Two Years of Blogging for Money for Military

The 26th of this month was my second year of blogging/online money making. It has been a lot of fun and I've made a little money on the way. I'm not as big as I wanted to be and it's mainly my fault. Here are some tips/problems that I've had along the way that I think has stopped my progress. What's worse is I don't have enough time, or patience, to fix any of this really.

1. Blogger has been easy and free to use; however, I think for a blogger to make a lot of progress and money, he or she has to get his/her own domain. They are really cheap and once you start making money, your blog will pay for itself. This is a major problem for me because the military has blocked access to blogs (especially with .wordpress or .blogspot at the end of the URL). This has seriously stopped a lot of my traffic. I haven't switched over because I'm too lazy and I'm too busy for that.
2. I haven't reached out and made friends with fellow bloggers and readers. I have some faithful readers that I don't really talk to, much. For example, Jerry from www.leads4insurance.com has been reading my blog faithfully and commenting faithfully. THANKS JERRY! I think it's important for bloggers to build a giant circle and comment on each other's blogs. I haven't really participated much in it and I haven't taken advantage of blog carnivals like I should. There are a lot of very good bloggers out there running awesome blog carnivals and I rarely post to them.
3. I seriously need to post more frequently. I have plenty of ideas in my head. There is rarely one second in the day that I'm not thinking about finances. I get lazy or no motivation and I think that I lose the faithful daily readers.
4. I stopped logging onto www.problogger.net everyday and posting comments. He has so many readers that people would click on my comments on his blog. That site has so many good articles and I really need to start checking it out more frequently.
5. In two years, I've only made $2,687. That's not really the part-time money making job I had in mind. I should have used some of the money to pay for links and SEO helpers. I have a good niche, so I know that only a small investment would yield great results. But again, I'm too busy and lazy to do it.

If you are a faithful reader, then I would like to say thank you. If you are a potential advertiser, please let me know so I can fix #5...lol. If you are a fellow blogger, then try not to make the same mistakes that I've made/been making. Thanks everyone for an exciting two years.