If you've played Sim City, this game will make a lot more sense to you, but there are nuances.
For starters, here is a basic rundown of the early game.
This is a basic guide assuming you've played the game and read the tutorials in the game itself, which are fairly exhaustive.

You start with a tiny planet population and two completely undeveloped regions of heaven and hell.
Your job is to make sure that EMBO's who die (the nickname for the ET looking people on the planet) end up being taken care of in the afterlife.

The game itself explains every major mechanic in the help/tutorial section and will play a short narrated clip showing the action. It does not cover actual gameplay, however, which is the point of the guide.

There are three major things to keep in mind when building heaven and hell out:

Heaven is meant to be utopia : perfectly sculpted, easily accessed, friendly, happy disneyland-like layout. Keep zones close together, touching eachother, and make use of general zoning in dead space. Keep the roads short and keep zones away from siphons.
Initially, heaven is the easiest to manage because efficiency and togetherness of zones is cheap and ideal. Later on, congestion sets in and it becomes really hard to manage roads and add zones and balance them fast enough.

Hell is meant to be a distopia: a clonky, traffic laden, sad, tortuous prisonscape. Keep zones pretty far away from each other, use general zoning sparingly, and make roads long and snake like, zigzagging to cause a long traffic situation. Hell is overall the easiest to run, but the most expensive and least intuitive to design. As you run out of space it will be more and more difficult to run efficiently, but if designed right its much easier to manage and balance than heaven and will be your biggest money maker.

Souls reincarnate and need a karma station and connection to the fountain like portals on the map and anywhere with road access so that they can go back to earth once they are done with heaven and or hell.

Barring that, there are other concepts to keep in mind.
1.)The colored zones are ordered for hell first, meaning from left to right in line the colored zones should come out of the gate with green first and blue last in hell.
2.) Heaven is reversed in color - Blue is the preferred first destination.
3.) Generic space (rainbow) can be first in hell or heaven, but ideally should be last. EMBO's prefer specific rewards.
4.) Build Topias (the demon/angel housing) on the same side of the road as zones for a mild vibe effect boost. Same with colleges.
5.) Start small. You are running a deficit every year for the first 500-1000 years and the focus is to keep it as simple and efficient as possible, while leaving reasonable room for expansion later.

For Heaven:
Build a Topia and a College closest to the gate, turn on the college full blast (the cheapest stuff) and build a straight road. Leave room for expansion to the largest gate and college and Topia, a 6x6 space alloted for each building.
Build the zones in 4x4 squares right next to each other in a straight line. keep 3 square lengths away from at least one side and the top so that they can be upgraded to the 6x6 - (this requires road all away round it for it to become the ultimate structure.
Build seperate road for ad infinitum syphons and a karma station - keep this away from your stuff.
If the zones fill up, and you've balance them, you may need more syphons. It's ok to build general zoning on the opposite side of the road with similar principles to the common zoning.
Repeat this format as heaven fills up in another avenue from the gate.

For Hell:
Build a Topia and College closest to the gate, but build a long zig zag road for your zone space.
think of a game of snake.
Build the zones in 4x4 squares like a fish hatchery or pork ribs: a blank space and then a zone strip. DO NOT let the zones touch, and keep between the road and space at least 4 spaces distance from the next zoning strip. Ideally, a long road makes a 2x deep U at the end of the space, and then goes and does it again - the first zone should be on the third road after the second U turn, then make a 6 deep uturn, have a road, then another 2x U turn, then the next zone.
Ad infinitum zones give out bad vibes in hell, which is good, so dont worry if they are close or are in the zone space.
Build off of existing roads for ad inifinium, but still keep karma stations away from zones - they are negative for development of zones in heaven and hell.

Money:
When possible, build the next level of topia somewhere new, and a college somewhere new (but before zones for best effect) and make sure all angels/demons are 0% commuting, and try to get the imported angels/demons down to 15%. at 10% it will warn you, but if you're running the game fast you can easily get pop up spammed so you cant turn it off, then the angels/demons destroy stuff, which can be very costly.
The smarter angels are, the more money per soul they get and the bigger structures are formed.

Be sure to set aside 100k for a heaven pig and a hell pig bank. Hell is no interest until you default, then it will cost you an unfathomable amount: but heaven is a straight 100-year loan with 1% interest on the life of the loan.
Borrow from hell, then borrow from heaven to pay back hell, then pay heaven right back to infinitely expand your loan time without interest or payments.
This loan floating is amazingly efficient, but if you forget it can be expensive, and if you play with more money than you can ever hope to repay, you'll lose the game.

By now you are starting to earn rewards from heaven and hell in the form of special structures which help your domains to develop fully, and you're earning some money rather than paying it out every turn!

This is where things begin to heat up. you'll need to start spending a lot of money to upgrade buildings and to balance zones automatically, because individually managing zones is no longer manageable.

Key concepts:

If you haven't already, build a limbo on each plane. the little events on the planet or disasters will really start to mess with cash flow, and losing souls is extremely expensive. it's a very cheap investment in the long run, but don't rely on it.

Start building ferries, and alternate gates on other islands on the plane, and develop new territory.
Copy what you've already done, even if you don't think you need it at the time: you'll need it soon enough, and now that you have the cash to cover it, building a new wing of hell isn't as bad as when you started.

Prepare for the worst. build more banks for loans.

once you get up to 10 million souls, you'll make plenty of money but keeping up with it all will be a challenge.

By this point there's not a whole lot more room, but if you manage to make it to the end (which is REALLY HARD and i've ever done it with an honest straight play through once)...

There are new buildings available that act as small heavens and hells in them called omnibolges and love Domes which, once you get to 1 billion souls, takes a lot of the work off your hands as they hold MANY MANY souls and handle EVERYTHING for 1 billion souls. And theoretically the game is endless.
If you've managed to get yourself to this point, you've evolved way past this guide.

Congrats!