Spent waaaaaayyy too much time & effort on my first niche adsense site

I think you're on the right track with the part I quoted.

I'd suggest you pull the adsense ads for a while, you're going to get a spike of ( the wrong kind of i.e. unnatural) traffic from this post, and that could hurt... a lot.

Right off the bat, your first mistake was thinking of personal development as a niche. It's a MARKET, to be filtered down into smaller markets then niches - ie: Personal Growth - Success Mindset - Eliminating Negative Patterns In Thinking.

You have Market, Smaller market, targeted niche.

Depression is a submarket of mental health, treating depression with hypnotherapy would be a niche. Get where I am going?

With things like "depression" the CPC is big but the COMPETITION is HUGE. If you are going to target a mammoth like that you need to seriously drill down and refine to something VERY specific - and hopefully something not oversaturated.

As far as having subniches and google.. well ok there's no such thing as a sub niche in my opinion but I covered that above

Google DOES like variety and content that is not only geared to SEO and traffic bait. However it also likes Focus. If you are targeting something too broad at the top and hoping a smattering of more focused content under it is going to rank you and bring you the adsense revenue for the top level stuff, you've got the wrong angle on it.

looking at your site, the first thing I think is that "ImproveMyselfBetter" sounds odd- MAKE myself better makes sense. the other is.. bad grammar or what have you. Also, it doesn't suggest anything about depression (whereas make myself better would - though I'm sure that domain is taken.)

Fight Depression and Improve Yourself do go hand in hand but from a targeting angle, it looks like you are splitting yourself in two different directions.

And I really hate to say anything about someones hard work on design but the front age post style is.. not attractive or welcoming. You should try for a wider layout where you have 3 bigger content boxes across, if you are going to keep it all in white boxes against purple. As it is, the boxes are too small to get a feel for the article (which doesn't make the visitor want to click) and they scroll down forever because the column is so thin you can't get much content at once.

You want the visitor to see more of the posts, enough at least that they can read the full title and a snippet, so they WANT to click- because Google cares most about people staying on your side, clicking through and around your site, and potentially clicking off to other AUTHORITY sites, because it lends to the concept that you have a valid site that is circulating traffic around the web, not trying to horde it to yourself - which is a mistake a lot of newer adsense site makers do - they think that it's a no-no to let people leave their site. WRONG thinking. You want to have people stay on your site for at LEAST 3-5 minutes, if you do really well, even longer.. then you want them to go off your site from a link within your site to a relevant site. (you know, if they haven't already clicked off on your ADSENSE that is.) Relevancy and authority and staying power are three BIGS for google rankings.

as is engagement. (giving people a reason to comment and interacting with them is a google lovespot too, but sometimes that's hard if you aren't actually an expert in the field of the blog you have up.)

Ok I've said enough for now, my kiddo just popped a nosebleed- good lucK!

Any tips for properly monetizing a niche site with adsense + infolinks or should i use kontera?

But pls correct me if I'm wrong, but having content on related sub-niches that I am not actively targeting could probably only look better in Google's eyes right?

Your good to go. Nothing wrong with adding content in related sub niches.

Your blog looks good, keeping hacking at it. The only suggestion I have is to add some personality into the site (social media)