Earning Gold

Ask on any server in trade chat what is the best way to earn gold and you will get mixed answers. Depending on the maturity of your server's trade you may get advice like: "farm this..." "buy low, sell high at the auction house," "get these professions..." What it all boils down to is time. How much time and effort are you willing to put into making gold?

The casual gamer who plays mostly on the weekends and an hour here and there during the week will not find all methods feasible much less enjoyable. A heavy gamer will be able to devote more time to making gold and will be the most profitable if said player uses the best methods. A time consuming method that involves watching your auction house market will not be a good choice for the casual gamer but possibly perfect for the heavy gamer.

A few suggestions for the casual gamer is to have characters or one character that has both mining and herbalism and the addon gatherer. These are the two most profitable gathering skills that i had found across the 5 servers I played. Skinning is nice too but nothing tops the other two and I will explain why later. At first mining will be your big gold maker as you mine what I call level 1 ores (copper ore, rough stone, malachite, etc.), please try not to use these items to feed your jewelcrafter, blacksmith or engineer. Actually if you are having gold problems you should forget about engineering for a while, it is a BIG gold seater. I have made the mistake of using my own resources and it takes so much longer to earn gold when you are feeding another profession. Mining will eventually get a little hard to level around level 2 ores (tin is a pain to find) and around level 4 ores (Mithril...shall I say more...) this is where your herbalism will pick up. Once you hit level 2  and 3 herbs (mage royal, bruiseweed, wild steelbloom, kingsblood...etc) you will start selling them for more than your ores, they are just naturally priced higher.

The reason these two gathering professions are so profitable is because the main two production professions in the game that make money are alchemists and jewelcrafters. Now after Cata this may change, they are adding archaeology, not sure what that is exactly...

Heavy gamers will be able to employ multiple methods of gold generation. One touted way, and I don't like using this method because it can lead to a virtual economic depression if enough people do it, is the famous buy low sell high slogan. Auctioneer or an auction addon is necessary for this, and detrimental for selling at auction house. For this method check double listings, items listed way below their value, etc. buy those items and resell them for a higher price. This is a slow slow process and auctioneer will need at least a weeks worth of data to act right so you will have to wait at least that long till you can employ this method.

Another method that takes less time is advertise a service like running a lower level player through a dungeon for a fee or maybe for some loot if the player is poor. If you are a level 80 tank and well geared many groups will pay you 50g a run, this only works if you are well geared and know the fights. Another less explored option is to advertise paid guild signatures, just spam trade about how you will sign any charter for a fee (5g is enough) and its fast, easy gold; leave guild once its established, rinse, repeat.

I could go into more details on this subject but then I'd be writing a book, anyways, have fun and happy hunting!