Avoid cloud mining like the plague. Unless you want to get involved in a soft ponzi scheme. I haven't seen a single one that provides a positive Return on Investment.

Mining is easy to start, but very hard to get a positive ROI, even if you are doing it in house. I have a medium GPU setup and it will still be months before (if) it becomes profitable.

I really only recommend mining if you are interested in the software and hardware used to mine and the idea of administering servers that run 24/7 and GPUs excite you. If you dream of having your house heated by mining, well, join the club, I have a miniature growing datacenter in my house.

If that does sound cool then the easiest place I found to start is at minergate. They have an easy to use program which will let you mine on CPU several different coins. And yes, they do have a referral program, so if you like this advice please use this link to sign up! Don't expect to make any real money on a CPU though. Just play with it and see if you like it before putting any money into hardware.