Here's a few tips :
-Get all the quests you can and complete them all. By killing and with rewards that will give you some money to make the first upgrade i suggest to you (get bags upgrades !)
-Now that you have some bags, and that you put a merchant board in your room you are ready to make some money.
-Enroll in one of the crafting society and grab an harvesting quest.
-Now everytime you go out, harvest everything. You will also have the harvesting quest, which gives decent money. Sell the remaining ressources depending on prices on your server. Get another harvesting quest (when youre lucky you get rares that sell for better money).
-Dont destroy anything. Even stuff labeled as no value might be worth something. Ask around if youre not sure. All those insect shells and stuff, they add up to give you some money in the end. All the other stuff you find and you cant use but you feel like someone might be interested in it, you put in your vault (put 2 chests in there) to sell.
-Did I say get all the quests ? I MEANT it !!! Some quests are fairly easy and you get some decent money for them. And if you can't use the reward, put for sale !
-ALWAYS sell your stuff that you are selling to an NPC merchant to the city merchants, they ALWAYS give the better deal. In the first stages of the game its only a few coppers but in the long run and the latter stages of the game we are talking a few golds.
These are the basics of making some money in the game. That's what I did all the way up to level 60 and I am in the top 100 wealthiest players on my server. And I gave tons of stuff away to guildies. There's no secret, just the basics : Harvesting, stuff selling and questing. If you do that and you don't waste money around, you will never have a problem with money in this game. I'm not even talking about crafting, this can provide you some decent money too. Maybe even loads of money !
Hope that helps.