Here's the thing with marketing: it is its own unique field that encompasses a large skill set. Copywriting, conversions, media buying. Product launches, if you're into that. Social media marketing or SEO/SEM. Guys who are good at it spend years learning it. Just like good engineers take years to learn their crafts.

If a marketer came to you and said hey, I can market like a champ, but I need a quick way to engineer a killer product by myself on a razor thin budget. Can't start marketing until I've got the product ready, and I also don't know much about product design or what to build. How do I do it and succeed? Same chicken-and-egg problem.

You can hire a professional who is GOOD, but then you're going to pay a lot of money for it. The better quality you want, the more you will have to pay. Or you can learn to be good YOURSELF, but then you're going to spend a lot of time to do it (and possibly still a lot of money).

In marketing, you cannot usually just hire talented marketers for low dollar amounts. If a marketer is any good, he knows how to make hundreds/thousands of dollars a day marketing any number of different things. He can affiliate market something off Clickbank, or take advantage of any of a number of other affiliate channels. Or he can debut his own product and market it himself and keep 100% of the profit. Or he can work for a beefy startup with lots of equity and high upside, or if he's risk averse take a high paying salaried job at an ad firm or mega corp.

So at the lower end, you get a bunch of aspiring marketers who are either brand new or just plain suck. (a few diamonds in the rough here and there, but they're few and far between and they don't stick around in the rough for long)

Best path if you're bootstrapping and have limited funds:

1.) Do your own marketing until you find a few okay-enough channels to get business from. This part sucks at the beginning because it's slow going and most of what you try doesn't work.

2.) Look for free ways to market until you have more cash to spend on marketing. The average paid media campaign takes somewhere between $5K and $50K of experimentation before it reaches profitability. That's $5K to $50K down the drain before you're making money. Don't go for paid until you can afford to absorb the upfront cost of creating a profitable campaign.

3.) Once you have a few okay marketing channels in place (could be search traffic, a popular presence on Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter, or maybe you have a higher dollar offer you can leverage networks and do direct sales for), you'll get more money coming in

4.) Once more money is coming in, you have a few options how you spend it. Hire professionals to boost the conversions of your sales funnel; hire professionals to experiment with new or better marketing campaigns; or hire professionals to train you on these things and make you the expert

Not fun (at first, anyway) and probably not the fast/easy way you might wish you could find. But when you don't have the skill yet, and don't have investment money or high enough sales already to pay for high skill professionals, you've got to grind it out yourself for a bit.

If you'll study marketing, I suggest you pick up a copy of Jeff Walker's Product Launch Formula. It's an effective way to get an initial burst of sales and designed for people with low/no marketing experience.