I recently got started in the BTC game myself, and as "level 2 noob" (self proclaimed) I can definitely say mining is easily non-profitable right now and faucets can be a waste of time.
If you have the mindset that you want a very minimal amount of BTC, and hold that amount over a very long time, and have the time & patience to type in series of captcha's....then by all means do some faucets. Coinbox is a popular site that holds your faucet proceeds and pays out at .000055, just doing simple math you make $14.05/Year if you get that .000055 each day. Most faucets pay .00000020-.00000060 per 30-60 minute cycle.
I've had success doing two things to get me started. The first is buying BTC through Coinbase and transferring it to BTC-E and then buying/selling either BTC or LTC when the prices drop/rise. You can always just buy and hold onto it too if you think the price will rise soon (I do). The other success I've had is by mining Primecoin and transferring that to BTC-E and buying small amounts of BTC/LTC. Primecoin can be mined on your CPU and it's startup took me like an hour of reading up on it and 5 minutes of installing the software. Any questions feel free to PM me or post anywhere on this forum.....I started by posting question after question after question, and this community was super helpful.
Best of luck!
"If you have the mindset that you want a very minimal amount of BTC, and hold that amount over a very long time, and have the time & patience to type in series of captcha's....then by all means do some faucets. Coinbox is a popular site that holds your faucet proceeds and pays out at .000055, just doing simple math you make $14.05/Year if you get that .000055 each day. Most faucets pay .00000020-.00000060 per 30-60 minute cycle."
2 hours of a full run and you can get 1 payout from coinbox, so say you average 8 hours a day (4x0.000055=0.00022btc a day 0.00022x30=0.0066btc a month 0.0066x12=0.0792btc a year which is using 800 $usd for bitcoin 0.0792x800=63.36 $ a year.just for some captchas every hour and just on the coinbox faucets. there are many faucets out there that pay considerably higher then that per hour. then you any of the exchanges that can wield you massive profits if you do it right.
remember faucets were only created and ment to be for getting new coiners their first coins and get them used to using the coins, was not ment to be a full source of income for folks hence "faucet" name meaning drips.