The mining has turned into a kill be killed all out war, and you have 3 options these days. Option 1: sit with the herd mining what you can and slowly gain coins, and more and more equipment making the equipment designer/sellers rich..but not yourself unless you get lucky. And hope someone comes out with some software that will help your equipment along.
Option2: trade it and try your hand at speculation on the multitude of exchanges..I mean what fuck happened with Fractal coin..it exploded, but without its basis on its own name it is fucked!.(FRACTALs..which by the way using fractal cryptography with a new protocol not based on satoshi would be awesome!)
Option 3: this is the only real option to make real money: program your own code and use your own ideas on how to use the IMMENSE tools out there to make your own mining as fast and efficient as possible. I have many ideas and have spent the last month learning cuda C myself..since I seriously invested in the hardware, but I am not gonna share it because then you become part of option 1...so unless you are willing to pay the Devs what they are worth and that is in the Millions of dollars.. Then general public mining will die...