Make Gold on World of Warcraft (WoW) - the Basics of Making Gold

It's no secret that gold is a necessary and important part of WoW - but it seems a lot of players just don't know where to start with making gold. This is a bare bones basic guide on how to make gold in WoW. It will point you in the right direction to make gold, and you can flesh out your gold making abilities through trial and error or by reading more advanced articles on how to make gold in WoW.

The first thing you must accept in order to make gold on WoW is that it WILL require your time and effort. Some methods require less time than others, but the only way you will ever make gold on WoW is if you set it as a priority. This means you will need to take time out of your other WoW activities in order to make gold.

The second thing you should understand is that, in general, your ability to make gold will scale with your level. A level 80 WoW toon will have many more opportunities to make gold than a level 20, 30, or even 70 toon. There is one exception to this rule which will be covered later.

There are three basic ways to make gold on World of Warcraft and they are as follows:

1. Questing/Dailies to make gold

This is the slowest way to make gold in WoW. It is also the easiest way, which is why it is what most people do when they need to make gold. If you are power leveling, this will probably be your primary gold making activity as it does not require you to take time away from getting experience in order to make gold. Once you hit max level, I strongly advise you to dump this method to make gold and move on to one of the other two methods.

2. Use Professions to make gold

People often ask about the best profession to make gold on WoW and for toons who are still leveling. It is undoubtedly mining, followed by herbalism, with skinning in third place. The reason being that all three professions (known as "gathering" professions) obtain materials that other professions need, which means you can make a lot of gold selling them.

Once you reach your maximum skill level, you may decide to change professions. Keep in mind that gathering professions will ALWAYS be your number one gold making professions, so a switch in profession will mean a reduction in your ability to make gold. I will cover how to make gold with crafting professions in future articles.

You also have the option to have 3 secondary professions in WoW - fishing, cooking, and first aid. You can definitely make gold with fishing and cooking at their max levels. You will not make gold (or not much gold) with first aid, although it can save you gold by being able to craft rather than purchase bandages if you aren't a healing class.

3. "Play" the Auction House to make gold

This is a way to make gold that any level WoW toon can do - assuming you have some gold to start. First of all, you must install the add-on, Auctioneer Advanced. It is essential for any WoW toon that wants to make gold in the AH. If you have problems with add-ons, disable it when you are doing other activities and enable it when you are at the AH (this will require you to log off and on). You should run an auction scan daily to keep your saved pricing data current. The fastest way to do this is to type "/aadv getall" (without the quotation marks) in the chat window. This will give you a roughly 2 minute scan of all AH items.

You can start to make gold by buying low and selling high. It is best to start with items you are familiar with because some dishonest WoW AH sellers will artificially inflate a price for a few days then drop it down to try and trap new buy low/sell high toons into a bad purchase. You will recognize these bad deals the more familiar you become with the AH.

One method that is very simple to make gold in the AH is to buy full stacks of items and then make smaller stacks and re-list with a slightly higher price. For example, you could buy a full stack of cobalt bars for 20 gold (1 gold each bar) and re-list them in stacks of 5 for 1.25 gold each (or 6.25 gold per stack), making a profit of roughly 5 gold. You can do this with fish, meat, leather, or herbs as well. This method to make gold works because some people need a small amount and are willing to pay a little more to get just what they need and no more.

There are several advanced methods to make gold in the WoW AH, which I will cover in future articles, so subscribe to my profile on Associated Content to be sure and see them as they publish and get ready to make more gold than you thought possible!