I am pro offline and made money but want to come online. What's up with this ban on bidding on keywords like Amazon? I am marketing their damn store anyway. I see others bidding on it, or variation or compound forms of it. How does keyword bidding for affiliate marketing work PLEASE.
If you're an affiliate, then the vendor has the right to prohibit you from bidding on certain keywords, trademarked or not. This may be to prevent excessive competition, or the fact that affiliates have been known to use questionable ad copy that may give consumers an unfavorable impression of the vendor. An example is "[product name] scam", even though the product isn't a scam in any way, shape, or form. This sort of marketing technique makes vendors nervous.
Regarding AdWords and bidding on trademarks, it's my understanding that you can bid on trademarks, as long as the trademarked term doesn't actually appear in your ad.
Can I attempt to rank for keywords with trademarks? Will they pay me if I indeed do rank and pull in sales for them.
You can certainly rank for keywords with trademarks, provided that the keyword isn't in the domain name. The reason that you shouldn't buy a domain with a trademark in it is that you may get a cease and desist letter from the lawyers of the company that owns the trademark, and you'll have to take the site down and possibly transfer the domain and surrender any money that you made off of their trademark.
In terms of payment, if you're talking about Amazon, then they'll pay you as long as you comply with their TOS. You cannot, for example, use PPC to drive traffic to your Amazon affiliate URLs, but you can certainly use PPC to drive traffic to your own websites that may have your Amazon affiliate links on them.