First, before you think about monetizing, you need traffic to your site, which in my opinion is the most difficult part. From my experience for a noob there are two ways of getting traffic:
1. Organic traffic by ranking your site
It takes quite a long time and you need a lot of knowledge to rank
2. Social media
This is the easier part and you see result immediately which gives you motivation to continue and not giving up. Promote your site on Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Stumbleupon and others depending on the kind of website you have.