Well, an insurance niche is EXTREMELY large. You have to compete with some extremely large companies and pro black hatters.
Basically, until you are making money with some other sites and learn all the secrets of the web, you won't make any money. A top spot in insurance can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
If I were you, I would write about 3 articles a day, depending on the time you have available, and leave it at that. At the same time as that you should work on a few other websites, writing articles, link building, ext...
After a few months you go BACK to your insurance site and manual link build. (Takes a lot more time, but backlinks in a related niche and manually done will give you better results)
Pick a much less populated niche and you will make a lot more money.
Just another little tip: every few days you should add a few more tags to all your websites, will help you rank.