Before you think about XP and gold, I am going to give some general advice. You need to figure out how to survive before you should be worrying about becoming rich. If you are having problems with low level quests, you certainly have some fundamental issues that we need to fix. Gold will come. Other than feeding your horse and the occasional repair bill, you should not need much gold until you hit level 50. SAVE IT. The only way to get XP is to quest or grind. It very well might be in your interest to find a very low level grind spot and boost your level a bit, and get comfortable with your abilities.

This game can be very overwhelming at first. Fortunately, you picked probably the best Class/Race to get your feet wet. Some people have suggested heavy armor, but I dont like that idea. I would try to wear 5 light, 1 medium and 1 heavy. If you can find someone to craft (this is why a guild is a good idea), get a 5 piece of seducer or kagrenacs in training. I would start with a destro staff as your main weapon. As a magic character, your abilities scale (become more powerful) based on your max magic and spell damage. The lesson here, dont waste any attributes or glyphs on stamina. A little health is okay in the beginning.

A templar's bread and butter is Puncturing Sweep. It is a Damage ability that is good for single target and AoE, and it heals. This should be the skill that you cast 10 times more than any other. I am fairly certain (havent actually tried) that you could beat the main quest with just this skill. As long as you are doing damage, you will be getting healed. The second skill you want for solo, is breath of life (morph of rushed ceremony).

Start with these two skills. You have a damage, and a burst heal. Spam sweep unless you are really low on health, then cast your BoL. The more enemies being hit by your sweep, the more healing you get. When solo, you should have a good reason for casting a skill other than these two. This is really all you need. One problem I got into at first was having 5 different damage skills, most of which were redundant, on my bar. Keep it simple.

For getting around, I think the best bar for a templar is as follows:

-Puncturing Sweep: Main spam ability and passive heal. This is 90% of your button pressing. You need to have faith that this will both kill your enemies and keep you alive.

-Toppling charge: Because you are in melee, this is a nice gap closer. Dont spam this, but use it to close the distance if you are far away from an enemy, or get around when grinding. This is more about utility than damage. This is probably the first skill I would flex out for something else.

-Radiant Destruction (or Radiant glory): This is your execute. It is really powerful, but only works when your target is below about 30% health. Once your target gets to low health, this will kill almost anything that moves. Destruction is more damage, Glory is better when solo because it heals.

-Breath of Life: This is your oh S**T heal. use if your health is below about 50%, otherwise just keep using sweep.

-Inner light: this is not actually used to cast. We slot it for more magic and more spell crit. It can be used to empower abilities, but I wouldnt mess with that. This can also be flexed for other things if needed.

Start with this bar, or as close as you can get. I would start with Destro staff, but Dual Swords, Sword and Shield, or even resto staff are viable options. You see a bad guy, cast toppling charge to jump on them and knock them down, spam sweep until they are low health, then finish with Radiant Destruction. Cast BoL if you get in trouble. Thats it. This will win 95% of solo fights including world bosses. Your back bar can be used for support abilities, but I wouldnt be doing much bar swapping at the beginning. Once you are comfortable with this, then you can branch out a bit.

To answer your original question, start doing crafting writs. They are are the best consistent source of gold and materials. It wont solve your problem overnight, but they add up. I dont do anything else for gold anymore other than selling rare items I get from trials. If I had as much money in RL as I do gold in this game, I could buy a jet. Haha.

Edit: If you are PC/NA, send me a whisper in game @Oreyn_Bearclaw . I would be happy to get you setup with a basic starter gear set at no cost. The more players, the better.