The first method is the easiest way to get far away from spawn. However, most of the portals near spawn are probably going to be "trap" portals, meaning that they are there to just trap new players. A common trap is the "slabbed in" portal, where you go through the portal and find yourself stuck, and since you're in the portal, you can't type /kill to get out (the PortalGUI mod prevents this). An easy solution is to just use a hacked client and bind "/kill", but this will trap some inexperienced newbies. Once you've gotten further out just follow the standard Minecraft survival guides.