Conflicting advice and three lessons from Writer's Market

1. You can't make any money off of poetry.

2. Getting a literary agent to represent you is a better goal than getting published.
Recently, I listened to a panel discussion on being published, and they said that their literary agent was indispensable, and that a bad literary agent could really hurt you.
This makes sense to me, because I have a bad literary agent--me. I send work to places that were probably mostly interested in adding me to their mailing list, if that.
Hearing this sage advice, I sought out the Writer's Market handbook to look up literary agents.
There I discovered what I probably should have figured out on my own: first, literary agents only work with things where 10% of the profit is still some amount of money, like screen plays, novels, and just maybe a collection of short stories, and second, I don't have any of those things written.
So, essentially I realized that I am doing a bad job, but I am doing approximately what I should be doing as a writer: writing down stories and showing them to people and publishers, honing my writing skills and creating ideas that could be used in the kinds of work that have the possibility of actually making any money at all.

3. Publishers would prefer that you be somewhat known, for something
That very informative panel on being published mentioned self promotion briefly.
They said it's more or less a waste of time, that you should focus on being a good writer instead.

Then I happened upon a segment in Writer's Market about "your platform."
Publishers looking for your platform are looking for ways that you are already famous or known not including the work that you want published. The book suggested a laundry list of get-famous-quick schemes like making shitty youtube trailers for your book, starting a webcomic or blog or otherwise trying to catch a ship that's already set sail.
Bob Powers got a good following by giving away stories on girlsarepretty.com but to paraphrase something a published writer told a sweaty, desperate crowd, I am not Bob Powers, and you probably aren't either. You're probably not even the why must I cry guy. But more to the point, why would you want to be somebody else?
Don't answer that. Let me just say that you are even more unlikely to be successful if you're trying to be somebody else. Probably the best strategy would be to turn something you need to do or enjoy doing and make that your get-famous-quick scheme.
Okay, that's kind of contradictory.
Let me start over. I think the best any of us can hope for in our endevors is to be an example for others. And if more people know who you are, AND know you for doing something interesting or good, you've got a better chance at being published, I mean, making a difference.
I, for instance, lead art workshops in my community. But I haven't put in anywhere near the amount of work to get my efforts into the newspaper on a slow day, and being in the newspaper on a slow day is a very low bar to set for a non-profit arts program.
Also, freelance article writing is another way to get kinda known, and at the same time do something that might feed yourself sometimes. How to write good articles and get them published, I have no idea. More on this later.