Or e.g. you write 3-5 unique articles and reuse them for 15-25 posts?
15-25 posts is probably overkill. Usually if you do these things for your properties you'll be fine in terms of manual review; more than this is mostly a waste of time:
- Add a brief about page
- Add a brief contact page
- Change the default banner image + set a custom blog title
- Add/remove/adjust the default widgets in the sidebar/footer -- maybe add a short bio or similar
- Add like 3-5 posts (see next section of this post)
Haven't been using spun content for years now. There are a few providers where you can get $1 a piece articles like
@littlewebdragon so why risk it with spun stuff anyway.
Came here to say basically this. Mixing some things like sharing/reposting other people's images/videos with a brief comment works pretty well, too and is free.
Would note that we're presumably both mainly talking about expired web 2.0s that have existing backlink profiles, where dropping a few dollars on scraped content is a negligible cost.
Since OP did mention:
When you create a 1st tier backlinks for you money site.
Would infer that these aren't expired web 2.0s.
For fresh properties, the value per web 2.0 / value per backlink is substantially lower. While $1 per article is pretty negligible for a decent expired property, for brand new blogs, you're going to need a lot more properties to move the needle in terms of ranking, so getting expired articles for each is going to hurt your margins much more noticeably.
Honestly, if you're making fresh web 2.0s you should keep your expectations pretty low. It's been a while since I've gotten any decent movement from fresh web 2.0s without putting way, way more effort into them than it's worth (see https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/opportunitycost.asp). Normally I would recommend focusing your time elsewhere; if you're brand new to SEO, then you might go for it anyway. Fresh web 2.0s are a free, easy, and basically risk-free way to start experimenting with link building.