The more time and effort you put into learning about the Lightning Network, how routing of payments work, which nodes need new channels or more liquidity and then enabling those things, the more payments you’ll route and the more revenue you’ll bring in and the more likely you’ll be profitable.

Running a Lightning Node can absolutely be done profitably. There’s many forum posts or videos from fantastic node runners that are already turning a profit right now not to mention huge companies doing the same thing. That being said, we’re not going to sugar coat it as it’s a hard slug to get to where they are now. Just like with Bitcoin, it takes Work. Here’s an excellent post outlining someone who’s done a ton of work and still is having troubles returning a profit.

Our recommendation is that you should think hard about whether you’re willing to put in the many months of learning and experimentation required to (hopefully) turn a profit one day. Maybe your skills are better suited to something else which is OK. Maybe your Internet connection goes down all the time and so it’ll just never work no matter how much you try. Maybe you don’t have enough Bitcoin to fund enough channels. Or maybe you don’t care about being profitable as you want to just learn.

Whichever way you go, just know that it takes lots of work and know this going in. This is especially true right now as the mempool is more full and has higher fees together with a higher Bitcoin price in general. The best time to start running a Lighting Node was 2019, the second best time is now.

We've gone into more detail (6 pages or so) in this piece: Bitcoin Lightning Node Profitability: ROI & What To Know Before Investing