Every time I arrive at one of these threads, there are always people vouching PTCs, GPTs, and other such programs where one spends a lot of time and effort for minimal monetary gain. You would be lucky to get even enough to pass off for minimum wage were you to manage to gather a handful of referrals. That isn't making money. That's just nonsense. The only thing these programs are good for is getting startup money for the real methods that will make you thousands of dollars if enough effort is put into it. This is in contrast to these pyramid scheme programs where you hardly ever advance regardless of the effort you put into it.
I would recommend newbies to read up on
SEO and Social Media Marketing, then look at their options for monetization, including affiliate products, CPA offers, Adsense, selling advertising space, PPD, sponsored blog posts from advertisers, etc. You know, the
real ways to make good money online. If they can or are particularly precocious, they can try advertising their own businesses (online or offline) with a website.
I would then instruct them to start up a blogspot or wordpress blog (they both can get good traffic if you write correctly and fumble with all the options for SEO given) and write rich, quality content in their niche of choice. Literally, just start writing, and the traffic will come as the crawlers spider your content more and more frequently. My latest blogspot to test a niche gained slightly over 8K uniques in the first month. This can be them. Once enough blog posts have been written (think 10-30 posts) then they can apply for Adsense and get approved almost right away no matter how bad you think the blog looks, as long as the content is lengthy. Then they can monetize that 8K traffic per month, get anywhere between a 0.5 to 10% CTR, and make a few hundred per month already with just that alone. Then they may choose to promote affiliate products, or get a domain and hosting of their own once they are comfortable enough with the concept, then scale their success up from there. It does not have to be difficult.