Yukitaro's Beginners Guide to Making Gold

Introduction

In this guide, I will not be presenting you with a killer strategy.  What I hope to do is give you the critical thinking skills and tools to choose a strategy (or set of strategies) that will work well for you.  The World of Warcraft is a game, and if you are not having fun, then why are you playing?  If you can find a strategy that makes you 1000 gold an hour that you hate, and one that makes 500 gold an hour that you enjoy, my advice is to play for twice as long and have fun instead of playing for half as long but feel like you're at work.

The Undermine Journal (TUJ;https://theunderminejournal.com/)

This website maintains prices of all items in all realms and is a valuable reference.  In addition, they feature the writings of many gold bloggers on their front page.  These blogs have many specific strategies that will give you many ideas on how to make gold.  Remember that not everyone can make gold on the same realm with the same strategy.  If twenty people read that post on your realm, and they all do the same thing, it isn't going to make a lot of money for all of them.  If only one person on your realm reads the strategy and implements it, that person will probably make a lot of gold.  So, the very new strategies may work, but go back through the old posts because often those strategies would still work, but they're considered old news, so nobody implements them. I would avoid the one to two week old strategies, you'll be coming late, and there's probably already competition using that strategy.

Addons

You will need to use some addons to maximize your gold/hour and make things seem less tedious.  I personally use Curse (http://www.curse.com/) to manage my addons and I recommend that you find an addon manager that works well for you.  Primarily you will need an Auction House (AH) tool, because the base AH is not very user friendly.  Personally I use both Auctionator and TradeSkillMaster (TSM; http://www.tradeskillmaster.com/).  If you're going to do a lot of posting then TSM is what you will want to use, AFTER YOU KNOW your market.  While you're learning your market, you may find that Auctionator or another AH addon allows you to make small mistakes instead of big ones, and more importantly discover your mistakes.  TSM is highly automated and when you make mistakes it is easy to lose a lot of money before you discover what you're doing wrong.  TSM has a steep learning curve, but there are many videos on Youtube that will allow you to learn how to use it well.

Bank Toon

You will want to have a Bank Toon.  That is a character that is dedicated to posting auctions, getting mail from your other toons, and storing your valuables that you plan on selling.  Many bank toons are level one, but mine -- I have three -- are all above level 20, and on occasion I take them out questing or running a dungeon.  Besides posting auctions, your bank toon is responsible for receiving mail from your other toons, so that when their bags fill up with junk you can mail that junk to your bank toon to process.

Choose your name so that it will not be offensive to any of your customers.  You will be creating a Brand on your server -- don't mess it up.

You will probably want to create a guild so that you will have a guild bank in addition to your bank and bags to store your goods -- each tab will hold 96 items and the first three are cheaper than buying bags to hold the same number of items.  My bank toon guilds have six or seven tabs, because having the space is worth it to me, even though I paid a lot more for those tabs than I would have getting more bags.  Your bank toon is limited to 11 bags and if you want more storage, you'll have to pay for it.  Don't do this at the beginning, but keep it in mind when you find yourself needing more storage.

Legacy Items versus Current Expansion Items

As of this writing, the Mists of Pandaria (MoP) is the current expansion.  Most of the neat things that people want will come from killing MoP mobs, MoP herbs, MoP ore, and MoP crafts.  Legacy items can bring a high profit per item, but you can easily flood the market -- you will need to sell your items slowly if you want to make the most gold from them.  For example, I bought a lot (over 15000) of Volatile Earth for less than 1g each at the end of Cataclysm.  Currently I sell 50-100 a week for 10g - 20g each.  But it took a while to make my investment back, and I may be selling my stock of Volatile Earth for three or more years.  If I dropped the price down to 2g each, I would make fewer gold per week than at the higher price.  Current Expansion items will sell more quickly so you can make a lot of gold with a small profit margin with high volume.  Along those lines the more expensive an item is, the more slowly it will sell (all things being equal) so you have more trade offs.

Markets

A market is an item or group of items that you will think of as a single unit.  If I'm thinking of all glyphs as a single market, and my competitors have broken up that market into several markets each of which contains items that are more similar to each other than all the items in my one large market, then my competitors will out compete me.  On the other hand, there is a limit to how much stuff you can keep track of, and treating every single item as its own market will mean that you won't be able to compete on very many items.  There are trade-offs in how detailed you want to make your markets.  There will be trade-offs in almost every decision you make.

In some markets you will need to camp the AH.  That means posting very frequently, and possibly getting involved in AH PvP.  The glyph market requires camping mostly because glyph buyers will only buy one (of each type of) glyph so if you're the second lowest price, you probably won't make any sales.  In other markets, like selling the current expansion ore (Ghost Iron Ore at the moment), you can post and forget it -- either your price is low enough and some crafter will buy it, or it's not low enough, but most buyers aren't interested in just one or two items and many will buy based on price.  I will often go to the AH with the intention of buying all herbs that cost less than 25g/stack (for instance) and go through the auctions of five to ten posters before I've finished buying.  So, when posting these high volume items, pick a price where you are confident that someone will buy before the auction period expires, not undercutting the lowest price.  I will often post vegetables in stacks of 5 at 10g each even though there are 15 items for 3g or less.  When someone wants to level their cooking, they will need 50 of the vegetables, and most will not hesitate to buy them at 10g each.  Choose a market that fits your posting style.  For example, don't try to sell glyphs if you're only going to post once a day.

Timing

See if you can find patterns in the prices of the items in your markets.  Often 5 am is a good time to buy on the AH, because lots of tired people post right before they go to sleep.  Often 7 pm to 1 am is the best time to post, because that's when lots of people decide to buy things.  Prices on many items (especially legacy items and materials needed to level a profession) go up dramatically on the weekends.  The weekenders have different spending habits than the seven day a week types.  Of course the biggest time is the first day of a new patch (or even more crazy) of a new expansion -- fortunes are made in those days if you can predict what will happen and act accordingly -- read TUJ for some ideas but beware that if too many other people are making the same predictions, then you will not profit the way you would if you alone had the insight.

Farming versus Crafting

If you want to not think very much while making gold, farming is best.  Herbalism, Mining, Skinning, and killing lots of mobs and looting them (or capturing battle pets, or providing services like porting people around or opening lock boxes) costs next to nothing.  Even if you don't get top price at the AH, you'll still get something, and something is better than nothing.  If you want to farm, I think you can stop reading here.

Crafting is where you take some items, and change them into (hopefully) more valuable items.  To do this well, you should not be afraid of math.  You may be able to find a crafting profession where you can make gold even though you don't really know how much it's costing you to make what you're selling -- but I wouldn't count on it.

Shuffles

A shuffle is a method of taking some items and turning it into more valuable items.  If there is only one step to this, we don't call it a shuffle -- that's just crafting (and selling).  But if you start with cloth (or leather or ore) and make armor and then disenchant that armor and sell the essences (or make enchantments) then we call it a shuffle.  Usually a shuffle involves more than one crafting profession, as in the case above tailoring and enchanting.  An interesting exception is the Ironpaw Shuffle which consists of buying cheap vegetables, fish, and meat, taking it to halfhil, getting Ironpaw tokens for the goods, and then using the tokens to buy much more expensive vegetables, fish, and meat or more often the other goods that you can't farm like soy sauce, rice flour, and black pepper.

Opportunity Costs

If you farm some and craft some, you may think of selling the crafts for very little gold, since you didn't have to pay for the materials.  While you may do so if it makes you happy (remember it is a game) the proper way to think about it is how much would I have gotten from my materials if I sold them on the AH (minus the AH cut) that's what your materials cost -- figure it in to the cost of your crafted goods, cause otherwise you'd be better off not crafting at all, just selling the things you farmed.

Setting Reasonable Goals

I first set a goal of one million gold (more than one toon could carry).  And for a while trying to reach that goal made the game less fun for me.  Currently I try to make more than 20k a week net after expenses and luxury purchases -- so when I buy a 20k piece of armor that means I need to make more gold or have saved that up from additional profits from previous weeks.  I find that this is much less stressful and more enjoyable than trying to hit a particular point.

What Have You Learned?

I haven't taught you a single strategy to make gold on your realm, but hopefully I've given you some of the concepts necessary for you to choose one or more strategies that will be fun for you and help you with your in-game financial goals.  Thanks for reading, and feel free to let me know if there are other important concepts that I've left out of this beginners guide.