Welcome to Gaia!
I know your question has been pretty much answered, but I know a couple of things you can do to help you get gold ((in order of remembrance)) :
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FaceBook Sharing: If you have FB, you can connect your VB account to Gaia. Doing so will allow you to share things on FB three times a day for a gold reward of 500k per share. For eg., you've just changed your outfit and you've hit the "you've just changed your outfit" page. Below the pic of your new avi there should be the FB button. The good thing about this is that you can alter your privacy settings of the sharing as you're sharing it and still get the reward, so you don't have to show it off to everyone if you don't want to ((plus you can always delete the post from your FB afterwards)).
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Booty Grab: If you go into the Aquariums forum you'll see lots of threads being bumped up with high-reward tanks. Some threads will have the link to their tank in their first post so you don't have to wait around for their signature to load. The gold cap on this has recently been raised to like a mil or something ((I'm not sure as I haven't played BG in a while)) per day.
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Heralds of Chaos: This little game may not get quite as much attention as it used to, but it's still up and it still works. I've separated it because it can be hard to track down, so you might want to bookmark it if you want to keep using it ((or remember the URL)). It's pretty much a battle system and you can play against the game or against other Gaians ((other Gaian battles produce higher rewards)). You earn essence and trade the essence for gold at a rate of 10gg per essence, with a cap of 50k per day. Not much in this day and age, but it will allow you to get some more gold shop items that haven't been whipped by the hike-stick yet.
Of course, there are lots of other games that you can play for gold or tickets, which you can swap for items or sell for gold, or sell the items for gold, or whatever. Posting, voting in polls and commenting on other people's profiles grant a small amount of gold, and be sure to always grab your Daily Chance, as they've upped the gold in that thing and you can hit something like 30k with one tab alone ((so you can pretty much get over 100k per day with it)).
There are also a couple of threads around designed to help newcomers, such as:
^ A great little charity thread for newcomers! You can request to be sent something from the Grab Bin, and request the items ((and gold to cover hair, eyes and skin)) from one of the complete avi sets. There's also some contests and games going on, so feel free to participate in those.
^ If you're having trouble formulating an outfit and need some ideas, here's a good place to look. Before the price hike in H&R Wesley, avatars posted here would be no more than 500k. These days it's a cap of 5mil, but considering how easy it's becoming to gather 5mil these days, it's not as scary as it sounds. There are some cheap examples in the first page consisting of gold-shop-only avis, whereas there are a few throughout the thread that include free items from grants, fail items from RIGs and just generally cheap items. If you have an idea for an outfit but aren't sure how to pull it off, or want to make an outfit based on a particular outfit but can't quite make it work, the thread
How Do You Bargain? is the place to ask ((it's like the chat thread of Simple Designs)). Your request will then be put on the first page of Simple Designs and people will play around and post their design based on your request in SD.