or is it better to hire a pro from the marketplace here?
normally this should be the best option, but since you don't know SEO you won't be able to tell who's expert and who's not... So, probably the best way is to learn SEO by trial and error... at least for a few months (1 year maybe) until you get some sense of what you need to be doing.
Of course, this means a lot of money down the drain and lost websites initially, but you can't make omelette without breaking the eggs, so...
I want to see fast results
you need expired domains then. If you're not using expired domain you'll be looking at anywhere between 3 months (good case scenario) and up to 1 year of waiting until you see results if you're going to go with a fresh domain. And that's assuming that you already know what you're doing, but since you're a newbie you'll probably waste few other months / years with trying to get the hang of SEO.
Of course, you could also get lucky and start getting traffic from month 1, but since this will be isolated case (because of luck) you won't be able to replicate the results with the next project once the current one runs out of luck. Which is why you're looking at minimum 3 months of no traffic / income (from Google anyway, other search engines might be more rewarding) until you get some sort of results...
What is the #1 thing I should know before I touch anything?
I'm not a SEO expert, so I could be wrong about this, but from what I've noticed I would say that the things you should prepare for are:
- BH is usually quick but not lasting (the first google update will probably screw you over and you'll have to start afresh... but the plus side is that - if you know what you're doing - you can make bank in those few weeks / months that your BH project manages to escape google's radar, so there's that too
)
- BH is usually more expensive than WH, so you gotta dig deep into your pockets for automation, high quality BH services that you can't do them yourself for whatever reasons (lack of skill, geolocation limits, whatever...)
