What advice do you have for an International student with a low/no GPA and virtually no extracurriculars?

To save money, I would suggest going to community college. It's much cheaper, it has smaller class sizes, and would give you much more time to work on other things while in school.

So if you are applying now which you seem to be doing don't try to hard to get into the top tier school but you could try at schools like UofHouston, South Carolina, NC St, IA st, Drake, Temple, Miami (OH), AZ st, U of Memphis. These schools will, in my opinion, will have you in the mid 50% but you will have to pay much more than a US resident as these schools don't pay a lot of financial aid. But you could always try to start a blog and be dedicated to it you and even if you have few other things include it whether its a job at McDonald's or a grocery store its still something colleges will like to see. The colleges I've listed are ones I thought of off the top of my head all them are for you to decide based on major affordability travel. All most all of these schools will have a link to prospective students and you click international you should be able to get an email and then email them as they are a great resource.

There isn't a whole lot to do but clean up your resume and application and if you had a job in your gap year include it and apply to as many as you'd like and if you don't like any of them look at US News best value schools.