Niche Blogs, I have some questions.

I'd suggest you don't start with buying blogs in a bulk .Start with 2 , gain experience and move ahead .

Stay away from "blogs in bulk" or other automated gimmicks. All you're going to do is end up losing money. Stay with one blog, focus on it, put up good content and try to add something of value to the web, and you will do well.

If you could find one really good blog with lots of great content that had a built in audience of regular readers, that might be worth the investment. But, to buy numerous lower quality blogs on the theory that you can build up traffic and readership is an iffy idea. Go with one quality blog and see where that takes you and then build up from there.

I do "neither of the above".

I make my own.

I'm an affiliate marketer, so as long as I can use my niche sites to collect the visitors' email addresses, their design doesn't matter much. Clean and simple is always best, and I can cope with that on my own. I spend as little time as possible putting up my sites.

It's not that I begrudge spending a bit of money on websites, but for me those are always over-designed and effectively say to the visitors "I'm just another marketer", which I like to try to avoid.

It doesn't matter, really. "Regularly" is good. Once a month is good. Once a week is good. Once a day is good. Three times today and then twice tomorrow and then not again for another three weeks isn't so good.

It isn't possible to answer this question from the premises suggested. It could be anything from zero to a fortune.

This might interest you. It might even help you.

They're not really alternatives? You could also do both or neither?

I do neither.

If you want to do one, buy traffic rather than buying SEO services. At least you have a chance of monetizing traffic.

Increasing the amount of blogs, I'd say. It's really easy to spend a lot of money on "site design" without it benefitting your income at all.

I think you should start with either one or two, though. Not more than two. The relationship between work and income is non-linear. In the early stages you do the most work for the least income, and if you try to duplicate that simultaneously over multiple sites, you might never get anything off the ground at all.

Appreciate clearly where the money comes from, and how and why.

It seems to me that at the moment, you expect the money to come from "how the site looks" and "how the site ranks". From my perspective, these are both fundamentally mistaken concepts. I have multiple niche sites, and those two things have only very small effects on my income.