Anyone can learn to build sites based on basic research.
Publishers have a higher calling of seeking out and recognizing big opportunities and spreading their assets across a network of individually and collectively valuable sites.
The kind of site you build to capitalize on an opportunity is just “details.” Knowing which market niches to build in and how to provide content, products, and features that capture the audience better than the competition is what a Publisher does well.
Though you are currently in charge of building your own sites, you're also learning this business from the ground up.
To be an effective publisher you have to know how to direct people who will likely be working for you later on exactly how you want things done. The only way to get good work out of people is to know their jobs better than they do.
Other than that, and even if you build your sites from here on out with no outsourcing, your main job is keeping an eye on your overall business plan, your marketing, and researching new niches when it is time to add a new asset to your network.
Not only that, but every addition you make to your portfolio MUST be with reasonable, informed assurance that you are building something that has the greatest potential to explode with interest, traffic, and profits. (Spam site makers NEVER talk about that!)
For the most part, people who simply build websites on “hunches,” without the kind of professional research we are doing as publishers, are just hobbyists. They are also techies and geeks who know how to do neat things with their programming skills (sometimes), yet absolutely nothing about marketing and monetizing a niche.
Your purpose is far different from everyone else online building websites on the weekends and wondering why they get no traffic, no profits, and no interest from the niche they so poorly researched.
You are building a real business.
As a Publisher, you are charged with a complete understanding and competency in the minor details of site and network building while keeping an eye on trends and holes on the web that you can move into and dominate whenever you discover them.
This requires constant research and the ability to open up and be receptive to ideas that present themselves to you in your daily life.
It requires that you know a little about a lot of topics and keep a good amount of information flowing across your radar via news, specialty sources, magazines, papers, TV and whatever else you wish to use to keep your finger on several pulses at one time.
A good Publisher can talk to people about virtually any topic after they have done a year’s worth of collecting, parsing, and organizing information not just from the web, but from the world around them.
I find myself talking to people about the oddest things at times and it comes from being a “collector” of information from magazines, newspapers, and a wide array of casual research on the web.
It also doesn't hurt hanging out with several hundred fellow publishers at Authority Site Center who are all working on a huge variety of niche sites!