How about this: don't create a website if you don't have anything (meaningful) to put on it.
I know, it's crazy. But sometimes it's best to wait until you have something of value to contribute before you start throwing up websites and trying to get them indexed by search engines.
Most successful websites are successful because their creators came up with a really good idea for an application/service, or they have a lot of useful knowledge or other interesting content to share with others. You don't just decide one day "hey, I'm gonna create a website and make money from advertising!" and then start building and promoting it before you come up with a source of useful content. People who do that are generally spammers. Their only motivation is to make a quick buck despite having nothing to contribute to the online community, so they create spam blogs or other equally useless sites with low quality content and load them up with ads. And then they have to go around comment-spamming on other people's blogs because their low quality content isn't generating any natural backlinks.
People who own successful/quality content-based sites have all slowly built their site up over time. They don't just start with 6000 pages of content. A blog author starts with just one blog post, and over many years of posting regularly, they slowly build up a significant pool of content as well as followers. Usually they start the blog just for the fun of it, because they're passionate about a particular field or topic. And then by chance they discover that they're good writers and that people are actually interested in what they have to say. And it's only then that they turn their hobby into a business and start monetizing their site by including a reasonable amount of advertising.
But those individuals are in the minority. Most people just aren't able to create compelling content that they could actually make money off of, much less create such content in bulk. Even professional bloggers are only able to write when inspiration strikes, or when they have something to write about. Good writing takes time. That's why hiring a copywriter to deliver 50 articles in a month will get you very low quality content. That's also why most sites that publish a lot of content regularly have a full-time writing staff of 10-20 or more writers.
If you want to pay $7~$8 per article/template/whatever, then how good do you expect it to be? A good article takes at least a couple of hours to write, if not a couple of days. And a good author isn't going to work for $1/hr.
If you don't have the money to pay for professional writers, then you'll need to write it yourself. But then you have to first ask yourself whether you're qualified to write on the subject of your site: Are you a good writer (or at least a competent one)? Are you an expert on the topic you're writing about? I.e. Were you formally trained in it in school? Do you have industry experience? Do you actually have any insights on the topic or are you just writing because you need more content for SEO purposes?
By the sound of your question, it doesn't seem like you should be running a website, much less 2 websites. This quantity over quality approach is characteristic of spam blogs, and the web doesn't need any more of those. A legitimate site should be focused on generating moderate amounts of quality content, not trying to generate bulk content to meet some kind of quota. Instead of flooding search indexes with hundreds or thousands of low quality pages, you should just figure out a way to write small amounts of original, high quality content that people will link to, thus giving them high search ranking. That will get you more visitors, and they'll be repeat visitors too.