Here is my update and what i've learnt so far, hopefully this serves as a nice halfway house type of inspiration.
I bought 15 domains targeting a wide variety of things, a couple very niche, a few more general. I went through 1 domain, and wrote everything i done in a column in a spreadsheet so i had a complete ticklist.
I installed infinite wp, which is free and allows you to manage all your installs and plugins. It doesn't have clone feature for free, but there are plugins out that do that.
I then just systemically went through each of the installations and repeated the same task on each of the wp's. I didn't have a clue about setting up widgets and menus when i first started, but after doing them 15 times in a row. I got the hang of it.
Probably the best thing i learnt was that when i looked up the keywords on the products and the articles i was targeting, i have come across at least 3 shitty autoblogs each time that are ranking high. So i know the high quality effort that i'm putting into my articles will certainly beat the hell out of these.
You will learn everything from viewing your competition, and come across all the ideas you need. There was even someones click here buttons I took since they were the best i'd seen. My spreadsheet with the list of things i have to do is now big, but everything is organised to be followed one after the other, and be the quickest way possible to setup each of the sites.
I'm still going to have about 20% to do over all the sites i've done by the end of the month. But at least once I see them start to rank better, i can get in and then improve them adhoc based on traffic. I've taken about 5 different approaches with them all.
I havn't made a sale yet, and will be buying another 15 at the start of next month. Since i've managed to get the setup, and the initial writing down to about 10-15 days, fulltime.