6502 emulator and I'm ready to start testing it. I found the nestest ROM with some documentation, but I'm not sure, what the proper way of loading the ROM is. The author says, that emulators should start at 0xC000, which contains 0 when I load the ROM, so I must be doing something wrong.

So right now my loading procedure looks something like this:

clear memory
set PC to 0x8000
open the file
skip first 16 bytes (iNES header)
load the rest of the file into RAM (starting at 0x8000)
set PC to 0xC000