The great thing about investing in cryptocurrency is that there's loads of ways to increase your portfolio value.

• You can follow the recommendations of experienced investors.
• You can learn how to read charts and look for great entry points.
• You can invest in a project and come back to it in a year.
• You can swing trade.
• You can pick a project because you like its name.

There are so many options, and many of them will make you money if you're careful.

Another Option

Although I dabble in many of the above options, there is another method that I prefer, and that's investing in ICO's.

ICO stands for Initial Coin Offering. It's a way for new projects to raise money via crowdfunding. There will usually be a target amount of money that a project is aiming to raise before going ahead with their plans.

As with any other cryptocurrency investment, you're exchanging monetary value for coins or tokens in the project.

However, the great thing about ICO's is that there are often bonuses involved. For example, you may receive an extra 30% of your investment in tokens for investing in the ICO. In this instance, you'd be receiving 130 coins for the price of 100.

Secondly, coins can generally be found at their lowest ever price in ICO's. Combining the low cost coins with bonuses can put you in a position for huge profits when the project is eventually listed on the exchanges for the public to trade.

A Recent Example

To demonstrate the above, let's take a look at one of my recent investments. I won't list the name of the project, but you'll get the idea. The ICO was as follows:

• 1 Ethereum = 300 tokens.
• 20% bonus for ICO investments
• 10% bonus on day one investments.
• 3% bonus for using a referral link from someone else.

To make things easy, let's say I invested 1 Ethereum into the project.

1 Ethereum bought 300 tokens. I then received a combined bonus of 33% due to the reasons listed above. 33% of 300 = 99 free tokens. That gave me a total of 399 tokens.

At the time of investment, 1 Ethereum was worth approximately $400.

$400 divided by 399 tokens = $1 per token approximately.

Exchange Listing

As the token hit the exchanges for the first time, it was trading at around $9 per coin.

399 coins x $9 = $3,591

$3,591 - $400 investment = $3,191 profit.

That's a fantastic return. Of course, the value of the coin itself was huge compared to the ICO price even without the bonuses. The extra coins simply reduced the average price of my coins, meaning an even greater profit margin.

Potential Issues

With all that said, there are a few things you really need to be careful with when it comes to ICO's.

As with all investments, you need to put in the necessary research before parting with your money. There are plenty of amazing ICO's to invest in, but there are also a lot of flops and even a few scams.

You can make a lot of money from ICO investments, but you should do some background checks on the team behind the project.

Ask yourself if you believe in the project itself. It should offer something exciting that can make an actual difference in the world. This is where you'll see your greatest profits.

Check out the hype behind the project. Is it real hype or just social media marketing? Is the team active? What do the whitepaper and road map suggest are important dates in the development?

These are all things to think about, but it's very exciting to me to spend time looking at new projects. If I really believe they'll succeed, then I'll look to hold the tokens for at least 6 months to a year. That gives the project time to grow, and will hopefully lead to increased profits.

Let me know what your favourite form of cryptocurrency investing is in the comment section below.