Making Gold With A Friend

   It's been a while since my last post, but in my defense it was Diablo 3 fault but non the less i am back again today with another post on how to monetize in WoW. Usually every time i cover a certain subject it revolves around the reader needing to have that particular profession, and hopefully have the patterns or materials needed to craft that item, well today we are going to take a look at how to use your friends/guildies to help you out when you don't have the aptitude for a certain profession.

   I will further explain as to how exactly does this work for the given market that is of interest for this particular post, and that is the WOTLK gems market.

   First of all why did i choose this market ? Well i did this on a different server then my own where i have millions to throw at the AH and not be afraid to loose them, so i needed something that i could control to a degree and something that i had experience with. The WOTLK gems are the bread and butter for all the twinks in the 62-80 bracket as well as the people that are leveling, and if you take into account that 80% of the people that have JC now didn't play in WOTLK or for some reason respeced and lost their WOTLK gems you end up on a market that is usually controlled by very few people or if you are lucky no one at all. 

   So now that you have chosen the market that you want to go into, it's time to get down to asking your friends or guild members to see if they have the ability to cut those gems. Don't be amazed if you find someone that has all the cuts of WOTLK and Cataclysm and claims that he can't make money from Jewelcrafting, those are the best kinds of people that you can encounter because they did the dailies not to make gold but simply because they were there.

   If you are unfamiliar with the WOTLK gem market you might want to check out one of my older posts that covered that particular theme, but if you are you will know that this market can be a bit of a volatile sort, so before you jump in head strong just scope out the competition, and the availability of the raw gems that is up on the auction house.

    So provided you have found a friend to help you out with the cutting of the gems, you checked out the prices and competition and they were in your comfort zone, the last thing you need to do is define the prices. In the previous post i explained that i i had priced my gems at 95g for the rare ones and 195g for the epic ones, but after i wrote that post i kinda changed my prices and added an extra 100 to those so the prices are 195/295g for the rare/epic cuts and they are still selling like hot cakes. So like the image here explains your server might be a lot different from the one i play on, but by following the simple supply/demand chart you can come up with a price that is just right for you.

   For this market you want to check out the prices of the red gems first, and when it comes to rare red gems you want to see if you can find someone to craft Brilliant Scarlet Ruby simply because crafting it would require one to be exalted with the Kirin Tor to obtain the pattern and that is kind of rare nowadays.

   Another thing before i go though, if you do decide to use a friend to do your cuts, or what ever it is that you want to sell, make sure that you give him some kind of a reward. In my case it was 10% of the profits that i made which was a pretty heft sum for him seeing as how he cut about 200 gems for me, and i managed to move half of them in the first 3 days. 

   I gave you this Jewelcrafting example because i have the most experience with this market but you can use your friend's help with pretty much any market that you want to jump into but don't have a character that can craft those items, and just to name a few PvP Armors ( Plate, Cloth, Leather, Mail ), Glyphs, Pots, Pets and pretty much everything you can think of that would sell, because remember WoW is a community game, and if you can't use the community to make gold then what good is the community.

   That's all for now and 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.

Flipping The Leather

   I have talked about how to make gold by flipping various items on the auction house, and today we are going to be looking at the leather market for our profit making. Before i go on into explaining i just want to note that farming leather is the most unique way of farming as it requires that you actually go and kill, loot and then skin the animal, and as such it can't be done by bots, not very effective that is.

   Well the two items we are going to focus on today are going to be the Thick Leather and the Rugged Leather. The reason why i chose these two is not a random one, but a rather strategical one and i will explain why.

   Like i said farming leather requires that you need to kill animals and skin them, but with all the perks that give you plus bonus on your XP you will find yourself with a too low skill to be able to skin animals due to low skill, and in demand for leather to be able to break the 300 skill mark. 

   Now the reason why i didn't choose any of the lower tier leathers was because leveling in the Heavy Leather bracket of leatherworking requires about 150 leathers to get above it, so the demand is smaller. At the same time leveling leatherworking in the Thick and Rugged leather level is about 400 leathers each. So the demand for these leathers is almost three times bigger then the demand for the Heavy Leather, and the lesser class leathers.

   So we have a market where the demand is rather large ( all the people who are leveling leatherworking ) but at the same time the supply is low. What this offers is a rather unique opportunity for playing a Dam Strategy. 

What the idea of this strategy is that you will act as a dam build on a river (Auction House), and the only things that can pass through it will be the things that you allow it to pass. In this example it would be the Thick and Rugged Leather, but to make it more clear, this is what i exactly did.

   Log in on your server and check the prices for these two leathers. If you find them at prices lower then you would like to be selling them buy them out ( in my case i found the market with about 70ish stacks all priced between 30-60g per stack ), then you go ahead and post them all up for a price that you want them to sell ( again in my case i relisted them back at 140g per stack ). Since you have posted your innital stacks, check the auction house from time to time to check for people undercutting you, and if you see someone undercutting you then simply buy him out. The reason why this can work for these leathers is because you won't have to deal with a lot of competition as it is a sort of a Niche market. As a more hands on information, i managed to sell around 60 stacks in about two hours while i was out leveling my character, and made about 4000 gold by simply making a monopoly on the market.

 Now this works better on a high population server, and usually in the peak hours as that is when the most players are playing and leveling their professions, and if you would like to give this a try that would be the time to do it at.

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

The Hush Hush Vendor

   To all the readers that have been reading this blog, you have noticed that on number of occasions i have stated that one of my favorite ways to make a profit is when i sell something that is either very cheap, or even better, a vendor item for a big profit. Well this thing i am about to tell you has made me tens upon tens of thousands of gold over time, and i have kept my mouth shut and by luck no one has caught up on the thing, and read on if you want to know what i mean.

   Well as the saying goes, a picture is worth 1000 words. What i meant with that profitable venture is this guy, Stone Guard Mukar. He is the Quartermaster in Wintergrasp ( If you are Alliance then it's Knight Demeron ) and as you can see on the image that i made for you nice people, he sells a few things of interest. 

   What i mean with this is that he sells the PvP metagems which the lvl 80 twinks buy for their gear. Now here is the best part, they are only 24 honor each and what that means is basically, you log on your Tauren go sit on a gnome, and buy yourself a meta gem that you can go ahead and sell it for 495g ( the price that i was selling those ), and another good thing with these gems is that the posting fee for those is 1s.

   The reason why this is a good seller is due to the fact that the people that play their twinks in PvP don't bother with checking where they can acquire the gems and go straight for the Auction House, and that is where you are waiting with your gems to offer a helping hand to their needs.

   A word of advice though, don't flood the Auction house with more then one of each because they move slow anyways so you want to make it seem like the gem that you have left on the Auction House is the last. So if the potential buyer doesn't buy it, he will have to look for a JC with WOTLK patterns, which is a hassle that many people want to avoid, and in return he buys your gem.

   So there you are, you can make some decent gold by simply keeping a stock of one each on the Auction house and laugh when you think that, that guy that was camping your corpse and you somehow managed to kill him and got that honor actually made you gold.

Making Gold With Mechano-Hog ... Kinda

   So you have seen those guys in trade channel selling Mechano-Hogs asking for 20k or 30k, so why not look into that market and see if we can make some gold off it. 

   First things first, when thinking about getting into the Mechano-Hog market there are two things you need to have decided. First thing is do you want to sell the actual mount or get into manufacturing the parts for it's creation, and the second one would be that you have at least enough gold to be able to buy the vendor items from the vendor at K3 in Stormpeaks.

   Ok lets look at the first scenario where you would be selling the actual mount. This market really depends on two things, first one is the competition and the second one is the size of your server. The reason why i mentioned the competition is because if there is a fellow engineer  making these and posting them on the auction house for a 1000g profit then it is up to you to decide if you want to get in on the action for a cut of the meager earnings, or take the diplomatic route and get to a agreement where you get him to raise his prices to a profitable level.  The second thing i mentioned is the size of the server. The mount market is more of a luxurious goods market which means it's slower to move, and it is only logical that the bigger the server is the bigger are the chances that you net in a sell, but you will be combating more competition as well, so it's a more or less a two sided blade.

   So not to drag on a  simple sale, if you have the gold and the materials make the Mechano-Hog and put it up on the auction house, and it would be a good idea to advertise in trade as this will promote your product and increase the chances for a sale.

   Now we are going to look at the second part of this market that i deem it to be much more profitable, and that is the market of providing the materials that are required for the chopper. As you can see on the image the two most important things like i said were having the gold to pay for the vendor items, and the materials. 

    When we are talking about the materials you should know that there are two items that are the main concern, the first one is the Titansteel Bars as you will need 12 of those for a single chopper, and the second one is the Arctic Fur which you need 2 for each chopper you intend on making.

   As far as the Titansteel Bars go there are two ways to obtaining them, first one is farming and the second one is transmuting the Saronite into Titanium, and then smelting it into Titansteel which will require some additional Eternals. If the Eternals are pricy you might want to check out how to exchange frozen orbs to Eternals. Now since no one really likes to farm it is a much more effective way to transmute the Saronite into Titansteel and then post it on the auciton house.

   Now i can't say for your server in particular but on my server i picked up some stacks of Saronite for 40g/stack and about 80 Frozen Orbs for 8g each, and then went and posted the Titansteel Bars for 475g and managed to sell 16 bars in 3 days. So there isn't much to say because this market is a very low with supply and even if you are selling the Mechano-hog you want to have some Titansteel Bars up on the auction house. That way you will profit from anyone that wants to have the Mechano-Hog no matter which way he chooses the direct purchase or the materials, he is buying them from you.

   As for the Arctic Fur  it's down to the Auction house, so whenever you see some up there snag it and put it in your bank for safe keeping.

   So a fast recap of the post. Mechano-Hogs are profitable, if you choose to sell them on the AH talk to your competitors and negotiate a mutual price, if you decide to sell Titansteel then go for the Saronite and transmute it from Saronite and keep an eye on cheap Arctic Furs on the AH.

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

Glyph Profiting

   Usually when i go about telling you fine folk how to make gold from a particular profession it actually is required that you have the given profession. Well today i am going to give you the breakdown of inscription and how you can rack up those profits without even having the profession.

   There are a few basics you need to understand about the glyph market, and those are that the worth of ANY glyph is basically the sum of the cost for 3 inks which in most servers is about 15-30g. Well as you can see on the image to the left it portrays the actual state of the glyph market on nearly all servers. 

   To make it more clear of what that image is, it is basically a scan of the Auction House for the phrase Glyph which automatically scans for all the glyphs. Now the top half is the cheapest ones while the ones on the bottom are the most expensive ones. Well as i just said the average price for every glyph is basically the same so why this disparity in the price tags. Well it is quite obvious, even though it is not that public and thrown out there, but glyphs have a tier as well.

   As it is shown on this next image on the right, the costs to make for all the glyphs are the same, while their profits margins are going up more and more. This can be explained with the "tier" system that i just mentioned, and this is how it actually works.

   If you are a scribe you encounter the glyphs very early on in the profession, but when people try to make them and then sell them on the auction house they rarely have any luck, or if they sell them they usually sell them under price which is lower then the cost to make them and that usually sways people away from the profession. Well this is the first low tier of the glyphs and is the intro into the market.

   Now after the initial tier we have 3 other tiers of glyphs that are much more lucrative. I will refrain from using them as second, third and so on and on tiers as that will make a false priority system. Now as i was saying, the other tiers are the glyphs you get from Northrend Inscription Research, Minor Inscription Research, Book Of Glyph Mastery. Now unlike the glyphs that every scribe gets access to while leveling, these glyphs actually require some leg work to obtain, and no matter how much you want to you can't rush the glyphs as you can only get one research per day. So i would say that it would be wise to consider the researchable glyphs are the Second Tier of the glyphs.

   Now the third tier i would say is the glyphs you can get out of the Book Of Glyph Mastery for their sheer price of obtaining. What i mean by this is that these books usually fetch a hefty price on the Auction House that can get up to 800-1500g on some servers and that compared to the usual every day research is a lot higher, which in return makes those glyphs rarer. So with this i think it would be Ok to address these glyphs as Third Tier of the glyphs.

   Ok so now that we defined the three tiers of the glyphs, i will get down of explaining how you can take advantage of the high disparity between the prices of the glyphs. 

   The basic idea behind the strategy is just like the Recycling, where you are taking the worthless trash then flipping it and making it a shiny new product. Well almost, basically because you are not doing this to save the planet nor are you making a new product but rather making the old glyph appear new and shiny.

   Ok enough with beating around the bush, this is how the whole deal works.

   You will use two things, first is a buying list which you will be able to copy from here, and the second one is that you will be able to pray on 95% of the glyph sellers who are blatantly using the the addons without checking for prices. As you will be checking for glyphs with low supply and low price to buy out and then resell back, you might want to use the baiting tactics to reduce prices on certain glyphs that you deem would sell well. Now in continuation here are the glyphs you can get out of the Glyph Mastery book and the Northrend Research.

***Book Of Glyph Mastery
Glyph of Arcane Barrage
Glyph of Barkskin
Glyph of Beacon of Light
Glyph of Berserk
Glyph of Bladestorm
Glyph of Chaos Bolt
Glyph of Chimera Shot
Glyph of Cloak of Shadows
Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon
Glyph of Deep Freeze
Glyph of Demonic Circle
Glyph of Dispersion
Glyph of Divine Accuracy
Glyph of Divine Plea
Glyph of Explosive Shot
Glyph of Fan of Knives
Glyph of Feral Spirit
Glyph of Furious Sundering
Glyph of Guardian Spirit
Glyph of Hammer of the Righteous
Glyph of Haunt
Glyph of Hex
Glyph of Holy Shock
Glyph of Howling Blast
Glyph of Hungering Cold
Glyph of Ice Barrier
Glyph of Kill Shot
Glyph of Killing Spree
Glyph of Life Tap
Glyph of Master's Call
Glyph of Metamorphosis
Glyph of Mirror Image
Glyph of Penance
Glyph of Raptor Strike
Glyph of Riptide
Glyph of Salvation
Glyph of Savage Roar
Glyph of Scatter Shot
Glyph of Shadow Dance
Glyph of Shadowflame
Glyph of Shield Wall
Glyph of Shield of the Righteous
Glyph of Shockwave
Glyph of Slow
Glyph of Soul Link
Glyph of Spell Reflection
Glyph of Spirit Tap
Glyph of Starsurge
Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem
Glyph of Templar's Verdict

***Northrend Research
Glyph of Adrenaline Rush
Glyph of Anti-Magic Shell
Glyph of Bane of Agony
Glyph of Bestial Wrath
Glyph of Blade Flurry
Glyph of Bloody Healing
Glyph of Chain Heal
Glyph of Chain Lightning
Glyph of Chains of Ice
Glyph of Circle of Healing
Glyph of Concussive Shot
Glyph of Cone of Cold
Glyph of Conflagrate
Glyph of Crippling Poison
Glyph of Dazing Shield
Glyph of Deadly Throw
Glyph of Death Coil
Glyph of Death and Decay
Glyph of Devastate
Glyph of Dragon's Breath
Glyph of Elemental Mastery
Glyph of Felguard
Glyph of Felhunter
Glyph of Fire Elemental Totem
Glyph of Fireball
Glyph of Focused Shield
Glyph of Frostbolt
Glyph of Frostfire
Glyph of Grounding Totem
Glyph of Hammer of Wrath
Glyph of Healing Wave
Glyph of Heart Strike
Glyph of Hemorrhage
Glyph of Holy Wrath
Glyph of Howl of Terror
Glyph of Hurricane
Glyph of Immolate
Glyph of Innervate
Glyph of Intervene
Glyph of Invisibility
Glyph of Kick
Glyph of Kill Command
Glyph of Lava Burst
Glyph of Lifebloom
Glyph of Light of Dawn
Glyph of Lightwell
Glyph of Mangle
Glyph of Mass Dispel
Glyph of Molten Armor
Glyph of Mortal Strike

   One fast recap of the entire post. Put in these glyphs in the Lists in Auctionator and then simply do a simple scan and if you see some that have a low price and low supply buy them out and repost them back at a higher price. If you want to get an idea on what glyphs are the best sellers you might want to check out the glyph section on Wowpopular.

That's all for now and like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

   

Transmogrification, Gold Maker's Style

   In the last few days i was a bit occupied with making the interview with the Mogfather which ended up being a very informative, as well as profitable venture. I did a bit of a research as to how the whole process is done, and then took it upon me to further put the gold maker touch to it. In this post i will cover a few things after which you should have a sold base on which to build on if you decide to get into the transmogrification business. 

   Before i start to get into detail on how everything works, and the how's and why's i would like to clear up one thing, and that thing is the whole logic behind this market. If you get into this market you will be entering the vanity market, that means that the items you are selling will NOT make the buyer stronger in any way, there will be no buffs, but instead you will make them appear different and with that stand out from the crowd. This is actually a very powerful mover, and it will make people spend huge amounts of gold on a piece of gear that in their eyes will make their avatar look awesome, and the place which is between the buyer and it's ability to look awesome is the place where we will put ourselves at, and profit from the whole affair, so let's get started. 

Phase One (Getting The Addons)

   Before you start getting anything done there are a few things you need to get. First thing that will make your entire job a much easier is downloading an addon called Mogit. 

   Upon downloading the addon, what it does is it makes a new view frame whenever you mouse over an item that is equipable by your character and how this makes it more unique then the blizzard frame is that this addon will make your character appear with nothing but the item on him equipped, so you can have a focused view on the given item.

   The advantage this addon gives is that it makes your decision whether to buy the item based on it's appearance or not, much easier.

   The second addon you want to have is Auctionator, but if you have been in the auction house business for a while i am sure you already have that one covered.  

Phase Two (Research and Acquisition)

   So now that we have the addons that we will be using it is time we focus on the research and acquisition part of the whole deal. The first part of the research can be done in two ways, a manual way and an automated way. Both of these ways have their pros and cons, and i will try and explain both.

   The manual way of doing the research is by simply going over to the auction house and start going through the items that are listed there. One thing though when you are listing make sure you are listing them category by category, and make the search to include items that are in the 1-70 item level range. The reason for this is that the items above that are simply too look alike like the current content and seeing as we are in the vanity market where we sell the pretty and cool, it's pretty much not worth it.

   So now that we are on the auction house window and we have set up the range to be 1-70 we can start scrolling and looking for a good deal. Another thing that is important is, if you are selling an item and have the ability check out and see how that model is going to look on a male and a female character, because many of the buyers are willing to spend huge amounts of gold on items that make their female character look like they are in a bikini.

   There are three categories that turn out to be most profitable and those are the Plate, Cloth and Weapons. Now don't take this the wrong way and think that there is no gold to be made because that would be wrong. Anyways when you are scrolling through the auction house what you are doing is you are looking for two things: a cool looking item, and a low price. As you can see up on the image above, and the one on the left i found both of those weapons for a 5g and 20g buyout price. Now what i can do is take those and flip them for 200, 500 or even 1500 or more gold depending on the unique aspect of the item. I will refrain from giving out prices for items because i am quite a new player in the transmogrification business and i have only sold about a dozen items, but there are other people out there that you can ask for prices that are more then willing to help you, like the Mogfather. (check the end of the post for the contact info)

   If you would like to learn how you can make this whole process on a auto pilot kind of a way you might want to check Jim's Post on Power Word:Gold about it, in which he makes a good and quite informative post about it.

Phase Three (The Go Getter)

   This last phase has nothing to do with the basics of the transmogrification business, but is a rather more of a gold maker's view on how to open up a small starting quantity of items for yourself in case someone has bought out all the cheap items and left you with nothing.

   The problem with getting your own green items is kind of a problem due to the randomness of it all, but there is a way you can do it non the less. Instead of explaining how to do it though, i went ahead and made a pretty video of it that will make sure that everyone can repeat and no one will get lost. Just as a clarification you will need to get to Scholomance in the Western Plaguelands.

   So as you can see in the video, you can get a rather good stash of starting items in a fairly quick manner by just doing this and then resetting the instance and doing it again. Though you can also choose to gather up the mobs in the instance and just kill them and loot them all for additional ways to get greens.

   That's all for today, and i am sure i will make an even more detailed post on how to profit further in the transmogrification market as i get more experienced in the market myself. But until then, like always, keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Profession Grabbing Profits

   As any player of World Of Warcraft would tell you, be it a new player or a long time veteran of the game, World of Warcraft is a game which offers many diverse ways of making gold to fuel your needs and fill your bags so you can buy all those things you might end up needing, or repairing that armor after you had your behind handed to you by a nasty Dragon. So if there are so many ways of making gold, how do you choose which ones to take upon and use to earn your profits? Well it's quite simple, you choose the ones that give you maximum return profits at the minimum time required, or a way that would incorporate into your free available time.

   Well no matter how much free time you have, it's always a no brainer that  the best route to take is the one where you spend 1 gold to make 10 gold without having to do pretty much anything special.

   These opportunities are usually not always out there in plain sight, because let's be honest, if it were that easy and everyone would be able to do it, then everyone would know and noone would pay the price. So this is where the ones with the information on where and how will be the ones to reap the profits.

   So this is where you, as a gold making goblin armed with the right set of tools (information), will take on those opportunities and make great profits on them. But enough with beating around the bush lets get down to the hard cold facts and the how to.

   First to define what we are gonna do. We are gonna do a simple game of selling the items that are already up for sale, so we wont have to be farming anything, or kill any mobs, and no i'm not gonna tell you to buy a sword and relist it for a higher price, because there are already way too many people doing that dance with the selling of gear on the AH and the trade channel. No we are gonna take on one of the most used and most neglected section of the market by almost everyone, the profession powerleveling market.

   Yup, those are the guys we are going to be aiming for, because as you can see on the demotivational on the right it pretty much shows it as it is, bunch of guys that don't want to get to the cheese (which in this case is the max level profession) without having to go through the maze (which in their case is farm all the materials that they will need to do it ).

   Just as a clarification, we are not gonna be looking at one particular profession but rather all the professions in general and from it we will take on the one ones that we find to offer the best profits.

   That's was the What, and now we are going down to the How bit of the post. There are many possible ways of finding the best items to keep your eyes on, but from my experience you want to take on the most used information when it comes to powerleveling a certain profession, and the way to do this is by asking the all mighty Google. The first place it will send you to is WoW-Professions where you will be given the choice to choose which profession would you like to level? After you have chosen, it will give you a list of items you will need to get that profession leveled up following that given guide.

   As an example, if we choose Alchemy, we can see the list of all the herbs that are needed, and from here what we can do is check the prices of those herbs on the AH or simply go over to TUJ and check the prices from there. (If you are not familiar with The Undermine Journal check the TUJ Part 1 and TUJ Part 2 posts)

You want to focus more on the lower level herbs as they are the ones that are the least farmed and in the highest demand due to everyone who is powerleveling some profession will be buying them out.

   If you choose to do the price check by manually it will take on some time due to having to alt tab and check the names, and then check the prices, so i would recommend using the TUJ for that bit because it will give you a clean breakdown on the prices of all herbs along with the visual representation of the stock available on the auction house, as well as the little slider bar which is telling you if the price is low or high on that item compared with the prices seen on the AH in the past.

   So what you would want to do is for instance, like we said we would be checking the alchemy we can see that Goldthorn, Briarthorn, Sungrass are all in high demand, and usually people don't really look at that so they would post stacks upon stacks of whatever they have leftover for next to nothing, and that is where you take on the charge and flip it for those great profits we were talking about. As you can see the price of the Goldthorn is  10g per item which is racking up at 200g per stack while i spent 15g per stack to buy them (Granted i should have taken the screenshot when the price was low as well but heck what's done it's done you get the idea anyways)

   So what you want to do is like i said, check that list for items that you will need, then check the TUJ for the actual price of the items, and once you find items that are with low price but high demand, check your local AH buy those puppies out and repost them back at the high price and watch those profits rack up.

   Well like i said there are more then one ways to skin a cat, and if you don't want to go through WoW-Professions and TUJ you might want to give a quick glance to one of the sites that i mentioned in                 The Spotlight post, that being Warcraftprofessional.

   This site is pretty much like the TUJ and WoW-Professional put into one sweet package with a twist, and that twist being that it will give you an estimate on how much gold you would need to fork out to get it up to Max skill.

   As you can see on the image on the right, it gives you the estimate on the cost to powerlevel that profession, as well as the individual cost of every single item that's included into that overall price as well as a little colored box (green or red) where it's telling you if that price is high for that item, or it's low, so pretty much like the slider option that the TUJ offers.

   So just so we are clear, in this post i took the first profession that was there, alchemy, as an example but this whole strategy can be used on ANY and i do repeat ANY profession out there that requires any materials.

   And there it is, you follow these steps and you will be able to find a good deal of awesome deals that by simply taking the stacks of cheap materials and reposting them back on the Auction House at prices that are x3,  x5 or even x10 will make you those sweet awesome profits. 

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

The Auction House Bait

   Have you ever been in a place where you wanted to buy a certain gem or a glyph on the AH after getting that shiny new piece of gear but when you got to the AH you saw that the price of that item be it a gem or enchanting scroll or even a glyph is so high that made you puke a little bit inside your mouth.

   Well it doesn't even have to be that you need that item for yourself, it just might be that you are selling that particular item as well but you want to drive down the competition a bit and make them basically give you the item for a dirt cheap price where afterwards you go back repost it back on the AH and get all the profits, well this process is what i like to call AH Baiting and i will explain why the name.

   You see the image here i kinda stumbled upon it by accident but i'll be damn it depicts exactly what this strategy is all about, you will Bait and then Tackle the opposition down from the market.

   First thing you need to understand before you start is that 90% of the people that are posting and reposting all those auctions use some kind of a addon to post their auctions be it Auctioneer or TSM but what they don't really do is they almost never check for the lowest post and they simply click away and post their load and this is where you jump in and i will go in details about this as to how it looks like.

   One thing worth mentioning would probably be that this strategy works best for items that are in high demand like gems, flasks, pots, beltbuckles and even glyphs, and the best times for doing this is during peek hours like between 7pm - 1am, and the reason as to why this is the case is because there's most people that are buying and selling their auctions that period of the day, hence your best time to try and catch those big fish.

      As the example for this i have taken the screen shot from the TSM addon where its showing the information about the purple Retaliating Demonseye. If you take a quick peek at the information there you'll see that everything under that red line is prices around 175g per gem with give or take a few silver pieces, now with the introduction of the actual bait which in this instance is a single gem posted at 45g (this is a price that you can set to be as low as you feel like you want to go) you can see that there have already been someone that has undercut my bait with 4 gems with the standard undercut.

   As it is in this example you would probably go like, pff it's just a stupid Demonseye gem, nothing exotic. Well i'll try and get a screenshot of the new big undercut i do with the Red Inferno Rubies. For an example few nights ago i did this same thing like with the Demonseye but instead of it i went for the Brilliant Inferno Rubies, and on my server their moving price is somewhere between 80-250g depending on the day, well that night their current price was hovering at 120g and i was kinda running low on the red raw gems so i decided to try out my angling skills and try and bait out some cheap gems, and boy did it work. I posted 3 Brilliant gems at 35g each and like 3 minutes later i had 3 guys undercut me where one was undercutting me with 10 gems the other one with 7 and the third one had 25 gems up there, and all of them were at less then 35g. Needless to say i bought them all out and then cleaned house on the remaining 10ish gems on the AH and reset the price back to 250g. That night i sold them all at prices ranging 220-250g (the guys i undercut didn't stay away totally so they came back for round two so i had to battle it out with them on the AH but they lost their 250g worth gems for 30g previously). So there i was i got 40ish gems with them being pure profit ranging from 100-200g by not doing anything special, hell you dont even have to be a jewelcrafter to take advantage of this strategy.

   This doesn't stop at gems but like i said you can do this with beltbuckets, pots, flasks hell with all the high demand items to be honest, and pretty much anything that anyone would put in their posting addon.

   Just so you are aware, once you put down your baits know there's a good chance that someone might simply buy out your item be it a legit buyer or even a camper that knows his stuff (but those are not something you see alot) so it's pretty much like fishing, you need to throw a small fish to catch the big fish, or if you throw the big fish you might catch Moby Freaking Dick but if you get too greedy you might end up with just Moby's last name, if you catch my drift.

   So there we are, if you fancy yourself a good AH angler or simply want to try out the baiting then get your fishing pole and get to it, and like always keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.

Making Gold Out Of Thin Air (Trade Channel)

   For some reason i simply enjoy making gold and my best guess as to why would be simple, my inner goblin is making me do it. Now you might have a inner goblin as well or maybe you simply have a need for gold to pay up for those pesky raiding repair bills or you want that new shiny mount or that new AH sword, but no matter what the need for that gold would be it's always good when you see those profits coming at you, and especially if don't really have to be doing anything that would make you do complex math, gathering data or god forbid go farm, well in this post i'll give you an idea as to what one of these ways would be that has worked well for me for months.

   This awesome thing i'm telling you about could be called simply Valor Resale, and the reason to it's name is simply because you are selling the valor purchasable items. Now before you go "Meh i ain't got no Valor so i don't care about this" let me tell you that you don't need to have a single point of valor to be doing it.

   The way this whole thing works is so simple that it will make you do a facepalm for not doing it all this time.

   Ok so down to the point, you must have seen all those people in trade channel (unless you've gotten fed up with anal and dirge jokes and turned it off) that advertise something in the lines of   "WTS Valor bracers 2K" or something similar. Well that right there is the market i'm talking about and in order for you to be harvesting the profits of this market you only need to go and check out the names of the actual be it bracers/boots or whatever is next to come and then check their price on the AH.

   If you've done that you'll see that lets just say for kicks that guy was selling the Valor Bracers for 2K and we check and see that there are no bracers [Pure Awesomeness Bracer] (this one was made up so don't go googling it) up on the AH or someone has put one up for 8K. Now every fiber in your body goes "Pff 8k good luck selling that dumbass" but actually that guy is your best bet at selling your item because he has set the AH price of the item.

   If you are still confused as to what i'm saying let me break it down even more. People in general don't really know the names of the Valor items and in their head they think the item name is really VALOR Bracer/Boots and never bother to check the vendor, and simply you doing that and getting the name and then advertising the actual item in trade for a price that's twice or even more then what the guy with the Valor Bracer was asking for will be a success.

   The best case for this would be a few weeks ago i turned out to do my ad where i was selling my item right after someone else had put down a WTS Valor Bracers 2K, and i was asking for 5K and even saying it's 1K cheaper then the AH because someone had put it up for 6K on the AH. Weirdly enough i got a buyer asking to buy it for 4.5k and i was good with the price because as soon as i sold him that item i went and bought the same item from the guy that was selling the Valor Bracers for 2k and he even gave me a discount and i ended up getting it from him for 1700g, but to make it even more hilarious i sold that item as well later on that night for 5K. So in about an hour i got 5700g pure profit from me not going anywhere to farm anything or post gazillion auctions and getting hundreds of sales.

   One thing you should know is and be prepared for is that there will be people that will know that those are the Valor items and will whisper you offending names and what not, or even call out your bull out in trade channel and if that happens chill out for a few minutes and don't go spamming that ad aggressively because you don't want that bad rep, but you rather want your buyer to think you are doing him a favor by selling it to him for 1k cheaper rather then you trying to rob him blind.

   So like always keep your eyes peeled for good opportunities out there.

Gems For Everybody !

   One of the best professions out there is and always has been the Jewelcrafting, and while many people are diverted back by the strong opposition and the fact their gems are usually undercut in less then 10 minutes but that doesn't have to be the case. What i mean with this is that if you don't want to face the giant head on then kneel down and bite his balls.

   Ok just so we are clear, the biting balls part was merely a comparison and no real biting is going to be required on your part. Now that we got that out of the way i'll actually get down to the real gold making facts, and those facts are quite simple, the forgotten market of the WOTLK gems.

   So before you get down with the idea of doing this whole thing you need to be aware that if you are serious about making gold with this way you will need to have the patterns for the gems or if you don't have the pattern that will require some old daily running so that you can acquire the patterns.

   Ok so right about now you are thinking that this can't be true and that the old gems market is as dead as it can get but that's why you would be dead wrong and i will give you a few pointers on how to do it properly and in the process make a killing on these gems.

   First thing you need to know is that these gems are contrary to common belief in very high demand among leveling up players and twinks, and the higher the population of a server is the greater the demand is and in return the greater the profit is.

   Now there are few things you need to understand about this market before you get into doing it and that is the fact that the supply of the raw gems is extremely limited nowadays due to everyone depleting their WOTLK stock and no one actually going out to farm saronite ore for the prospecting needs, but still there is a low flow of gems getting up on the AH from players leveling up their jewelcrafting and those players not caring about pricing their gems properly due to them wanting to offload them as soon as possible, but even that low supply is more then enough to fill your coffers to the brim with gold.

   Another thing you need to be aware about this is that you should be prepared to invest some gold into acquiring some starting gems be it from buying them straight from the AH as gems or buying some Saronite Ore.

   So like we said the higher the demand is the lower the supply is going to be due to the limited influx of raw gems to the market but even with that there's a good space for profits here, and even if you don't have the actual cut patterns there's a way to get around it and profit from it, though not as much as if you had the actual pattern and if you are wondering how keep reading.

   Ok so if you are still reading up i will take it for granted that you are interested in how to do this whole thing properly and get those great profits i'm talking about.

   Before you get down to evaluating the gems and starting to buy raw gems check out the old gems scene on your server and you are more then likely to see that someone has posted some old cut gems for 10-20g each or even epic ones for as low as 30-50g, if you see those buy them out every single time and the reason behind this is that i have made the prices for the blue ones at 95g while i'm selling the epic ones for 195g but have sold them for 295g as well but they are moving slower at this pace. (this is for me personally but you can choose your own prices be it higher or lower)

   

   Now that you have set your "mind" to the price ranges being 95g and 195g you need to get some gold and invest it in buying out any gems that are up there for anything lower then your target prices and posting them back up for your preffered price. Now this step is that usually deters people from getting in this market due to them having to invest 5, 10 or even more thousands of gold just to buy out the gems and instead of them looking at it as i'm paying 100g for this gem, you should be thinking i am going to be profiting 95g by simply reselling this gem on the AH.

   As you can see on the image ( crappy cropping job on my side due to people sending me chat messages in the My Sales reports ) the gems sell quite well, well at about 3-8k per day, the high points being weekends. 

   From my experience the best sales come from the red gems, no surprise there and from the King's Amber (yellow epic ones) due to the fact that one of the cuts is the +crit and +res one.

   So as a recap of this post, as a start you need to be doing the Dalaran daily JC quests if you don't have the patterns for the cuts, then you need to be on a constant look out for cheap raw gems on the AH so you can cut them for profit, and if you don't have the patterns or hell even if you don't have jewelcrafting and you see someone putting cheap cut gems out there keep buying them out because in the long run you will always profit due to that one person posting cheap gems is going to run out of stock very fast.

   One last thing before we close the book on this thing would be to check out the AH for Frozen Orbs as well as the 3 gems required for crafting the Icy Prism, this used to be a 24h cooldown craft but it was changed with the launch of Cataclysm and if you take into account that it can contain up to 3 rare gems an epic and even a dragon's eye this little guy can rake up some serious profit where one simple Prism can have up to the equivalent of  600g and it's cost could be as low as 30g so that's definitely something to keep your eyes on.

   So there, we are taking up a market that has a fairly good requirement and usually a low to none suppliers for it, and with that in mind we embark on a voyage of epic gold gathering cruise.

   So like always keep your eyes peeled for good opportunities out there. 

Selling the Obvious

   One of my favorite ways to make gold, even though it's not the most lucrative business is selling items you can get straight out from the vendors. And what i mean by this is that you can rack up some fast and easy gold by just walking up next to the random vendor that's sitting usually next to the auction house or very close by.

   You would think that i'm full of crap and that everything i'm saying possibly can't be true because lets face it why would you pay ten or even fifty times the worth of something that you can get from the vendor, well the answer is simple, people are either too lazy to walk to the vendor don't care or they are not informed but either way that's gold in your pocket.

   I'll put down some items i've had insane margins selling like 500-1000% even though they are not expensive profit is profit.

Blacksmith Hammer          13c                     10-20g
Mining Pick                       57c                     10-20g
Walnut Stock                 3g 50s                         10g
Hair Trigger                       63s                         10g
Enchanting Vellum              7s                          1g per item, usually sell them in 3-5 stack size or 20
Coal                               3s 50c                  20-35g stack

Dust Of Disappearance 8g 75s                   15-25g depending on competition

   Those are some of the basic no brainer items you can post up on the AH and get some nice profits but i have to admit my favorite vendor items would be the items you buy off the Inscription Vendor in the Twilight Highlands, but for a better preview check it down below

(FOR THIS YOU NEED TO HAVE OPENED TWILIGHT HIGHLANDS PORTAL)

Una Kobuna sells

Deathwing Scale Fragment          4g 50s              125-175g
Bleached Jawbone                    29g 60s              125-175g
Preserved Ogre Eye                  24g 67s              125-175g
Scavenged Dragon Horn            12g 78s              125-175g
Silver Charm Bracelet               33g 41s              125-175g

   One thing you need to remember about these items is that you need to leave an impression that they are rare and something worth buying and not something that's easy to obtain or give notice to the potential buyer then he can get it from a vendor by doing the silly thing and flooding the AH with them, so think smart and only post 1 of each at any given time and watch the gold come pouring down in due time.

   The reason why these items sell at such a price is that all the scribes get access to the PvP items that they can craft but need these items but for some reason, be it that they dont know that it's sold by a vendor or haven't unlocked the vendor by doing the quests they decide to turn to the AH and in turn to fill up your pockets with gold.