Beginner question for experienced warriors about niche website

You will get wildly different opinions on this.

I started by option #1 and still rarely outsource anything. I'm the kind of person who has to have a certain level of quality and just have not found it with VAs.

If you can find quality help then it is a matter of the value of your time. Is it better to pay someone $5 for something that would take an hour of your time that may be better spent on something else?

Ambiguous answer: a little of both #1 and #2.

I've always found it very much more "active" than "passive", myself.

I recommend not outsourcing, at the start. So that you can learn how to do things and get more reliable results and develop skills, and avoid some of the mistakes I made when I first started. Outsourcing is a difficult skill-set all of its own. It's far easier to outsouce things you can do, and have experience of doing successfully, than other things. The more you outsource at the start, the less you learn.

Sorry to be blunt, but you should lose the 'make money asap' mentality. It will only lead to disappointment. As for your course of action, I would go with neither. Instead, I would spend a month or two writing a business plan and cover everything. Once I have a clear idea, I will execute by doing as much by myself at first then maybe outsourcing once I know what to expect realistically.

Expect to loose money to start - there is no quick way to big dollars on the internet. Take your time and start doing everything yoursself. As you get a skill set under your belt then figure out the best way to outsource and keep the same or better quality. Then move onto the next thing to try. Design and content are easy to get the basics - outsourcing seo is a waste of money, if you don't know what you're doing people will take advantage of you - getting qualified traffic is the hard part - hardest part is making money especially off of ads - more money in lead generation and affiliate sales

For #1:

This is what I'm doing in my case study, and aside from the immense amount of time it requires, you can get a good site up and running with $20 bucks or less.

Outsourcing content is the greatest time-saver, as the rest of the site design and setup can be done in a few days. But, the content of your site is also the most important aspect of any authority site. If you have crap content, your design/seo/etc doesn't really matter.

If you really want to give your site a chance to succeed, you need to be extremely knowledgeable about your niche and write the content yourself, to maintain a high quality standard, or hire an expert in the niche to create your content. Hiring an expert leads us to #2.

For #2:

Outsourcing everything leaves you as a project manager for the site and can be a good way to go if you have prior experience (which you said you don't have). As an inexperienced webmaster, you're going to have a hard time gauging what is quality and what isn't, and whether or not you're getting the most bang for your buck. Particularly with the writing aspect, as I eluded to earlier.

If you're planning on hiring an expert to write articles for your site, depending on the niche and the level of expertise and quality you're shooting for, you should expect to pay, at minimum, $20-$30 per 700-1000 word article. Going by this rate, you would need $600 for 20 articles alone. Not even counting outsourcing any site design, SEO, stock images or custom graphics (like a logo etc).

So, as for your question, if you're planning on outsourcing a high-quality authority site with little prior experience, I would budget over $1500 and expect to lose quite a bit through the outsourcing learning curve.

I guess this post is a long way of saying, I recommend doing it yourself and gaining first-hand experience. This will help you save money, teach you skills that will aid you in managing your site, and make outsourcing easier in the future. Good luck.

Just do it, you don't need any money except for the domain name and hosting at first. Use wordpress and learn at your own pace. As you learn and think you need something come back here and ask if you need it, we will be blunt and tell you the truth, unless we sell what you ask lol.

You can spend some money later.

All this makes no difference though depending on your niche. You may want to rank for the words "weight loss" then I would say make it a hobby, so unless I knew what niche you were talking about and it would have to be a small sub niche or micro niche for me to be positive about it.

Steve is right.. Put a plan of action together how you'll accomplish your goals, but dont spend months on it. In the beginning, use the chance to learn as much as you can, you seem to have the right mindset going in.

If you don't care to learn design, hire A FEW sellers from fiverr or some.where cheap to do a logo and you'll be gtg.

Many people will have different opinions on the things that you can do. For me personally, I will invest the money into getting my squeeze page up so that I can start growing my own list of subscribers. Once you have invested the money monthly on getting the squeeze page up, I will be focusing the rest of the time on traffic generation activities that will get people to come to the website.

If you have extra budget, you will want to first decide on the method that you plan to use and then just focus on it. You can either outsource the content creation and pay people to help you submit. Or you can use paid method like PPC or banner advertising.

This is what I will do personally.