Although I don't have any yet, I think the most viable alt-coin so far is litecoin. It's the only one besides BTC that you can use to purchase goods right now.
Guide to make some easy Bitcoins --------------------------------- 1. Create an alt-coin. 2. Announce alt-coin on bitcointalk.org. 3. Mine 100,000 of said alt-coin while difficulty is low. 4. Get your friends to post in the announcement thread. 5. Start a petition for btc-e to add alt-coin. 6. Pump up price of alt-coin in btc-e chat box. 7. Wait for price to reach 1k alt-coins per 1 BTC. 8. Sell 100k alt-coins for 100 BTC. 9. Give yourself a pat on the back for the massive profit you just made.
Or, you can also mine one of the new altcoins and trade it for BTC.