There are a lot of ways to be able to earn bitcoins. There are signature campaigns, mining, trading, and doing tasks from websites that offer you btc in return.
According to me, the lack of knowledge and the lack of interest in the world of crypto currency can be the possible reasons of losing money and not making anything good even being there in crypto currency. You really need to make a self-analysis and you need to figure out the actual problem. This will give you a fair idea of what the problem is actually and correcting that will help you in making more money.
Right basically it is all about how knowlegable a does a person when it comes to bitcoin investments. Tho there are really methods in which you dont have to spend a single penny. I think one year of bitcoin experience is too much in order for you to learn atleast the basic of the cryptocurrency and were able to determined what the problems are. Yet it seems that the op still fails to recognize it