Help me figure out my iPod please!

Normally I'm a very tech-savvy person, and this is driving me bananas! I recently broke down and bought an iPod after years of my friends extolling the many virtues of the world's greatest portable audio player. Everybody brags about how easy it is to use and how much music you can store on it. So I get my iPod home and install all the software, download the updates, and I'm ready to start loading my digital music library off of my external hard drive and onto my iPod.

Well it turns out that it isn't that simple. I read the directions (something I'm usually guilty of not doing) and followed them to the letter. I tried importing songs into the iTunes library and the program won't allow you to import mp3s, only xml and m3us!! I know m3u is the file extension for playlists...is that the secret? Do I really have to go through my painfully large mp3 library and put everything in songlists to even load it into my iPod?

I thought there was no way it was meant to be that painful. So I dragged and dropped mp3 files directly from my external drive into the iTunes library window. Now I seemed to be getting somewhere! I got a bunch of music loaded into the library window and went to export it to my iPod device. The only option I was given was to export the ENTIRE library (which was just a dump of a wide mix of genres) as a single file onto my iPod. That didn't look right either! But I tried it anyway, and for the next 9 hours my iPod read "Do Not Disconnect". At the end of those 9 hours, there seemed to be nothing added to my iPod. What the heck is going on??

So I tried something else. I tried dragging and dropping pre-sorted folders of mp3 files from my external drive directly onto my iPod. Well the files are there, and when I plug the iPod into my computer I can browse the folders and play the songs just fine. But when I take the iPod away from the computer and try to browse, it acts like nothing is there. The menus are all empty, there's nothing to browse.

I've read every bit of instruction that came with the iPod and I've browsed Apple's website for help to no avail. I'm really at my wits end and I'm starting to think this is the worst $300 I've ever spent. I know it's got to be something really simple and I'll feel very stupid when someone explains it to me properly. Can anyone please help me understand what I'm doing wrong?!