Not saying your doing a bad job. Guess I'm trying to understand how your trying to make money off the sites. All I saw was some adsense ads on the one site and that was at the very bottom of the page (not good) and one ad in the sidebar. On the second site, I didn't see anything to make money. Unless I am missing ads or revenue generators on either site?
Obviously could be why you only made $5 or so. Not trying to be rude, or give you a hard time, more a critique. Another question, is the subject something that could make money in the first place? There are plenty of things that are popular on the net, but the audience just doesn't buy, of they are not ones to buy anything. I don't know myself for your topic, just thinking out loud.
I am all for people doing their own thing, more power to them. It can also be said that when you do something you enjoy, it won't seem like "work". But when some one's looking to make money...
At the very least get more ads, and for sure get your adsense ads at the top. I checked keywords for alicia keys and while there are a large number of searches, many advertisers are not paying big money per click, which means not much earnings when it comes to adsense. Course depends on what your targeting, a number of keywords pay okay.
Another thing, on one site you have AK media, the other is AK daily, for your titles, which are really your keywords as seen by search engines. Both of them have quite low search volume, meaning not many people are searching using those keywords/phrases.
Maybe you know all this already. Just a number of things you could do to improve your earnings