Website Advice & Help on making a profit (SEO)

Hello, I have 2 websites. I wanted help or advice on the design of website and also help in mareketing the websites, increasing traffic and making sales and a profit. The twitter resource site is a type of blog but I have trouble updating the site as an error occurs and a thumbnail does not appear, you can see this on homepage as I having written test or similar. The second site I am more interested in and hope to make profit as its a link to amazon using an affiliate account, they have been on for a short time and I am using adsense and have a google account no sales made so far, I have submitted to search engines but really need to drive big numbers to them I did buy a 1000 hits from ebay but taht was just hits and a waste of time probably. So advice help needed, I do use cpanel and wordpress alittle bit to be able to adjust some features but I am not proficient.

Many thanks

Look forward to hearing replies