don't check your rankings more than once a day or else you'll just be constantly panicking. Most good SEOs here don't even check their rankings they just check their conversions/stats.
1 day is never enough time to postulate what might have happened. You need to look at your rankings month over month rather than daily to really judge how well your campaigns are doing.
As for outsourcing: I strongly believe you should never outsource anything you haven't/can't do yourself. You should outsource to increase your bandwidth and because you can afford to. When you aren't making money but you aren't spending money, you have enough time to afford to build your own links.
Lastly, don't buy traffic, it's probably shitty bot net traffic and you could risk losing your affiliate accounts or adsense account if you get click bombed or something. Just don't do it.
Biggest thing is build build build. Add content, build links, just keep putting in effort.