I definitely second Matthew Woodward. If you want to learn how to rank a site, and do it manually, his tutorials are the best. Look at others knowledge they provide after studying Matts stuff. His article spinning method is the best in my opinion! I've incorporated more into how I use GSA and stuff like that.
What I wish someone would have told me in the beginning so that I avoided wasting so much time is, "create a parasite and rank it"
Seriously, create a web 2.0 property in a low comp niche and learn how to rank it with the following tools:
Article Spinners
The Best Spinner (Matt Woodwards method)
Spinner Chief (works well with FCS Networker)
Kontent Machine (quickens campaign creation in GSA)
SEO Tools
GSA SER
GSA Captcha Breaker
FCS Networker
ScrapeBox
Additional Stuff To Get
VPS
Private Proxies
Death By Captcha
Some social bots to automate your social networks
And I outsource social signal from panels
Yahoo Pop3 Emails for GSA (you can find a seller on Fiverr)
After you learn these tools, you won't even need to build sites to do product "launch jacks" and stuff like that. You can rank YouTube videos or whatever.
So why spend and waste time listening to all of the fluff in between from affiliate marketers when you can start learning the actual technical side of things.