The best way is by mining at home, decentralization and all. Only due to high electrivity rates, not very profitable. You can also buy hardware and let them be hosted at cheaper electricity costs. The easiest way is to buy some shares through LTCgear, on which you can chose to recieve the payout in BTC, LTC or even more shares
You see alot of threads selling shares of LTCgear, I advise the asiqshares, cheap and high payouts. PM me for a referral links, that way I get shares for refering you, and i will send half of those shares to you!
Offcourse you can also plunge into PBmining, but no-one knows who they are and they could dissapear fairly easy.
Last but not least, on Badbitcoin.org, you can view if any cloud mining company is a verified scam.
Also follow pumpdumptracker on twitter, al news and pump and dumps via one twitter account. The account is still being build, after it's finished you see all news and can subscripe to all lists, check it out.
Succes!