roywall: Mining colonies will not produce a population. Only a colony ship will do that. Mining colonies will make it so a planet will produce resources that you can harvest. Imagine putting a drilling platform in the ocean. A real population isn't there, but instead you have workers extracting the materials for you. Once you have that in place you can send harvesters there to start collecting the ore.

Generally what I do to start is - Jump to my homeworld, go to the build menu start a ship yard. Then I go to skills choose my specialty, and queue up a few skills (Since I chose researcher I knew the first skill would complete while I was sleeping). I generally queue up skills to get me defensive abilities so if someone decided to attack me I'd be able to defend myself. I queue up to Stealth Orbitals.

I then return to my planet and create a few probes, and a few small harvs, and start harvesting my local system saving up for a colony ship, so I can expand my population. You require an actually colony to have the colony grow. Every 100 million in population you get 1 factory, to a max of 9 factories on a single planet.

There is no special way to build, and you sound like you are on a good route already. With the new game everyone is in the same boat, so many new options and so many different ways to grow your empire. Feel free to post questions. We will do all we can to try and answer them.