mining seems to be a choice of pour money at it and get big rigs/asic or sift little and often and try to chip away at the mess of 0s to get some im only a tiny player myself and now after almost 1 month have .4 btc
unless your on a laptop you might look into getting a cheap gpu even a 57xx will give you about 100-150mhash
I am on a laptop, and that's a huge offset. Nevertheless, I've learned a lot. I've also managed to worsen my browser display output setting up ATI drivers but that's another story

Cheap desktop with PCIx16 about 50 and 5750 or 5770 is about 50 and you will getitng about 150 180 without overclocking and up to 220 with overclocking... But use cgminer you get about 10% more out... When ASIC takes over BTC switch to LTC...