A few things I do:

Join trade guild. Sell things like motifs, gold and raw crafting materials, set items with value, jewlery... - anything that sells for a few thousand gold is worth it.

Do daily crafting writs.

Do fighters guild and mages guild dailies and sell rewards.

Steal items and sell them.

Honestly just pick up and sell everything you don’t need or don’t deconstruct to merchants. You’ll earn a bit just by doing daily quests and pledges and selling items you don’t need.

I’m not sure what crafting mats is either.

This is a question that pops up on these forums like clockwork. It has been asked several times in the past, and will no doubt be asked again in the future. Try searching for stuff relating to "earning gold" and you should find several old threads about it.

And while the question may take several forms, the answer is always the same - spend less than you earn. But that is not really helpful, which is why this thing keeps getting asked all the time. A much better thing to ask is "what is worth spending gold on?" and then you will start to get much more useful information.

The thing is, that making gold is rather easy in this game. It comes at a steady pace simply by playing. It might not always come in a form that is easily identifiable as "gold", and usually needs an extra step (You need to vendor it, list it in a guild store, craft something from it, use it to get something else that you will then list in the guild store and so on.)

Eventually a million will become chump change, and I realize that it might not feel that way at the star of the game, where 50k feels like a lot of cash. But trust me, it will change.

When you no longer have base gold sinks (i.e. bank space, horse upgrades, basic consumables (potions, food, poisons, soulgems) or even armor repairs (I have couple of hundred grand repair kits distributed among my character - all received from doing crafting writs)) you will easily make 30-60k in gold during a single evening of play, depending on how lucky you are with your RNG, and what dailies you bother to do, and whether you maintain a membership in a trading guild.

The other side of the equation is that the game has tons of inbuilt gold sinks - and some of them have been purposefully scaled to obscene levels, just to drain some of the vast stockpiles of gold that long time players have squirreled away. This makes certain things require horrendous amounts of grind for new players to achieve, and many, I feel, don't even try.

See, this game is old - not ancient, but it does have history. And this means that there is a wealthy class of long time players, who operate in a completely different economic environment from those who have played only for a year or less.

To some of these players, 10 million is chump change. And ZOS knows how much money is out there, and they keep that in mind when coming up with new gold sinks. As time goes by, it will be ever increasingly difficult to catch up with those who have already "done it all." Who already have all the motifs, who already have fully furnished houses, and all characters at max level and in gold gear.

However, the vast majority of these sinks are just that - sinks and not really necessary for enjoying the core content in the game - i.e. overland PVE questing, which constitutes the vast majority of what is on offer here. End game raiding and doing group dungeons requires a bit more - you need to have decent gear and a bunch of solid consumables to be competent, but as long as you're not trying to kit out 14 characters with several alternative loads of full gold gear, it won't be too hard to achieve once you've done with the things that actually matter - i.e. bag space, bank space and horse training. At that point, your only real sink is potions, and it's pretty easy to be self sufficient about that too.

Once you're there, everything you do will generate excess gold and the only real question is what things are worth actually spending gold on. But until that point, expect every ounce of gold you make to pay for these inbuilt gold sinks. You really wont be able to afford all the extraneous cosmetic junk the game has on offer until you've finished with the primary gold sinks.

As for practical advice... Start doing crafting writs early. Even if you do not level the characters themselves, roll up your maximum allotment of characters and keep doing writs with them. Also keep picking up every crafting node you come across, and decon stuff until you get level 50 crafting skills for all your characters. Start researching traits on all of them ASAP, it will markedly increase your master writ drop changes, which translates to increased profits. Learning motifs is not all that important, but mastering the traits is. Also as an added bonus, you will be flooded with grand repair kits and will never have to spend gold on repairing armor anymore. And if you are playing on PC use add-ons that can automate most of the procedure and make it require couple of minutes per character. Do that and you will be drowning in gold in no time.

For a new player, I'd say stealing and fencing is a lot easier than anything that requires you get a trading guild (which mat farming and fishing for Perfect Roe, two other commonly suggested methods, do require). The problem is that trading guilds typically have some sort of requirement (dues, sales minimums, etc.) for you to stay in them, and those requirements can be hard to meet when you're still figuring out how the system works.

So just rob the ships in Daggerfall, fence your loot at the nearby Outlaw's Refuge, and repeat as needed until you've filled your quota for the day, and you'll build up cash pretty quickly. It's not as quick as other methods, but as a newbie, it easily has the lowest point of entry of any solid method of money-making. Up your fencing limits and pickpocket chances with Skill Points when you can, and you have a steady source of income to at least get your foot in the door at a trading guild or something.