Tailoring Niche Market

   Lately i had people asking me if they can make gold from tailoring ? Well the answer is very obvious, as i have explained before you can make a pretty good profit by selling the bags and spell threads, but today we are going to focus on a pretty nifty niche that has been profitable from Vanilla up until now and it will continue to be profitable.

   This little niche market that Tailors can dabble in is the Tuxedo Set. The said set is composed out of three parts, the Tuxedo Pants, Tuxedo Jacket and Tuxedo Shirt . Now knowing that these are the three parts of the set, you need to know where to obtain the patterns that will teach you how to make them.

   Your best chance would be to check the Auction House for the pattern as many times there are patterns posted for as low as 10g, but if you want to skip paying that you can purchase it straight from Millie Gregorian if you are Horde, or Outfitter Eric if you happen to play Alliance. A word of advice though, while you are at these vendors check the price of the patterns on the AH, and if there are none up there post a few for 250g for each pattern and you will be simply baffled when they actually sell.

   Ok so you have bought the patterns, and even bought some extra ones and put them up for sale now what? Well now we get down to making the actual pieces of the set and selling them on the Auction House. The good thing about this set is that the materials for crafting it is Mageweave Cloth so it is not expensive to obtain it, and at the same time you are selling an item that every Auctioneer that wants to leave a serious appearance must simply own a set, and that is where you come into play.

   The best thing about the Tuxedo set is that it is a good item to sell, and there is usually low to none competition on the market. One thing that you shouldn't do is to explode the supply and post 10 of each, it would be a much better alternative to make 2 of each ( Pants, Jacket and Shirt ) and post them at a higher price ( i sold them for 400g each piece ). And one thing that is good about this is that whenever someone buys a single piece, he will buy the other two as well, and that only means that you have made 1200g by investing as low as 10g for that sale.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Professions In Mists Of Pandaria

   So i still don't have access to the Beta and can't confirm any of this for certain, but i got to a pretty amazing post up on MMO Champion that should prove to be an awesome repository of information for all of us that like the profession aspect of the game, and in return like to make money off it.

   The post can be found on MMO Champion named BETA Mists Of Pandaria, and i am only going to point to a few of the things that i found interesting.

   

    In MoP we seem to have more ways of turning enchanting materials into different materials, being able to change from dust to essence to shards!

Spirit Dust
Lesser Mysterious Essence, which is creatable from 5 dust (Lesser Mysterious Essence)
Greater Mysterious Essence, which is creatable from 2 lesser essences (Greater Mysterious Essence)
Small Ethereal Shard
Ethereal Shard which is creatable in two different ways, from 2 small shards (Create Ethereal Shard) or from 3 greater essences (Ethereal Shard).
Sha Crystal, which is greatable from 3 large shards (Sha Crystal).

   So you can go Dust -> Lesser Essence -> Greater Essence -> Uncommon Shard -> Rare Shard

   So in retrospective what this means is that in MoP we will be able to turn our dust into crystals, or simply put that would be like if you could make Maelstrom Crystals from Hypnotic Dust. So all in all we are going to have quite the demand for enchanting materials, and some awesome profits that will be there to be made by doing the MoP version of the Shuffle.

   So again check out the post on MMO-Champion and if you do find some other source for information share  it as a comment here.

Scribes Get Ready For MoP

   Today we are going to talk about how you should get ready for MoP if you happen to have a character with Inscription leveled up. Unlike the previous post that covered investing in MFC's  in this post we are going to take a look at how to save yourself thousands of gold, and in return actually make a crap load of gold. 

   Yup i am talking about glyphs again, but this time with a bit of a twist. Coming MoP glyphs are going to see a bit of a overhaul and we seeing as how we will see a sharp increase in the creation of new Pandas that only means that we are going to see a sharp increase in the need for glyphs for all classes and especially for Monks.

   Now the thing with this is rather tricky and if you are unprepared it can turn around and bite you in the ass. Let me explain why exactly so you know what i mean. As it is now making a glyph is more or less an easy task with the existence of the ink traders, so all you have to do is mill some herbs and trade the last tier inks to the ones you need to craft your glyph. Now coming MoP we are going to have the same options but the only difference would be the fact that the price of the new herbs is going to be more or less in the 200-300g per stack price range which is helluva lot more then the 15-40g per stack we can get the stacks at today. 

   So knowing this it is only logical what our step should be, open up your guild bank and stock up on inks that are of a lesser tier now. So get your inks to your ink trader and get stocked up on all the inks that you need to craft your glyphs, and if you have been in the glyph market for a while you will know that the stock you will need is going to be rather large because when you are crafting glyphs those inks are simply melting.

   Two inks that you should keep an eye on would be the Moonglow Ink and the Ink Of The Sea which are the needed inks for your Minor Inscription Research and the Northrend Inscription Research. Now even if you have done all your researches, don't forget you will still need to do them as you will not know the glyphs for the Monk. So those two inks you can even sell on the AH for all the people that will not get their stocks up now.

   Third and last thing you want to get stocked up on would be the Books of Glyph Mastery, and the reason for it is like you might guess the new glyphs that will be available from them. So if you find some of them on the AH for an acceptable price buy them out for yourself, or for later resale with a hefty profit margin. 

   As i have still to get my Beta invite i can only give you preparation tips, but as soon as that Beta invite comes through i will shell out some more solid info, and tell you exactly what to expect from the profession and what to focus on.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

A Dying Art Called Bidding

   Today we are going to be looking at one of the great ways to obtain items at awesomely low prices, and as you might guess from the title i am talking about bidding on the auction house. 

   The reason why i called this a dying art is because it is kind of a thing that stuck around from Vanilla and to a degree from TBC where gold was much more valuable, what i mean by this is that back then everyone was trying to get more gold ( higher buyout price ) but were happy to get a normal price for it as well even if it meant waiting a bit for it ( normal bid price ).

    As you might see on the image above, the price that we see in green is the bid price and the one in red is the buyout price. The difference between those two is about 50% and that is where this gets to be a sweet deal. When i saw this pricing it had the same pricing structure as a normal auction has where the bid price is normal and the buyout price is above the normal price range ( as you can see at 142% price ), but unlike this guy you will find countless others that don't know what the bid system is for, and those are the people that will make you thousands of gold in easy profits. 

   As i said there are many people out there that don't realize how the bid system is supposed to work so you will see auctions with a buyout price at 5000g, and then the most ridiculous 100g bid price next to it. It is auctions like this one that will put a smile on your face every time you see them. But like all good things there has to be a drawback at using this strategy and in this case it is the wait time that for some reason the majority of the people choose to go with the 48h post time.

    Now even though 48h is a long time you don't have to wait for it because you can simple browse the auctions by time left. This is actually the core of the strategy because all you need to do is go to the AH and check for prices that are posted with a low bid and a short time remaining on them and simply put your bid down. The best thing you could do is to bid on multiple items due to the fact that there will be other people doing this same thing as well and you might get overbid on some auctions, that is why it is best to look at this as a fishing net, the bigger the area is that you threw the net in ( the more items you bid on ) the higher the chances are that you will actually win.

   One of the best deals that you can find with the bidding system is in the Transmogrification market where many of the people do the mistake of posting their high value items for 10g bid prices and 8k buyout prices. And when you buy an item for 10g and then flip it for 5k, that is when you feel awesome.

   One last thing, after you are finished reading this and you might think "Meh i already knew this" do yourself a favor and check your auction house and i am sure that you will find deals that are staggering.  

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Profession Resale List

   A while back i made a post about the profit that could be made by reselling medium tier leather and got some great feedback from it as people did it and made some nice amounts of gold with it. So i invested a bit more time into this and made a list of all the items that are worth flipping besides leather. And the main reason as to why this is such a great market to get into is because you will cater to the needs of the powerleveling guys that simply don't want to spend time to farm for their materials, but they would rather take it to the Auction House and get all their materials there and give you all their gold. To make it even easier i broke it down into profession categories.

Enchanting

   If you have leveled enchanting you know that getting all the mats can be a bitch ( female dog ), but that only means that if you had it rough getting the materials it's a good chance that everyone else is having the same issue. This is why enchanting offers a good market for resales. The items you want to focus on here are:

   Dream Dust x 230

   Vision Dust x 155

   Arcane Dust x 330

   The numbers next to the dust name represent the amount of dusts a single enchanter would need to get past the level threshold of enchanting, so if you have 2 or 3 people at a time leveling that given profession you simply multiply that number by that and you see that the need for those items is huge.

The Ore Market

   I was originally going to break this down in two categories Blacksmith/Engineering but that would be pointless as both of these professions use the same materials. Given this it only means that the need for those shared goods is going to be very high.

Mithril Bar x 161 + 320

Thorium Bar x 189 + 420

Cobalt Bar x 275 + 320

   As you can see the numbers for those bars are very high, and that only means that the need is high while the supply is rather limited. The best time to get into this market would be if you see that the price is not huge for those bars or ores (if you have a miner that can smelt them into bars)

The Cloth Market

   This is a rather volatile market as it's prices are always in a flux. What i mean by this is that while sometimes the price for a stack of X-Cloth is going to be 100g per stack, next thing you know someone came if and posted 20 stacks at 20g and then another 5 guys took that 20g as the max price and they bring it down even more to abysmal levels like 5g. But the good thing is that if you target the low tier of cloth you can actually run a pretty good monopoly on them with a little bit of effort. There are two cloth tiers that i focus on, Wool and Silk.

Wool Cloth 180 + 135

Silk Cloth 150 + 780 

   The two numbers represent the need for those cloths for tailoring and first aid. Just to get into it a bit deeper, the Wool cloth has been a great seller as the level where it drops is low, and as everyone that levels nowadays has heirlooms they shoot past the levels where the wool drops, so their only way to obtain these cloths are either to go back and farm the cloth, or hit the auction house. The Silk cloth on the other hand is usually in a OK supply, and the demand for it is rather high as you can see. So if you ever see that the auction house is low on supply and the price is normal, or even better low, then buy them out and reset the price.

   So this should be about the resale list that should cover the lower tier profession material niche. I didn't make a list about the herbs as they are used for alchemy/inscription because the need for a given herb is too low and none of the herbs stands out from the crowd. Now this shouldn't be mistaken as a market that is not profitable, simply i haven't gotten into this market because i haven't done the whole research to see what is selling the best and fastest, but if you think you might get some killer sales in this market by all means get into it and make your profits.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

General Posting Mistakes

   Today we are going to take a look at something that should be a common sense, but for some reason the majority of the people simply don't follow it. 

   The thing i am talking about is the proper pricing of the items or goods you put up on the Auction House, bear with me as i will try and explain what i mean.

   Let's say for instance you are selling an item A which you can make for a price of 10g. That item sells, and you think "Awesome i will sell some more at that price" WRONG. If you are selling something and you sell it for 10g, next post get it up at 15g and if it sells at that price try 20g etc. So you get the idea, you need to be increasing that price to get it as high as possible before you determine the "normal" price.

   The thing what most people do is, they craft that item A and sell it for 10g and from there on they will never up the price, and with that they lose on every single sale they make, sure they get some profit but they are loosing on the good profit purely because they didn't want to extend their price into the proper price range.

   Another thing you might want to know is that if you start getting mails like " you won't sell your stock because it is too high priced " from people you don't know, then you are probably doing something right, because you WILL be selling at those prices while the competition will think it is not worth it to get in on that market because no one is buying since your stock is up there for that long and at that price, not knowing that you refresh your stock after each sale. Just remember Haters gonna hate, potatoes gonna potate.

   This might sound like a insignificant information because i was using prices as 10 or 20g but in reality it's usually crafted items that are ranging in the 1k-20k mark, so it's not the same if you are selling an item for 500g that you could be selling for 1500g or better yet selling a craftable end game item and selling it for 5k if you can get 10k for it. So all in all expand your prices if you haven't already, and you are sure to get some serious profits racking in.

   I will leave this post as short as it is, but i will use it in future reference as well as other posts i will make in the Don't Do It category that will be for things that you shouldn't do, or avoid doing.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

MoP Preparation Part 2

   Here we are back with another post that should give you an idea of what to start buying now, even though MoP is months away from being released. In the previous look at this subject we covered a more space efficient option of stocking up which was the Mysterious Cards, but today we are going to be looking at the more high investment/high payout market.

   This picture might be a bit corny looking, but then again it will do us justice as it basically hits the market we want dead on. So that market is the pets market, or to be more precise the rare pets market.

   As we all know until now with the shipping of Mists Of Pandaria we are going to get Pandokemon ( Panda Pokemon ) which will let  you take your non-combat pets and duel them against each other. Even though this might sound like a nonsense to some of you out there, it will attract a very high amount of players to it ( mainly kids ) and with it in the first month of MoP it will explode the demand for pets. If you want to check out which pets can be found where, you can find all the info you need at Warcraft Pets and i will separate a few that i think can be "farmed" of a sort from the Auction House.

   The best way you can start to obtain some of those pets is to get them from the Icecrown Champion's Seal vendor. As the name indicates, the currency for those pets is not gold but rather daily tokens called Champion's Seal  and that right there kind of limits your ability to buy a stock of these and then sell them as you see fit.  

    But it's not all that grim as there is a way that you can obtain these at a reasonable price, and then when MoP ships you can have a high profit margin. This way of procurement i am talking about is the trade channel. The way it actually works is simple, you go on trade and ask if anyone has any leftover tokens from playing back in WOTLK that would like to make some gold. If you don't get many hits like that, try to find yourself some "farmers" where you tell them a price you are willing to pay and they will go out and do their dailies and when they buy the pets they sell them to you, and then you sell them back to someone else for a much higher profit margin. This second way is a much more stable way of obtaining the pets as i have 4 people doing their dailies and buying me the pets. For a last bit of info, if you are interested what are the names of the pets, just check out the vendor sales list and you can see it. Or if you want some more ideas you might want to check out the Pets Category i have here on the blog

   That was about the pets, and now before heading out i would like to point out another market that is going to be profitable more or less on release week. And this profitability will come from the people that will level their professions. To be more specific the prices for the NEW ores and herbs will be sky high on the first week while the prices for the current ores/herbs will be all time low, so buying out the current ones and reposting them at a reasonable price will get you a nice quick profit as no one will bother farming the current materials just so they can get those initial 10-20 skill points off in their new MoP profession. As the beta hasn't started yet i can't say for sure how many of what will be needed until the current materials are redundant, but as soon as we get some info about it, i will make a post detailing this topic and have a number of materials you will need to level a single profession with the current materials.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Preparing For Mists Of Pandaria

   As the title says, this post is going to be a bit of a real early take at the "Get ready for the expansion" surge we are going to see when the Beta gets announced, and people start thinking about offloading their stocks. In this post i am going to try and give you an idea of what to expect, and better yet how to profit from it when people get to offloading.

   First thing we need to know is very simple, the bare basics are that you want to buy your items when their buying price is low and their selling price is high. This is best seen when a new expansion is about to come out, and everyone that has a stock of anything of worth start unloading it for any price they can get. This is THE best period to buy, purely for the fact that you will be able to sell those items back at those people when they level their alt monks for five time the price they sold it for.

   A while back there was a post that covered the inflation or deflation that will happen in WoW in this expansion, and if you read that you got the idea that no matter what you do, you are going to have to make a choice to either invest and bid on the inflation or sell and bid on the deflation. 

   

   Instead of taking a risk with either buying or selling, you might want to do the equivalent of buying gold in real life, and that in WoW would be to get stocked up on Mysterious Fortune Cards.

   The reason why i am comparing these cards with raw gold is the fact that they will NEVER go out of fashion, as they are a gambling item that is always in demand. Another thing that is boding really well for them is the fact that it will be harder to obtain new cards because the herb market will shift and you will see a big lack of herbs to make the cards. On top of that comes the fact that you can stack these cards in stacks of 200 which allows you to make thousands of cards and still have them only take up a tiny bit of space in your bank.

   As there is still no info about MoP i can't say for sure, but i am quite positive that there will be a newer version of the cards, but that won't downgrade the worth of the current ones.

    I will continue making more posts about which items it would be profitable to get a stock up on and which items would be a good idea to get rid of, and you might want to read up more in the following post about stocking up for MoP.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Profiting From Enchanting

   In this post we are going to go over on how to make gold from enchanting. This time around though i will not go about with how to make gold from selling some TBC, Vanilla or WOTLK pattern that will be making you gold but rather focus on the current top tier enchants.

   Since we are going to be looking at the top tier enchants, you should know that there will be a general need for four resources Hypnotic Dust, Heavenly Shards, Greater Celestial Essences and Maelstrom Crystals. Now this is all general knowledge, but still people that have enchanting are hesitant to get into the business with the excuse that they can't sell anything. Well if you are one of those people i am here to tell you that you have been wrong all this time, and i will try and help you get a better idea as to how obtain the materials in order to cut some expenses and in return increase your profits.

   First thing first before we start off, you need to go and get all the patterns from the vendor that you can buy with Heavenly Shards and Maelstroms. Now that you have armed yourself with the basic tools you are standing on the same game field as your competition. But now you need to do a few more investments into improving your arsenal so you are one step above the average casual player, and this means that you will buy the formulas for the bracer enchants. There are three of these enchants and they are the Agility, Strength and Intellect , and there are two ways to obtain these, either kill things and hope you get it ( slim chance ) or buy them off the Auction House ( better choice ).

Hypnotic Dust

   Ok now you have the patterns, next you need to get the materials. Now the best way to get the Hypnotic Dust as well as the Greater Celestial Essences is the Ore Shuffle, and you can even get some Heavenly Shards if you decide to DE the blue Nightstone Chokers. 

Heavenly Shard

   Though the best source to get your Heavenly Shards would be to DEing these next items:

If you have a Jewelcrafter Vicious Amberjewel Bands and Vicious Sapphire Ring depending on the prices of the volatiles on the auction house. 

   

   In case you don't have a Jewelcrafter on your disposal, but you have a Blacksmith then it would come down to getting your Shards from DEing Stormforged Shoulders.

  

    If you don't have neither a Jewelcrafter or a Blacksmith but a Scribe you can get your Heavenly Shards from DEing Etched Horn.

   Now if you happen to be one of those people that has neither of those professions, well then you should be leveling one of those professions, and in the meanwhile you will be getting your Heavenly Shards from the Auction House.

Maelstrom Crystal

   Now that we have the Heavenly Shards covered it only leaves the Maelstrom Crystals. Getting those requires that you DE actual epic items, and the only way in game that is actually profitable is the Firelands vendor that sells the Sleek Flamewrath Cloaks. Now this item is worth 250g off the bat, but if you are exalted with the faction, and you are a part of a level 24 guild with all the passive price decreases your overall price with come down as low as 148g per item, but if you take into account that you will be getting extra procs on extra shards due to your guild perk, then the end price is even lower . This price is actually even lower then the price of the Maelstroms on certain servers where their price goes as high as 250-300g, so it might be a good strategy to simply buy, DE and then sell the items on the Auction House for clean profit.

   So now you are at the point where you have all the patterns, and a way to obtain all the materials so all you need is the items to put up on the Auction House. The best way to have all your bases covered is to craft two of each enchants on a vellum, and then put them up on the auction house. As for pricing, you should use a fairly easy setup where the lowest price would be the combined worth of all the mats, while the maximum price would be a 300% profit. This would leave you always in the positive while keeping your profits as high as possible.

   You will find it that the bracer enchants, as well as the weapon enchants are the ones that move the fastest and yield the most profit so if you want some quick profit keep a closer eye on those.

   Now there it is, the whole deal with the enchanting, and no matter how much you want to divide or complicate this is everything there is to the end game enchanting market. Like I said setting up TSM should be fairly simple and with the mass posting option that TSM  offers as well it should be a cake walk to post and check for undercuts on your enchants.

   One last thing before you leave. As a Enchanter you will have the ability to craft a companion, the Enchanted Lantern / Magic Lamp depending on your faction which is still a good selling companion and it shouldn't be simply put off the sales list.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

New In WoW ( 40 - 60 )

   Here we are back with another installment of The Starter Kit series where i will cover the how's on how to make your gold while leveling your first character. In today's post i will cover the 40 - 60 level range, as well as the ways that will be most profitable to help you get that gold you need for training, buying your mount and anything else you might want, so lets get started. 

   First thing you want to remember is that the 40-60 leveling bracket has a one very big advantage, and that is the fact that all the green items that drop in this bracket are usually a very high priced items on the Transmogrification market. So if you know that it is pretty much logical that you are doing the same as the image here, taking your trash ( greens ) putting it in a melting pot ( the auction house ) and then in time gold comes out. But for the sake of this post i won't go into details on which items to sell and at what price as that is not relevant here, if you want more info about that check the link to the Transmogrification section.

   So next good thing about being in this leveling bracket is the profession wise aspect of the game. One thing though, if you have chosen a crafting profession over a gathering profession as your first profession it might be a rather expensive venture as the raw materials for the low tiers are highly priced while the finished goods have almost no demand for them. But even as so i would still choose to level a crafting profession as it will always make you more gold in the long run.

   As i chose to go with Leatherworking as a profession i was more focused on the leather market, and with that in mind i decided to make some gold from that market as i would need some gold to buy the leathers i would require to get my profession leveled up. That is when i decided to do the Leather Flipping tactic, and it worked out just great. Made some gold and leveled my leatherworking in the process. Now a word of advice, if you are like me and have picked up a crafting profession and are leveling it, don't do the most common mistake and vendor the items you craft, but rather find a enchanter and tip him to DE it for you so you can sell the enchanting materials as they have some good prices usually.

   Another great thing about being in this bracket is that you can take the full advantage of many of the tips and tricks i have covered here on the blog. For instance as soon as i had the level requirement i hit up Tyr's Hand for some Crusader Farming. I got lucky and snagged 2 Crusader Formulas in less then 30 minutes, and then managed to sell them both at 2k each, not bad for a 30 minute run.

   Another also great thing that you will have full access to would be the Road Less Traveled which would give you access to all the vendors and pickup pets in Kalimdor, which in return would make you some good profits.

    One last strategy that i have covered on the blog and i used in my leveling experience with this characters was the Transmogrification Gold Run as i did my leveling in the Blasted Lands. Now granted this is again part of the Transmogrification market, it is still a great income source and would be foolish to not take advantage of it.

   As you can see on the image above, i managed to get 15606g while i was leveling my character, and on top of that i leveled my leatherworking to the 300+ skill, paid for the mounts and flying training not a bad result i would say.  But if you choose to do the same thing as i did ,but decide you don't want to level a crafting profession you will end up with a figure that's a few thousand gold higher.

   So a fast recap of the things i did in the 40-60 bracket that were profitable:

• Saved all the green items, and put them up on the Auction House for the Transmogrification market
• Leveled leatherworking and  took advantage of the Leather Flipping market
• Did some Crusader formula farming
• Sold some pets from all the vendors that i had access to
• Did the Transmogrification Gold Run and got a bunch of items to sell on the Auction House

   Well that is what i did in my 40-60 level bracket, for the next installment i will cover the Outland experience and ways to make gold from it.

   So, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.