I am not a pro by any means however I have seen this asked multiple times in many of the groups I am a member of. So I figured I would start with this to help those looking to get started in cryptocurrency investment.

So how do you get started if you want to begin investing in crypto? Besides mining which is another subject all together you will want to put some actual $ into it. There are two options on getting started that I will go over.

Option One:
Start out by going to https://gdax.com and create an account. Once this is complete you will have a linked account on both https://gdax.com and https://www.coinbase.com/

By default GDAX shows the BTC/USD view. Once signed in look in the upper left corner and click deposit. This will bring up several options Bank Account, Bank Wire, Coinbase Account, and BTC Address. If your starting out you probably don't have a BTC Address to start from so you have to choose one of the others.

Choosing the bank account option is the least complicated. All you need is your banking info. However this takes 7-10 (business)days to actually deposit to your account for you to use. Choosing the Wire option requires you to physically go to your financial institution in most cases to initiate the transfer however it's much faster. Choose which one you want to go with and deposit your money.

Option Two:
Start out by going to https://cex.io/r/0/Sshadow/0/ (no referral https://cex.io/) Once registered and verified you will need to deposit funds to your account. This site offers a few quicker options than GDAX such as Credit Cards. So look through and go with what your comfortable with.

Once your funds are available you have a few options. Your first instinct is probably to go with buying Bitcoin however if you are in this to send it to a trading site to invest in Altcoins or do some trading you want to stay away from Bitcoin(BTC) for now. The transaction fees/time are way to high for this step in the process.

You want to decide at this step what your looking to do. If you simply want to buy and HOLD Bitcoin(BTC) then that is what you do here (if your wanting to hold long term you may want to look at an external wallet). Most likely though you are here to move your funds to a trading site so you can invest/trade in other coins. Below are the 3 trading sites I have the most experience with and how you would convert your $ best to do business on them.

Bittrex https://bittrex.com/ is the largest. Keeping in mind we are staying away from BTC because of the high fees we would want to choose Litecoin(LTC)(GDAX only) or Ether(ETH)(GDAX and CEX) to buy and then send from there. Once there you would then need to convert those back into BTC. The choice here is which one between the two are a better buy in price compared to BTC at the time of purchase and transfer.

Binance https://www.binance.com/?ref=11551218 (no referral https://www.binance.com)
On Binance you can send ETH and trade directly with it or convert it to BTC paying a small fee. This is not the same fee your would pay to transfer the BTC to an off site wallet.

Cryptopia https://www.cryptopia.co.nz/Register?referrer=Sshadow (no referral https://www.cryptopia.co.nz)
On Cryptopia you can send LTC and trade directly with it or convert it to BTC paying a small fee. This is not the same fee your would pay to transfer the BTC to an off site wallet.

On both sites you can send LTC and ETH and convert it to BTC for trading. So your not limited by any means. You only want to limit sending your actual BTC to external wallets because of the high fees. You want it to be worth it.

I want to expand on this if it garners interest so feel free to let me know if this is of any help or just something you have read before.