If you take your first experience: "My first crappy product made $8K a year in profit 0 advertisement" You might draw the conclusion that '0 advertising is no way to build a company'. In which case you'd have never bothered trying the others.

Adwords and SEO are extremely valuable and profitable when done well. Bear in mind that Bingo Card Creation is a relatively small niche. There are people doing finance related things with adwords who make millions.

That's not really true. You would be encouraged if you made 8K off a crappy product with no advertising. You would think that making money is easy and that you could do much better with a less crappy product. True or not, that's how I'd read that statement and feel about that situation (which is actually pretty similar to my actual situation).

OP "This is all mildly interesting and nice, but honestly $30K projected for this year is nothing."

I was suggesting that if the OP applied his own logic...

Personally I think making any amount of money is cool and something to build on.