My Passion, my curse??

I've been running a blog for about two years now that started as a love of labor and continues out of stubbornness. Over the past few months my site has been under assault by Google (or my lack of understanding of Google's 1000 commandments).

First After upgrading my theme, getting accepted into Google News, and seeing my traffic explode over night, I get me Adsence Account revoked because a friend on mine was clicking on the ads without my knowledge. He thought he was helping me out but didn't tell me until after I appealed. DENIED!!

Afterwards I go on a writing storm and with the help of a few writers put out over 40 articles of the highest quality but the traffic just doesn't grow. My intent was to get my traffic up to a level where I could get premium ads for my site and not rely on PPC. But like I said the traffic never materializes.

Then, according to Google's "this site is dangerous page" my site gets Malware, presumably from some hacked Clickbank ads I used to replace the Adsence. It was down for a week but I did recover the site. However, now I'm afraid to put ads on my site! I guess its just post-Google paranoia but it does complicate the plan of making money with this site.

Enter Warrior Forum: After reading many post doing lots and lots of research I realize my traffic building efforts are horribly off, no news letter, forums non existent, hardly any SEO and I learn that I am sitting on a gold mine of articles that can be used to get more traffic with back linking and article syndication. Then Google comes out with the change and now I'm not sure if this helps or hurts me.

I just enjoy writing on my topic and it would be so incredibly nice to have this site make money but from what I can tell, most money making niches have to do with demand and keyword loopholes. Or if I can put out 5 articles a day my traffic would grow a lot but then I might drop dead from exhaustion.

I've always thought that success in any business comes from a desire to do what you really love and eventually it will pay off but there is a practical side of me that thinks that if I am going to make money with a blog, I may need to change my topic or try to sell something people have a demand for.

So my question is this; Do I stick with the blog and if so what is the best way to monetize a high quality content site (3-5 articles a week) in a mega competitive niche? Will better SEO make that much of a difference? OR do I need to find a less competitive niche if I ever want to earn any money?

Thanks in advance!