I am also quite new to mining, so if anyone wants to correct me, by all means feel free, but here are my thoughts on mining:
I only have a single GPU and my CPU to mine with, and I'm taking a long-term view, so instead of spending a few dollars here and there on coins, I'm spending a few extra dollars in electricity bill to mine the coins, and by doing so I am supporting the coin community and infrastructure. If things go great with cryptocurrency, then perhaps in a few years those coins and partial coins I've collected may be worth a lot more than I spent in electricity during that time.
Here are the options as I see them:
1. I can mine the more popular coins (bitcoins, litecoins, ppcoins, etc.) at an extremely low rate, but with a greater likelihood of long-term profit since they are better-supported by the community, and more likely to take off in real use. Since these coins are more difficult to mine, I'll likely get a relatively low return on my watts of effort.
2. I can concentrate on the lower current value coins that look like they might be winners in the medium-term, concentrating on the coins that I keep seeing mentioned here and there, but still have a relatively low difficulty level compared to the others (such as feathercoins). The nice thing about these coins is that you can more easily mine whole coins, getting a few a day or a few a week, which is a morale booster compared to getting only fractions of other coins. These coins are also more likely to raise in value in the medium term, if the popularity of coins in general boosts them up to where the top tier coins are now.
3. I can take a risk on the newer or lower-difficulty coins. Most of these probably will die out in the short or medium term, especially those that have nothing particularly interesting about them. The advantage of these coins is that you can mine hundreds or thousands of them a day, which makes you feel better, and if you're lucky, their exchange rate with the upper tier coins will occasionally spike and you can "upgrade", or if you're EXTREMELY lucky, that pile of several thousand coins will rise in price like bitcoins and you'll be very happy. For these coins, I recommend going with coins that have something interesting about them (so the community will see them as useful for something), or have goods and services already purchasable with them (or have such things planned soon), or just have a cool name (this is the riskiest, but fates have hinged on stranger things).
If you haven't tested out mining yet and don't know what your hash rate is, look it up on a hardware list and check out
http://www.wheretomine.com/ to get some idea of how many of various coins you will get per day/week/month with your equipment (note: compare the difficulty rating of a coin to get an idea of how easy it is to mine (duh, but just pointing it out so you immediately know what stat to look for if you're looking to mine lots of easy coins)).
Good luck and happy mining!
-LB
