Investing in ICO's is a really risky move especially when it's your first time venturing into it. It's an unregulated market and anything can go wrong. Aways do your own research and only place money that you can afford to lose to protect yourself just in case the ICO turned out to be a scam.
A safer way to get involved into a project though is to start with airdrops. You literally get the coins for FREE, although there are some airdrops that require you a minimal set of tasks/requirements to join the program. One highly recommended airdrop right now is the one conducted by DeepOnion. They are currently on round 22 of 40 weeks of the airdrop program. You can check out some of the details in their ANN thread -
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2006010.0. It's a really good project that is primarily focused on privacy. DeepOnion is running transactions through the TOR network, and they also have an upcoming feature called "DeepSend". It will further obfuscate data via ring signatures. It's an amazing project with a lot of upside potential so getting in early into this coin is a guaranteed success.