Open source thinking is a better approach. So let's be open source in thinking.
Hit the keyword scraper and content generation forum here and hunt for scripts, learn how to install and run both php and perl scripts. After you can successfully setup and run a few scripts in the content generation and keyword scraping forum (there are a ton of free scripts here to do anything you need). Once you can do this go look into blogger and wordpress free hosted blogs. Setup multiple accounts (NOTE: MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS, NOT MULTIPLE BLOGS)... using a different email for each account (be very cautious on how you do things when youre a newb to this stuff)... each one of these should have 1 blog that related to whatever topic you choose (choose any topic, seriously, floor lamps, disney cartoons, whatever). I would setup about 10 blogger accounts and 10 wordpress accounts. Do not try to use automated software yet (the best method when starting this kind of thing is to do things manually for a while until you know what works manually, because manually you can change anything and everything.)
Now once you have these accounts setup make a post on each blog. Dont put any links in any of the posts. Just write some random stuff about the topic and talk about what youre going to be posting in the blog later (just make stuff up).. Don't use articles you find online and don't just duplicate the same post to each blog, make each post unique and try to use different layouts for the blogs.
up to this point you should not even have a domain name or hosting, just your 20 blogs and a few scripts to scrape for keywords and generate content. Now do the blog posting thing every day , once per day on each blog, for a week solid. Make sure the blogs are setup to ping after you make a post (youll have to look in the options areas and get familiar with where shit is in blogger and wordpress, as you should anyway, so forcing you to hunt for this is better long term). Now after a week you should have spiders that love your site, are crawling all over it and eating it up. Now comes the fun part.
You have built your first small blog farm which leads to your sites being indexed without spending a dime. Now go buy a domain name, I suggest you not think too much about what it will be but make sure its relevent to your topic. Now you can also get some good hosting at certain places. If you want to be cheap go with dreamhost. They suck at support and go down alot but give you a ton of shit for next to nothing. If you want some good reliable hosting go to resellerzoom, they have a $5 per month plan that should get you started. Don't want to invest all at once? pay for it monthly, surely you can afford $5 a month. You may also decide in a month that blackhat seo just isn't for you (some people just don't like it). If anyone wants to post other good hosts here go for it, search the forum, there are tons of them.
Now get your keyword list that you made from your scripts and start generating pages. Don't worry about how youre going to make money on all of this, it will come in time, just focus on generating pages, making your blog posts, and having a good keyword list. For a starter site I would do a list of about 1500 keywords and generate 1500 pages. Don't try to cloak yet. the focus here is to get you in the mindset that "indexing is key". Focus for now on just being able to get a site indexed quickly so you know a good strategy in the future of getting something indexed. Now after your pages are generated you need to make a sitemap page in html. Basically the sitemap page just links to all of the pages on your site (yes all 1500). Upload this sitemap and the 1500 pages to your hosting. Now what do we do with index.html (the front page of the site). Well write a very good article (around 500 words) related to your topic. Don't make it like a blog post where it's personal, it needs to be an article discussing something in the niche. Now use the same layout for all pages and make sure the layout has an image somewhere in it (and the image needs to be relative to your topic). On the front page where you wrote that article have the image in your template link to your sitemap page you made that has all 1500 links to the other pages. Nobody except the bots will realize that the image is a link (unless they accidentley move their mouse over it and click). After you have done all this and have your full first blackhat site up on the domain go to your 20 blogs and make a new post. Only post a link to your site on half of the blogs at max in a single day. The next day on your blog postings, post the link to the other half that don't have a link yet. You don't want to raise red flags by having 20 blogs all in one day link to the site, remember this is all new, be cautious until you are good enough to take risks.
Your sitemap page and front page should showup in google, yahoo, and msn within 2 days. As for the rest of the pages that are linked on the sitemap page, well be patient. Keep posting to your blogs and use your link sparingly. You don't want to just throw away a domain because you got to excited and posted your link on all 20 blogs on the same day. In the old days that worked, the new trick to getting sites indexed and keeping them indexed is slow and steady. Within a month your entire site should be indexed on the 3 major search engines. If it isn't start trying to hunt down the problems and what went wrong.
After you can get a site indexed within a month start looking into how to convert this to revenue. Maybe you get another domain that has an article and adsense at the top and on your 1500 pages use cloaking. When you get to that point you will have been in this forum long enough to know how to implement those techniques.
Most newbs make the mistake of trying to run a marathon before they learn to crawl in blackhat seo. Sure you can setup an entire system that does everything and anything you want (it has been done many times here). But honestly to learn all the techniques and build the actual scripts would take a month also. Which is the other route you can take. Learn the stuff you need to know and build a massive system to automate everything. It's very risky if youre not positive the system will work.
So i would recommend following these steps...
1. Learn to get pages indexed fast using blogs (a month tops)
2. Learn to cloak, banner links, and generate revenue from your sites.
3. Learn to link spam and other tricky backlinking methods (Referrer spam, trackback spam, forum spam, etc) EFFECTIVELY.
I put the link spam stuff last because it is the riskiest part of this business, all it takes is one pissed off blogger to nab you and your site goes down, there are ways to prevent it (link to 404 pages, link to a real page with real content, etc, etc).
Good luck, and that should be open source enough for you. Make sure you understand why things work before you jump into the "how do i do this 4000 times". Once you have an effective system and you know the exact things you need and how to automate things, hire a coder to write a full system for you or write it yourself. Consider this your test site.