dagan is pretty much meant to encourage newer players to fleet up with others. Ask in local if somebody wants to give you a hand destroying him.
As was said, fastest isk is the buy some plex from ccp and sell it on the ingame market route (citadel markets such as in perimeter and ashab often have a better tax situation going).
Trading is also a decent way to make a bit of isk (but pretty boring in my opinion).
Inter-regional trading can be done with literally any ship…it’s less boring than station trading, but not by a lot. Warp speed quickness is important if you are fulfilling buy orders. Deal in small, higher-value-lower-volume items. Always make sure the buy order you plan to fill or one acceptable to you is still open and unfilled before buying what you’re going to zip there as fast as you can and sell to that buy order. Don’t be greedy, go for trades that will make you a more-likely-to-actually-be-completed-ok medium profit until maybe you get it all down and become one of the ones finding the very-profitable trades and completing them ridiculously fast.
Speculation trading might not be something you want to do at this point in your EvE.
Check out project discovery?
EvE might very well be more enjoyable for you with other players. I’m sure there are Alpha-clone-friendly roleplaying corps out there…even for heretic traitor minmatrash…