Are you joking with us right? Are you telling me that you bought hardware and put it to run only to figure out you are missing something. Do you think it is the good idea what you have done here? Go and spend the money without looking more in depth about what are you trying to do and simply spending your money on... However I will somehow answer your question because I do believe this is important.

If you don't have specialized hardware such as ASICs then you probably don't want to look into mining bitcoin but if you are using GPUs then it might be better to go for some altcoin, this website is pretty decent with information http://whattomine.com/ plus they give you an option to calculate how much you could potentially earn.

Pool can be a problem if it's some unknown one with very low hashrate of course.