Gold Capped: Earning gold for absolute beginners
by Basil Berntsen 
Apr 21st 2011 at 3:00PM
Aaron wrote in the other day to say:
Unless you started the game with rich friends, this is something that everyone has to go through. People getting into earning gold from scratch often don't have any clue where to start, and they often have a bunch of incorrect ideas about what they need to get going.Despite having played WoW for years I'm a complete gold-making newbie and my characters are all dirt-poor because of it. I decided it was time to start playing the gold-making meta game so I've been reading through issues of your Gold Capped column, and while I've really enjoyed what I've read I'm afraid I'm still at a loss as to where to get started. Obviously I don't have a lot of upfront capital to jump-start my endeavor, either. I was wondering if you've ever written or would consider writing an article for complete, absolute beginners such as myself.
Is farming worthwhile?
First things first: Farming is an awesome way to make money. I know, about half of my regular readers just stopped reading and are in the process of drafting comments about how I've always told people not to bother with it -- but let me explain. Farming is simple, risk-free income. You spend time farming, and you get valuables that you can sell or use. Cataclysm has been (so far) the best expansion for farmers yet.
There are two keys I want you to bear in mind, though:
- If you're farming as a source for your other profession, don't calculate your costs as if the farmed goods were free. They cost what you could have sold them for.
- Assuming you set up your crafting professions properly, there should come a time when you'll make more money per hour off the profit margins of crafting items made from bought mats. This crossover point is where everything else I've written in this column will start to make more sense.
Assuming you have another profession and you're going to use the mats you farm to make items that you can sell, pick the source gathering profession. Mining feeds blacksmithing, engineering, and jewelcrafting. Herbalism feeds inscription and alchemy.
Also, be aware that the Cataclysm level farmers can be hard competitors, and you might find a better return on your time farming Outland or Northrend. Outland herbs, in particular, are quite valuable. You'll almost never have competition for the nodes, and the ink they mill into is used for some 30% of the glyphs in the game. Any time a stack of Outland herbs is cheaper than the Cataclysm herbs needed to make an equivalent amount of Blackfallow Ink to trade in for Ethereal Ink, glyph makers will buy the Outland herbs instead.
Scaling your production
The point of all the above farming is to get enough money that you can afford to set up some profitable auction house-only business, which scales better. Once you've gotten to the point that you can buy raw materials, process them, craft profitable goods, and reinvest that profit into buying more raw materials, your gold per hour should start increasing to much higher levels than you can get when you limit yourself to items you've farmed yourself. Part of this process may involve changing or finishing leveling professions.
Start off with what you have, though. I've written guides to how to profit with every single crafting profession in the game in Cataclysm, and each of those guides will list the major markets you will see most profit being generated in. Contrary to popular belief, most servers don't have every single market 100% satisfied already. The most popular markets will likely be saturated with competition, but if you watch from Tuesday to Tuesday, you'll likely find times every single week when you'd be able to sell goods profitably.
There are also probably a bunch of niche markets that you can make good money in as the only seller. For a period of about 6 months in Wrath of the Lich King, I was the only person prospecting Outland ore and selling the results to leveling jewelcrafters. I made the most weekly profits when I set my margins to about 30%, and I had no serious competition. Sure, I got undercut once in a while, but I never had enough competition that I needed to lower my profits. Nothing lasts forever, though, and eventually someone came in and was willing to work harder and longer for the same money, so I found another more profitable way to spend my crafting time.
Your toolbox
I can't overstate the importance of setting up a good UI. Farming has a completely different toolset I don't pretend to know (more than to direct you to Gatherer), but once you get to the point that you want to start selling goods crafted using purchased mats, you'll need more than the base UI. I'd strongly recommend at least picking up Auctionator.
Other ways to get started
If you are looking for "easy" money, there are a few other things you can do to aside from gathering that can get you a bit of income.
- Create an alt on your other faction, and move goods back and forth (with a friend), especially faction-specific pets.
- See if any recipes you can find on vendors will sell on the AH. I used to sell recipes I found in Shattrath quite regularly.
- See if the price for Dust of Disappearance on the AH is higher than the vendor, and if so, sell it there.
- Watch the price for a commodity for a little while, and see if you can snag some below market value to resell at market value. I hear this works very well for Northrend enchanting mats.
- If you can transform one type of good to another type (for example, lesser to greater Celestial Essences), see if you can make a profit by buying one, changing it, and selling the other.
Maximize your profits with more advice from Gold Capped as well as the author's Call to Auction podcast. Do you have questions about selling, reselling and building your financial empire on the auction house? Basil is taking your questions at basil@wowinsider.com.
Filed under: Gold Capped
Reader Comments (Page 4 of 4)
Lipstick Apr 22nd 2011 5:07PM
I disagree about skinning. I think because of the advent of mining and herbing giving XP bonus to them, and the fact you can track both types at once now has made it so that quite a few people take both of these while leveling to make money, as a result I find that I make quite a lot of money on skinning, when I took skinning for profit purposes alone. I also think that leather working takes an ungodly amount of mats of certain leathers so that even if you are skinning on your own you will still need to buy more.
On the server that I play on, I herb and skin on my druid. Often times I wind up with full bags from both, but where as sometimes my herbs come back to me unsold (as other people undercut me) my leather always sells in it's entirety.
I think people under rate how valuable skinning truly can be. Because the other are always seen as the money maker gathering professions next to enchanting; skinning is often under appreciated.
muqatil May 8th 2011 2:30PM
My method for "AH farming" is twofold. I do a search with no criteria, sorted by "Time left" and check all of the auctions that are short or medium. I don't really look at the items being sold at all, but only check the right side of the pane for a large discrepancy between the bid price and the buyout price, or for items that do not have a buyout. When I find such an item, I check if the price is good and if so, I bid on it. These are the bids that I have a very high chance of winning, so I will include gear, drops, trade goods etc on this scan. Secondly, select the "trade goods" option, and re-sort the search from current bid. This shows me all of the lowest bid trade goods, and I go through most of the items up to 75s-1g depending on how much time I feel like spending. Since I am going to be out bid most of the time on this scan, I don't bother searching everything, just the commodities that I know will be easy to flip. For this search, I am not looking too much at the price (I know for several pages it will be very low) and instead am looking for items that I know are more valuable. Basically, I am looking for people who don't know what they are doing on the AH- those people who will sell a stack of wool for 20s when it is worth close to 20g. Often you can find valuable enchanter mats for a few silver. My rule of thumb is to place bids if the items are 20% of their sell price or less. You can get away with a closer margin, but that is the level I have found it worthwhile. I only include "trade goods" on this scan, because most of the time I am going to get outbid, especially with items that are individually valuable. However, you would be amazed at how often I can get a stack of thorium for less than a gold. Other rules of thumb I have found is that items that are worth more than 1000g are often on an almost constant price slide, so you need to be more cautious on speculative purchases. Items like rare crafting plans can be worth a lot of gold, but they require a very specific buyer and therefore tend to be much harder to get rid of. I typically only buy glyphs and cut gems if they are extremely cheap (1-2s range) because they take longer to sell.