The position of Adsense ads matters a lot. Put them upper left and wrap your article around them. Centre of screen is good too. You need traffic. You can get quality links from articles in high PR directories. The top few are: ezinearticles,goarticles,amazines,articlealley,ide amarketers,articledashboard,articlecity. Links to these should help push you up Google a bit which should bring in more traffic. It's a long job.
Don't bother with buying traffic. It's a waste of money.