What you need is a reliable place to buy and sell bitcoins tied to your bank account. I use Coinbase, (
https://www.coinbase.com/join/5870b8c2b93eb527a46c40a1) that has proven reliable and reasonably fair with prices and fees (the link gives you a 10$ bonus for the first 100$ spent. Added advantage it allows you to directly buy Ether and LTC as well as bitcoin. However things change constantly, so it's bet to keep an eye on what the different merchants are doing (bitpanda and others).
Then you are going to need to transfer the Btc or Eth, you bought to an exchange, it's the best way to start. It's a good idea to open an account on different exchanges, since coins can be delisted without much notice, and exchanges are not the safest places, it diminishes risks and can create profit opportunity, since arbitrage between places is still possible in these markets that are not mature. I've using c-cex, nova, cryptoPia, poloniex and bittrex, never had a problem with any of them. They just work differently, Poloniex allowing you to do margin trading.
You can also buy ether, that allows you to take part in the multiple ICOS we are seing these days. They can be good return but following that is time consuming.
After that it depends a lot on your strategy (short term/long term, day trade/investment, amount of time you want to spend). So it's hard to be specific.
Just remember a few differences between stock markets and crypto
- there is no bottom in crypto, a token can go (and often does) to a nil value, cutting losses is quite often necessary
- Assets are not secure, specially on exchanges, so security is an issue and has to be dealt with according to the risk you are prepared to take
- there are on these markets geeky teenagers with no prior experience of trading and they can create movements (both sides) that are totally crazy, specially since some tokens can be in the hands of a very limited number of big holders, so expect the unexpected.
- very few crypto actually have a purpose or a reason to exist or any kind of assets backing their value (some do but in different ways than shares) so you need to know what you are buying, forum here is a good place to gather information but is also full or rumors and bullshit.
My one piece of advice would be to do a three months discovery with a small amount of money. You do get burned in the beginning.
As for return, my average daily return over the last 8 monts is slightly over 1%, but I am quite conservative and cautious, you can do better (or a lot worse) if you accept more risk.
The main thing is that crypto is fun and because of low fees and infinite division of assets allows the multiplication of small orders, and that can be quite efficient when you would lose your shirt if you did that on the stock market.