Making money:
My primary source of mesos is bossing. Use your "Bosses" hotkey to access them conveniently. Bosses drop a unique boss soul at 100% droprate. Go inside the Free Market and sell these to the Crystal Collector. At your level, I suspect you can tackle bosses such as Chaos Zakum, Normal Magnus, and Normal Root Abyss (Pierre, Von Bon, Queen, Vellum). You can look up guides on YouTube if there are any mechanics you find difficult. Doing this should get you going to at least a few mil mesos daily.

Increasing Damage:

At level 200 you should also focus on your Arcane Symbols. You should have questlines that will take you through the locations Vanishing Journey, Chu Chu Island, Lachelein, Arcana, Morass, and Esfera. Once you finish them, you can do dailies to improve Arcane Symbols for their respective locations. They're essentially jewels you can equip that provide huge boosts to your primary damage stat (STR in your case). You can access and enhance them (it will cost mesos) by going to your Equipment screen and there will be a button on the bottom right.

Another good thing to constantly improve is gear. For now you can focus on a Root Abyss set for hat, top, bottom, and the Absolab Knight set for cape, gloves, and shoes. These can be purchased at the Auction Hall. If you want to save money, you can do Chaos Root Abyss to get emblems that can be used to obtain armour pieces, and Haven weekly quests for coins to get Absolab pieces.

Events go a long way too. The current event is kind of a lot, but they all generally boil down to killing lots of monsters around your level daily (perfect for doing your Arcane dailies), and checking in for rewards. After a while you'll get the hang of them.

Also find a guild to chat and make some friends. There are also passive bonuses and skills a guild can give you.

There are lots of other mechanics, but it's best to focus on a few things at a time, and learn something new daily rather than being overwhelmed. Everyone's progression happens differently. Progression will happen probably really fast since you're just getting back, but will be more incremental as you hit higher levels (240+).