You say that you have spent months learning everything you need, but then you come here and post some very basic questions. What exactly did you learn in those months?

Perhaps you should have spent those months making some blog posts and writing articles. Had you done that, then you probably would be seeing some good traffic by now and wouldn't be asking if it is OK to use shortcuts before ever getting started.

Just start and fumble, hopefully stumble into success. But Start.

Next you need to be writing articles for your blog, or purchasing articles for your blog.

You can't just copy articles from other people's websites without their permission. You wouldn't want others copying articles you wrote (or purchased) and putting the articles on their own site as if they had written the articles themselves without putting a link to your original article.

You can copy articles from various article directories as long as you follow their system, their TOS, and include the author's resource box on your site.

You will not have any problem from this being duplicate content. These articles appear on various sites without a duplicate content problem.

:-Don

You'll probably get better results if you use unique content. Start writing some articles. As for #1 ... what do you mean content from other sites? Don't just take other people's content. That's copyright infringement.

What do you mean how many posts per day without being penalized? If it's good content, you can write as many posts per day as you can write.

As for #6, why would you submit a blog that has no content? A blog without content is called a theme, not a blog.

I use social bookmarking to get traffic started, but it works a lot better if you have interesting content.

Lately I've been watching a trend with Google as per new sites. They love the content, etc etc, but what they seem to love more is the LACK of backlinking (it means, don't go creating hundreds of backlinks tomorrow).

Just a word of advice.