You should concentrate more on the content and stick with a particular niche. Only change themes if it has outlasted its usefulness and/or doesn't really suit your work/reflect your nice. You need to choose some other theme because this is more for companies rather than those who do dynamic content. You need to be looking at magazine type themes.
Second, if you really want to monetize then you have to work so hard that monetization becomes be your secondary motive. You're a writer and that's the only thing that should be in your mind. Your primary (and in almost all parts, should be the only motive in your mind) motive should be to have relevant content that people can read it and follow you without you asking/convincing them to follow you. Since you're new, you need to generate honest, unplagiarised or "uninspired" content and you need to do it at much faster pace compared to well established bloggers. I do reviews and I barely sleep 2-4 hours a day when I need to do 1-2 H/W testing at a time. It differs from genres of writing, but you need to be that much dedicated and it will take a lot of time, atleast 3 years- to establish that momentum. You cannot afford to loose that momentum during that time.
This way they like your stuff and they share it, If 1 out 10 people share it when 1 person share it, 2-3 read it. The more quality and honest content you make up, the more people you get, the more people you get and understand your content, your credibility as a writer is established, you become credible writer you become well known for your work and only for your work.
Then you need to do a bit of some SEO work. I don't know how to do this at all but after consulting few SEO guys their tactics are seriously questionable. I use this SEO plugin called Yoast SEO. Just check it out and research on what is SEO, should get a hang of it. Rest of it, like others, you'll figure it out.
I don't believe in a lot of things people say. A lot of those tech bloggers I unfortunately have to meet at times are very arrogant and brag about their "readership" and try to do that "mine is bigger than yours" talk (that's when I give a thumbs up and say cool story bro, which at times just don't understand what that really means *facepalm*). I see a lot of Indian siteowners, forum owners, blog owners, etc. do that and then they fall down. You need to tone down, even if you think you have reached "that level". The way I see things, if you cannot achieve 100,000 organic hits (you'll know when you google it out) for a week with atleast 10-15 minutes of average time in site rate after having a site active for 6 months, then you need to figure it out what you're doing wrong.
BTW, contrary to certain belief, readers are not dumb. You might be successful in fooling them in few articles, but the time when you take them as dumb and you produced biased point of view and/or reflect that arrogance or boredom in your article- that's it. Its very easy to fall down but extremely tough to build credibility and momentum, even more if your niche is dominated by a lot of well known blogging and/or media sources.
You mastered this, then in 2-3 years its possible to earn regular (and still might not be enough but its enough to take some care of your expenses- like hosting and/or spending on resources that will aid you on research when you're writing- like cameras, notebooks, etc.)income. But this is ironclad, primary and only goal should be concentrating on your niche and generating regular amount of quality content much quicker than other well-known people. If you're the only guy then you got a lot of work cut out for you.
