niche marketing overwhelming? shortcuts, tips?

So I started testing niche marketing sites in the last few months - mostly doing testing but not sure what it is leading to.

A little background - I have made money in my own niches by creating niche products. But this all took lots of time and energy and I want to create some auto-pilot sites that generate $50-200 a month each and maybe make 100 sites.

But I am finding that this niche site thing is also taking lots of work.

I bought MarketSamurai, MicroNicheFinder and find them both time consuming. I use google EKT and some php to find my niches now and it is faster.

I tested one domain with lots of niche pages with backlinks from article marketing. I think I may have picked some overly competitive keywords?? Some have made it to page 1 on google. Many haven't.

On whim I took one of my keywords and bought the keyword-domain. That site with no backlinks is ABOVE the same keyword page on my multi-page niche site.

So I am going to just go ahead and buy niche domains I guess.

Backlinks seem like a lot of work.
I would like to automate this some. ANY SUGGESTIONS?

SO I am saying all this to say:
- I am new to niche site marketing but think I understand the basics
- I am lazy I'd like to automate as much as possible.
- I am testing to see what seems to work and what I dont know

*** Q1: How can I make this work faster?

*** Q2: Are there any tools I should buy to make this faster, more profitable, rinse-repeat.

I KNOW people are making money with both adsense and affiliates.

*** Q3: which is simpler and /or better adsense, affiliate (amazon, ebay, clickbank, comJunc, other?), or a combination of both?

The tools I have seem to work, but my implementation seems to be lacking. Possibly simply because of backlinks. I found a niche site out there and saw what they are doing and decided to basically copy it. But they have close to 400 backlinks to the site - many are temporary but obviously count for a while, etc, but I don;t yet know how to competed with them. HELP?

*** Q4: Are there good auto backlink tools I should get?

So I am really only self learning to some degree, figuring out what I dont know and trying to learn it; figuring out what I dont like to do and make a tool to do it.

I just bought 10 domains I researched and purposefully picked them because they have a wide variety of monthly search counts (1k-60k) and a wide variety of search results (10k - 80k) and am keeping a spread sheet to track the changes.

SO I am about to slowly release these this month and am working on content and backlinks.

So - am I crazy? testing too much? what? I'd rather spend some time testing to see what works than just fail and give up like most.

Is there a secret? There seems to be a million sites out there. Some with adsense, some with affil products. Some with great rankings. Some with keyword domains, some without.

*** Q5 - I think I have begun to make this all simpler, but can you guys reveal the tools you use to make this simpler and more profitable

thanks
kevin