The value of this blog technique? (Your views please!)

Hi everyone

I am trying to do something for a company I work for. They dont pay me to do SEO specifically i do webdesign for them, but because im learning I thought itd be the best hands on experience to practice for them (without doing anything crazy..)

So I've had a bit of mentoring and lots of reading and I think i want to try 2 things:

1. Set up a blog on a subdomain of theirs, that has unique posts that are designed for the reader not a search engine, with some bits of SEO in there but not much. This would be for the purpose of keeping the site alive, updated, etc and opening potential of syndicating with social media and giving to news aggregators etc.

2. Set up a blog on a totally diff domain on a diff server, probably a keyword domain with another word in maybe, and don't spam but set the blog to collect posts from other blogs and post them, centering around the keyword topic. Also post unique self written content there and prune posts so that if anything is spammy, really SEO-intensive with bold text etc, or looks like its not 'real', remove it. Keep some posts in that arent as keyword specific but are still good quality. Dont pass off the posts as my own. Use this blog to climb ranks for the keyword with specific plugin settings and looking after, and use it to boost the company site's rank after a while by adding links into some posts etc.

My main goal here is to improve SEO. Which do you think would have the most value to prioritize first??
2. will take a while before its ready to send links, and im bearing in mind ive only had 2 people recommend this not a whole bunch, it did work on a previous project though. but with 1. im not sure how much effect on seo it will have, and realistically the topics arent those to get people rushing onto the site and sharing like mad.

Can anyone advise?