Traffic is the king ,I guess no one will be doubt about this.
The problem is how you set up your stable traffic funnels;
I am thinking of this seriously ,and in fact I have been practising for quite a long.
First and last-----the slowest one:
build up many niche sites via wordpress or other cms;
collect articles ;
do the seo job(backlinks,anchors);
(I know somebody are hacking enormous webservers for this purpose);
Second,
Buying traffic from traffic sources like popads,trafficholder,or you can work with some DSP traffic like AVAZU,Yeahmobi;
It is easy and quick ,but you will always meet the bolt traffic and some other difficult issues
(like you paid quite a lot for the split testing and the traffic gone while you plan to scale up);
Third ,
Pushing traffic from Facebook,youtube ,twitter and instagram to your own site.
Forth,
make friends with the webmasters and buy the traffic directly from the owner.
Guys ,If you are interested in this topic ,please follow this post and say something.
Whole STM Forum is about the topics you outlined actually. Why would you need to start a group when you are a member of a forum that deals with the same topics... just post, we are always in for a good discussion 
ok,I will take your advice.