I've been struggling with the same thing, although my experience is on the marketing and analytics side, not web development. The sites I've built so far look like fourth graders built them! But I will eventually outsource that.
I am planning to outsource the things I am not good at, but meanwhile I'm trying to learn some of the basics and do some things myself so that I can save a little money and outsource effectively.
I'm no expert at all so take this fwiw! But I have been doing quite a bit of research and thinking a lot about my strategy. If you have a little bit of money to invest and are more concerned about building a sustainable business, whether it's a second income or replacing your day job, I'd personally think longer term and steer away from the Adsense type sites.
I do think you probably have to make some mistakes before you get it right and figure out what works for you and what you like. For the long term, I think the best bet is to build quality sites that you can rank well and get traffic to, in niches that can be monetized by eventually creating and selling your own products as well as developing a solid opt-in mailing list that you can sell affiliate products to. I think it's easiest to start earning a little quickly by selling affiliate products directly on your site.
I'm a good writer so I've been writing some of my content, but it's time consuming so I've been buying some cheap articles and cleaning them up which is quicker. I'm trying to learn the basics of SEO but that work is very time consuming and annoying (to me!) so will soon try to outsource some of that. That part is tough because there seem to have been a lot of changes recently to SEO strategies so it's hard to figure out the best things to do first.
Once I get a little traffic I will try to monetize with affiliate products, starting with Clickbank and Amazon as they seem to be easy to get into. I will also try promoting some affiliate products by PPC so I can learn how to do it. I have some ideas for information products that I'd like to test before I develop. If I earn enough money to keep going, I'll probably eventually try to sell some physical products online, as I also have experience in import/export.
I'm sure I'll lose some money along the way, but I'm only risking what I can afford to lose. The same strategy I use when I go to Las Vegas!
So I'm kind of thinking out loud here but that was my thought process. If you are willing to invest some time, there is a great free course called "the challenge" available, you can google it. It will probably take me 2-4 months to get through it, but it does seem to really cover all the basics such as choosing a niche, keyword research, building a site, onpage and offpage seo, and monetization. And there are forums and support when you have questions.
From one noobie to the next, hope that helps, and good luck!
