Your best bet right now is to likely just purchase bitcoins and put them your own wallet as a long term deposit/investment. BTC is pretty low in price right now compared to last year, so it might be good to just buy/hold. If you're looking to invest into a project, you might need to up your ante a bit if you're looking for a sizable return. There are good projects right now like Lighthouse that could use some investment and funding if you're looking to be part of a community-type project. Bitcoin ATMs are also a good investment for not only profit but extending bitcoins reach.

You might also start to look into alternative cryptocurrencies and look at projects and investments with those. You can get some basic information and market data on them over at http://coinmarketcap.com/. Storj, Darkcoin, and Clams all have some interesting projects going on, some of which can offer a significant return for a small investment into them (such as proof-of-stake for clams).

If you want to learn more about bitcoin, there's a good video series on it over at http://bitcoin.cbtnuggets.com/, the mining information is out of date though, but you'll learn the concept behind it.