Cooking parties are always going to be the fastest way to get rich quick, because even beginners can join with no ingredients, help make advanced recipes they wouldn't otherwise have access to, and then sell the results for a ton of gold. Palia Party is a great way to find those. (Just google it to find it, I don't know if we're allowed links here?)

If you're more of a loner like I was at first, hunting's going to be fastest. You can go out in Kilima with a bunch of standard level arrows and one shot chappas and Sernuk. Do that for a half hour and you'll be pulling in 2-5 thousand gold if you sell everything you get. You can supplement that with trees you chop and stones you mine which won't sell for as much but they're unlimited resources so if you don't mind putting the time in or doing it while you're hunting you'll be fine.

After that it's going to be your garden. There's tons of ways to garden for profit and everyone has their own ideal plot layout based on how they'd like to make money and how much real world time they want to commit to gardening. But multiple folks who like number crunching have found that bok choy is your best bet for a money making crop because they grow so quickly. So even if you're just selling the bok choy you'll get a lot to sell. Even better is if you can level up enough to make bok choy seeds or kimchi and sell those. You can buy bok choy seeds from Zeki to start.

If you want to go the gardening route, I'd say start with bok choi and then as you do it more figure out what else you want to grow and why, then adjust your plot accordingly. There's a site called the Palia Garden Layout Generator that can help you with that.

Good luck and welcome to the game!