Well, you can either go Litecoin (or any other useless scrypt based altcoin) mining or you can mine Bitcoin or any other SHA256 (or other sha256 based coins if you have the hardware).
The altcoin theme is slowly disappearing.. so I would go for bitcoin mining (unless you find yourself a nice cheap scrypt asic with good ROI of about 2-3 months).
In Bitcoin you can either mine with your own hardware or buy a cloud mining contract. If you buy an asic so you should check the Power Efficiency ( W/GH/s )
examples , you should also know how much electricity your are about to spend and to have a "special" place to store the miner at..
You should only buy a reputable miner like spondoolies or bitmain , remember that second hand miners can be much cheaper..
You have many online calculators for mining profitability like this one -
https://tradeblock.com/mining , so you can see what to expect in average, you can also compare cloud mining with "self" mining profits..
Unlike cloud mining, if you buy an asic you can always sell it. If you buy a contract its a little harder to sell, but, if you are uncertain what to get or how much mining power to buy you can add cloud mining power periodically like once per week or 2 just to be safe and not to put all your money in one order or one place.. that way, if the bitcoin price is going down you'll have the chance of buying cheap bitcoin instead of putting that money in mining (get the idea?).
Basically, what i'm saying is, don't put your money in one basket.
(I have ordered a scrypt miner from KNC for 10K and now i'm in a lawsuit with them because they did not deliver on time and it practically was a product in it's alpha state).
*If you don't have many bitcoins, my advise would be: buy some every week or so or after dumps like today, if you believe the price will go up and doesn't crash to 100$ then cloud mining with a lifetime contract is a nice option to put a portion of the fund there, and meanwhile you can look for a cheap asic to buy (after you figure out the hardware you want).
