Gold Making By Barking

   As i have stated in the past, there are many ways of making gold in WoW and as long as they are making you profit there is no better or worse way of doing it. Well actually to be honest i don't think that's all that true. In my experience there are two ways of making gold, first one by listing on the AH which is more of a passive list and forget style, and a more hands on approach where you take your goods to the trade channel. 

   Like i have said in the past about advertising it is a very good way of making those extra sales, and even getting a better price for your item. Well in this post i will try a cover a bit on how to go about with advertising and more importantly, how to make advertising work in WoW.

   One of the most important thing when advertising is making the other guy think that whatever it is that you are selling is so awesome, that if he doesn't have it his life would feel incomplete. Well maybe not to that extent, but you get the idea. In WoW the way this relates is quite simple, you need to convince the PvEer that your flasks, food, gems and enchants are somehow better then the other ones out there, and make the PvPers think that if they buy from you, somehow they will get better at what they are doing. So what we came to is that we need to have a way of Advertising that Works.

   So in order to get to this way of thinking we need to follow a few simple rules. First one of those rules is that you always must make sure that the item you are promoting is clearly stated, and that is done by linking your item or profession in the macro you are barking. And the second one is to make your macros interesting for the reader/buyer, while at the same time you can even offer a bonus of a sort. Let me elaborate a bit on this, and you will see where is the logic behind the advertising. 

   When trying to sell your goods, the best approach to the matter would be to go big or go home. This is the basic logic behind the work of the world's biggest supermarket chains. How does this translate into WoW you might ask, well simple actually. If you take on this mentality then what you are doing is basically taking on an entire market, be it enchants, flasks, food or gems and doing it on a scale that even if you are working on small profit margins it still pans out great at the end. 

   Well in order to get to this level you need a bit of preparation, and some clever advertising. The preparation part is where you get your "raw materials" in check for mass production, so if you are a alchemist get stocked up on herbs, if you are a jewelcrafter get stocked up on raw gems, well no point in going over every profession because i'm sure you get the idea. Up until now is basically what everyone is doing, but this next bit is what has made me a lot of gold and i don't think anyone else is doing it, so i'm am kind of proud of it.

   This unique thing i just told you about is a macro that i use to get people to look at me as a brand opposed to looking at me as a seller, and this is how it works. Seeing as i have all the professions maxed out, as many of you have, i have the ability to get into any market i desire. So what i do is i put all my items that i want to sell up on the Auction House and then get down to barking my macro a bit. If you are asking yourself what kind of a macro it is, well here it is:

/2 Are you in the market for gems, enchants, food or anything else for that matter? Well if you are check your local AH for items sold by Vile and with every purchase you stand to win in the weekly jackpot and get 100% of everything you spent back.

(reason why the macro says buy from Vile is simple, all my characters start with Vile so you can't miss it)

   What this means is that with every sale i make i get it recorded in the log of My Sales addon, and then i can simply see who has spent the most of that week then at the end of the week i simply whisper him and tell him that he has won and give him the amount of gold that he has spent. What this does is it makes him happy, but at the same time i bark trade and inform everyone that the winner is Mr.X and that he has won X amount of gold by buying from me. Next week goes about the same, we get another winner and bark trade again to inform who the winner is and by the third week you end up noticing something very weird, you start making sales even though you have been undercut by one, two or even more people, but somehow you are still making sales. Well this is what we were aiming for, to get established as a brand not a seller. What we have managed to do is get people to look for a name of the seller next to the item because they know that they stand to win and get all their gold back.

   

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

Making The Sale Continued ...

   One of the reasons why i am making this post is because i have spent a lot of time explaining to people the usefulness of advertising, and more importantly how to link items in macros. Before i start with my ramblings, if you want to read up more on advertising, read my post on The Art Of Selling With The Help Of Advertisement 

   If you have read up on that post, which if you haven't i would strongly recommend that you do, you can see that when making an advertising macro you need to link the actual items in the macro to get better chances for a sale.

   So let's get down to the point, and actually clear it once and for all how to link items in your macros. As you can see on the image on the left, i have chosen the Shadowspirit Diamond as an item i want to use in a macro. Now the way to do it is by actually using another macro, and yes i know it sounds like one of those Yo Dawg, i heard you like macros, so we gave you a macro, to put in your macro, so you can macro jokes, but just bare with me.

   First thing you want to do is open a new macro window be it by pressing esc and choosing the macro window, or by typing in /macro. After you've done that, i would recommend that you save the following script in a macro for easy access:

/script MacroFrameText:Insert("")

   This script is what we are going to be using to get the items into our macros. How that works out though is simple, yet crafty. What you need to do is copy the script, then open the macro window and make a new macro, and this time it's going to be the actual macro that you are going to use. Now when you've opened the macro screen, in the chat type in the script /script MacroFrameText:Insert("") and then find the item you want to link and shift click it into the script so it ends up looking like the one on the image /script MacroFrameText:Insert("Shadowspirit Diamond") and press Enter. 

   If you have done everything as i have told you, you will end up with the given item linked in the macro you are making, as it is shown up on the image.

   While we are at the matter of linking macros, i want to give you the macro for linking your professions in trade as well. This macro is actually another script, but unlike the previous one, there won't be any linking here but a more direct approach. 

/script s=strjoin(" ","Vile's",select(2,GetSpellLink("Jewelcrafting")),"emporium open for work. Get all your gems here for the best possible prices.");SendChatMessage(s,"CHANNEL",nil,2)

   As you might see the script i used gave me an advertising macro that has my profession linked in it, as well as some text. In the script you can see some red letters and then the normal black ones. The black letters is the actual script while the red letters are what i want to show up before and after the profession. 

   So i am hoping that this will clear out the confusion some people have about making macros, and then linking items in their macros. If you still are unclear on something though, ask in the comments or even the new chat option that's up on the right side of the blog.

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

The art of selling with the help of advertisement

   Have you ever wondered how come you are playing on a same server with thousands of other players from whom a good percentage are rolling with the same professions like you, but for some reason while you can sell like one or two items at a time, you hear they've sold ten, or even more times more then you have, so what gives?

   Well advertisement of course, when you want to move an item, you have (we are not talking about fast moving items like gems and glyphs to an extent) the best chance of getting some serious gold using the troll's lair AKA the trade channel. Now, if it's so simple why isn't everyone doing it you might ask, and the answer on that question would be, NO.

   What i mean with that is, 90% of the people that i've seen in trade channel are doing their ads just wrong.  What i mean by that is, you don't go about on trade channel with something like:  WTS [X Item] xx gold, no, no, no you have to use a bit of a advertisement finesse, and i'll elaborate a bit on this.

   Lets say you are selling one of the BoE items you can get with Valor points. Usually you'll see people barking trade channel with something like WTS Valor Wrists 5K gold, or some other random number like that. Well the right way to approach this would be for starters, DON'T tell everyone that it's the Valor wrists but put the link of the actual item in trade, and check the price on the AH for the highest one. Usually there's a few on the AH going for twice their asking price in trade. And when you are selling them just use your imagination and make it sound nice, i'll even throw in an example.

   WTS [insert item (wrists for this instance)], because we all know that if you want to get into raiding you need your performance to outshine all the other people in the raid, so get your best in slot item here.

   Now, i am aware that in that bark there's a bunch of information that is probably not all true, but the beauty is that it doesn't have to be. Maybe those bracers are not BIS but all that matters is that you make the sale, and that the buyer is happy he got a good deal, even though he probably overpaid for it. So basically if you want to up your sales your best bet is advertisement, so it's pretty much like that.

  And as a few more examples i will post a few of the cheeky ads i have for a few items of interest that i've sold.

Certificate Of Ownership

Still curse the day when you named your dear pet Cockmonster, well despair no more there's a way to fix that. Get your Certificate Of Ownership and change your pet's name. On the AH now

Fortune Cookie

Off to a raid,need food Fortune Cookie on the AH. Get your class best food buff along side with a chance to get Fortune Card and profit 5K gold


   And one more thing that is essential, when you are making your trade barking macro, you need to make sure that you are linking the items in the macro it self so the people can actually know what they are getting, opposed to a bunch of text that they automatically discarding as spam, or troll talk.