To begin mining, you must use either a GPU card, FPGA, or ASIC machine. We recommend that you purchase an ASIC miner if you are just starting out because eventually the GPU and FPGA miners will be too slow and consume too much power to be profitable over time. Butterfly Labs has a great ASIC miner for those just starting out which runs at 5 GH/s and is the most affordable entry into the ASIC generation, costing a mere $274. In contrast, previous GPU cards and FPGA's cost nearly the same amount, but usually hash at a rate that is around 800 MH/s, making them cost prohibitive at that price level.

Once you have decided on the machine you wish to purchase and receive it, you will need to download a special program that is used for mining, such as BFGMiner or CGMiner for example. There are many other programs out there that can be used for Bitcoin mining, but these are just two of the more popular programs released.

The next step to mining is to set up a Bitcoin wallet or use your existing Bitcoin wallet to transfer the Bitcoins you mine and keep them safely in storage. A Bitcoin wallet is like a traditional wallet and can be software, mobile, or web-based. Bitcoins can be sent to your wallet by using a unique address that only belongs to you. The most important step in setting up your wallet is securing it from potential threats by enabling two-factor authentication or keeping it on an offline computer that does not have access to the Internet. Wallets can be obtained by downloading a software client to your computer such as Armory and Bitcoin-qt, downloading an app to your phone, or using a web-based solution such as Blockchain.info. Wallets that are on devices connected to the Internet or mobile devices are much less secure than offline wallets, therefore we recommend using an offline wallet for the utmost security.

Once your Bitcoin wallet is created, we recommend joining a mining pool. Mining pools are defined as groups of miners working together to solve a block and sharing the rewards of that block. At this time, when a block is solved there is a reward of 25 Bitcoins that all the miners who contributed hashing power to that block will receive as a payout proportionate to how much hashing power they shared. While it is possible to mine alone, we do not recommend that at this time as blocks are solved faster by miners in pools.

Souce: bitcoinmining.com