Just go to coinmarketcap.com, choose a coin, go to Social tab and follow their twitter, reddit, and from there join their telegram group/slack channel. Download and print the whitepaper, read it, scan everything on the twitter and reddit, keep tabs on the chat rooms, and read up on their bitcointalk announcement and you should get an understanding of what the project is about and how to proceed accordingly. Also tools like coindata, cryptoping are very useful to back up your analysis.
Well described the steps that need to be followed in finding the proper altcoin to make an investment. Same time it's good to be on the exchanges and observe the price variation periodically. This too helps to buy at the right time and earn good on price increase.