So a small update actually just going through one of the tips I have used to create a large website by myself (with little outsourcing). My niche is INCREDIBLY competitive. Probably one of the hardest to get into out of them all, which means traffic has to be acquired through all means necessary. For this I post a huge amount of press releases and tweet / facebook about those topics which in turn usually buys me favours with the companies. Why is this important? Well I see a huge amount of people who ask about how to get crazy social media exposure. I actually wrote a review for a product, and by posting some PR's now and then I gained access to huge channels of distributing my reviews not to mention more goodies.
Anyway, to speed up the process of me actually checking my emails, I use IFTT to auto draft press releases from various sources (after all it isn't copyright as the original company owns the PR) so you can copy and paste, and your own twist, then post it. This saves me hours as I simply go to the Wordpress dashboard and can see all the latest XYZ press releases or whatever I want. I actually use this method as a way to gather interesting and hot topics in the industry at the current point in time in an attempt to leverage any potential hot stories, I usually check a few times a day to see what is cool and what isn't, then I clear my trash.
Whilst some might think this is slightly wrong, I don't have the time to constantly think of ideas and research and it provides easy content. Usually I just keep the title though, and work on the rest. A perfect example is a movie trailer + my thoughts. However I suppose you can bend IFTT to your will... all I know is it saves me a huge amount of time. I don't outsource to any writers, and from posting PR's I have a steady trickle of traffic from that alone
So my point is basically... reach out in your niche, even if it takes time and money - I feel it is a better way to build something of long term commercial value vs a clickbait farm.