Look into the various pools that mine multiple coins. You point your miner at the pool, the pool owner takes care of switching the pool to the most profitable coin (of course they take a %ge cut one way or another).

Some coin switching pools pay you out in the myriad of coins that have been mined that you then have to trade on exchanges or by private sale for the coin of your choice, while a few auto exchange to Bitcoin and payout to miners solely in Bitcoin.

Middlecoin (www.middlecoin.com) is one of the latter that jumps coins, auto-exchanges and pays out to miners in BTC.

Some other coin switching pools:
hashcows
trademybit
alternatepool
tompool
wafflepool
switchercoin
hash.so


It really depends how much time you want to spend keeping up to date with the latest coins, keeping track of what is about to come live and could be good for a few days (pump and dump), what coins are likely to be actually exchangeable by anything other than private sale, keeping a gadzillion wallet applications updated along with the blockchain for each.

As a newcomer to the whole thing I would strongly advise pool mining on a multi coin, auto exchanging pool that pays out in BTC. That way you don't have to give yourself headaches and your miner can be doing something productive whilst you find your feet in the crypto currency world and gain a better understanding.

Good luck!