Where do I start?

Hey all, just registered and new here. Internet marketing and making money online is something that I am very interested in. Let's just say that I have dipped my toes in a little bit before, but I feel I want to jump in the pool now for real.

A little background about myself. My real only experiences with Internet Marketing and alike came from a class I took at my old college when I was majoring in IT. It was an E-Commerce class taught by a professor who has a doctorate in SEO. Aside from teaching business classes, he does IM full time and definitely makes a good living doing it. He showed us some of his projects and numbers and he was constantly going to conventions and business meetings cross country. We did everything from researching niches and keywords, affiliate marketing, free traffic, web hosting/building, PPC, AdSense, online stores, dropshipping, online auctions, etc. Pretty much any way you can make money online we looked at and it definitely intrigued me. We used Clickbank for affiliate marketing and I forgot how we researched our keywords, but we covered all that. I think through the whole course, I built 2 websites in 2 terrible niches. 1 affiliate which I made no commission on and 1 product where I sold e-book bundles on a topic. I wrote some articles, did some social networking, web 2.0 stuff, trying to drive traffic etc. I learned a lot of stuff, but I just felt overwhelmed overall. I believe I spent ~$200 total for web hosting, domains, PPC, etc and only made back maybe $60. So I had a net loss, which was fine since I attribute it to being so new and still learning.

Now 2 years later, I really have always still been interested in IM. I find this forum helpful to a degree, but I have to say I am utterly lost. I don't really know what I am doing, don't know where to start and don't have anyone to teach me. I know that everyone is here for help in one form or another, but also the ultimate goal is to make a buck at the end of the day, so I understand nothing can be free. All I am asking for is some friendly advice. Where should I begin? I feel like maybe some affiliate marketing through clickbank is a good start. Possibly building a review site or blog and driving traffic to it. I'm trying to find a niche and do some keyword research, but I am stuck here. How does one go about finding a good niche? And then correlating keyword research with it? Where can I get keyword research? Probably stupid questions. I have the drive to put in the work and effort, I just don't know where to start or what to do. I have very basic knowledge of some of these IM topics. Where do I go from here? I hope I don't come across the new guy looking for handout because that isn't my intention. I just don't know what else to do.