Like the title says, if any of you men have experience with making money through a website, I'd immensely appreciate your advice. I'm looking for financial freedom and independence, but have very little knowledge of how to actually get there.

For context, my website is already online, but since I have no money to spare or invest, I've had to do almost everything from scratch. Got a fairly cheap deal for domain registration and hosting, but no Wordpress or anything to make development easier, so I'll ask you to keep that in mind when suggesting tools. Also, I've had to learn from almost zero, and haven't finished learning Javascript and PHP yet.

The site is intended to be a blog (I'll keep details to a minimum, never know who's watching), with a decent amount of articles already available for visitors. The problem is that I've been at this for a little over a month now, with no visible improvement in visitor counts (less than 50 per week). I've submitted the site to the big three search engines, created social media accounts with links to and from the site, changed the layout to improve SEO and mobile compatibility, and basically reached a point where I have no idea of how to advance.

So, my questions are:

1- How can I get a good amount of visitors? "Good" as in "large enough to start making money to pay for further development (or food)."

2- How long should it take? A difficult part of getting into this with zero prior knowledge is that I have no idea what to expect or what's considered "normal" for these things.

3- What are some common pitfalls that should be avoided?

4- Where can I learn more from a trustworthy source? The internet is full of people giving advice, but they're always hiding something or trying to plug their products.

Any help would be deeply appreciated.

TL;DR: zero experience making websites or making money from them. Got one going. How to increase traffic and make it profitable?