None of what I say below would be worthwhile if you play for less than 20 hours a week apart from the first paragraph, but if you play more than that, read on.
If you want to make money as a bounty hunter, it makes a lot of sense to pledge to powerplay. ZH gives normally 40% bonus for rank 2. On a Wednesday, you take your tanked up Vulture or whatever to one of his expansion systems, where you'll find special powerplay combat zones. There, you kill 10 ships to get 100 merits. Hand them in immediately, and then you get 40% extra on every bounty you earn for a week. The next week, you only need to earn 50 merits to keep your level 2, because the 100 you have gets halved.
If you have lots of time on your hand and have a strong ship (engineered shields), you can go for level 5. The first week is hard because you have to kill 1000 ships at about 40 to 50 an hour, so maybe 25 hours work, but you get a guaranteed 50 million a week salary plus every bounty you earn gets doubled. The next week, you only need to kill 500 ships, which takes about 12 hours, so your 50 million salary is equivalent to 4 million an hour. If you spnt an additional 20 hours bounty hunting, your average 3 million an hour would be doubled to 6 million an hour, so now you get 170 million for 32 hours work, which is over 5 million an hour.
You can also get level 5 by carrying intel from a control system to HQ, or by carrying fortification supplies from HQ to any control system (ideally one that the club wants you to fortify - see special forum thread). You need a cargo ship and have to pay for those supplies. They give you some free every 30 minutes, so what some people do is take a laptop to work and logon every 30 minutes, load the next lot of free supplies and logoff. You don't need any HOTAS for that, just click the screen. When you get home, deliver the supplies as your first activity (15 minutes maybe), then change ships and carry on bounty hunting. At the end of your session, change ships claim your free stuff and buy the rest to fill up your ship. Make a second delivery, then claim the next free ones and logoff. At level 2, they only offer you about 10 tons free each 30 minutes, so the first time, you go for level 5 like that, you'll probably pay out a lot more than the 50 million salary, but each week after that, you make a profit equivalent to how much freestuff you can claim, plus you get the double bounties. It would help if you had a big cargo ship like an Anaconda. A Python will need to make 40 deliveries and an Anaconda about 30. In the first week and half that in the second. The more free stuf you pick up, the bigger the profit onthe salary.
The third way is to do undermining. You get 20 merits for each opposing ship that you hook out of supercruise and kill in an undermining system. The problem with that is that you get massive bounties on you and then you get forever pestered by NPCs after that bounty.
Whatever system you use, you get the occasional opposing power's ship undermining you, but that's not a problem if you're doing combat because you kill them and get 20 merits each time, which is a handy bonus towards your target. If you're doing deliveries, don't fight, run away as quickly as you can.
Apart from the money, powerplay can be a bit of fun once you figure out how your activities influence your power's struggle to take over the universe. To get involved in that side of things, you need to read the special powerplatyforum threads, which give you instructions where to go. I think most people just go for the money or special weapons in the most efficient ways possible, which tends to work against those poor guys trying to take over the universe.
