Ok buying gold is not as smart as some would lead you to believe. It is a highly speculative market and unless you are willing to stomach wild ups and downs then go for it. It is not the panacea of investing.
For starters unless you are willing to seriously dive in and study the matter I would suggest to choose a passive investment strategy. This means that you would invest on index funds following the market instead of picking out individual stocks, funds, options, etc.
Having said that the first step is to truly define your appetite for risk. This is tricky. Many people are not aware that they are more risk averse than what they assess themselves to be. In that regard, knowing exactly what you are comfortably willing to wager is important to determine your strategy. Brutal and ruthless honesty is required, and for this you could play out scenarios of how much you are willing to lose at a maximum in a worst case scenario.
The point of this is to create an automated investment strategy where impulsiveness is minimized. Making emotional and rash decisions sometimes pose huge consequences when investing. Therefore, it is critical for you to establish your strategies for buying, holding, and going out of your positions you are invested in. Failure to do so, will have you go through the motions and have to deal with the normal market swings where you are more than likely to act on your emotions and make stupid decisions that are not in your best interest.
If you choose to invest like planting a tree, then you would be likely suited to read about value investing: Warren Buffet, John C. Bogle, Burton Malkiel, Peter Lynch and others. Your strategy would revolve around picking investments were you have a sensible degree of knowledge, basic fundamental analysis and overall long term expectations of an increase in value. By long term I am talking about holding an investment for a minimum of 2-3 years.
This type of investing means that you are not worried about short term losses or swings, as long as they fit your threshold (you establish what is the most you would bear to lose in any investment before going out of that position). For people who are more comfortable with this style of investing, even Warren Buffett recommends to invest in index funds like ETFs that follow the market. Truth is the average Joe will NOT be able to consistently beat the market. Hell, not even 95% of financial professionals and wizes are able to do so on a consistent yearly basis, so might as well not go there, as luck is more a factor than many would like to admit.
On the other hand, if you have a higher appetite for risk and are comfortable with truly putting some effort into tracking your investments on a daily basis then you can try out picking individual stocks and other high risk high yield investments. I suggest that for this strategy you start in small steps, first dabbling with little money and gradually increasing the quantity that is invested. For this I suggest reading by Jason Kelly:
[url
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_ ... vesting%20]
Don't be fooled by the name as it's an excellent primer on investing for the average person who isn't fully involved in the financial and investment world. I learned a great deal from that book and I work at an investment bank in my country.
I would shy away from self-help type of financial books as their main purpose is to dish out mainstream advice that rarely amounts to much value.
To sum it: for investments it is critical to be as cut-throat and logical about your strategy. Define your exact strategy based on YOUR personal preferences and follow it to a T. In this way, you avoid having that pesky human nature of yours (feelings and clouding of judgment) to get involved in making financial decisions.
Be extremely grounded in reality. You are most likely not going to beat the market. You won't consistently generate returns on your investments. You might have a terrific spree, and you might also lose a shit ton of money. Having returns as high as 10% in your portfolio is considered a success. Don't be greedy and make decisions to sell and capitalize your gains.