You should consider taking up lances, as that will boost your Strength considerably. Since your main source of damage comes from close combat weapons, and your damage from said weapons come off of Str, it's good to take up skillsets that reward large amounts of Str.
Rank everything on Knight talent to 1 except for Lance Counter. Rank that to r1 only if you plan on maining lances (as some of the end-game lance enchants do require r1 in Lance Counter), but otherwise leave that for last. Once you've mastered Lance talent, you could as well move on to Ninja, as that's your next major source of Str. However, this skill is extremely grindy, and will require a major test of patience. (Trust me, Ive went through it. It REALLY tested my patience.) You can rank every single skill in Ninja except for Explosive Kunai (r2) and Smokescreen (r3).
Once you've mastered Ninja, you can work on Carpentry, as that's another major source of Strength. This one is almost as bad, and may even consume some money if you're not already well-versed with Weaving. What I suggest doing is buying a bunch of Carpentry Woodworking Planes, and keep (regular) reforging them until you get Carpentry Exp 2 level on the plane. That way you can avoid the dumb requirements like "create a signed bow" as that is completely luck-based. That being said, be prepared to Harvest Song a lot, and I may suggest doing speed-upgrades on your Lumber Axes, as this WILL take a while. I dont even think you even need to rank Handicraft under Carpentry Talent to master it. But if you do, I'd say raising it to B is probably best. That was my rank when I got Master Carpenter.