money making guide for beginners (wow)  

Introduction

To be clear from the start, while it is possible to amass the ungodly amounts of gold an hour, as touted by many gold-farming guides, that is not the purpose of this guide. This guide is intended to show you how, from level 1, to start good practices that will make the purchase of your mounts less of a burden, acquiring materials for power-leveling profession a breeze, and generally ease the monetary struggle that most new players feel.

Styles of Money Making

There are two schools of thought when it comes to money making: Speed and Quantity. Most players use a mixture of both styles throughout their time in Azeroth. Neither is good nor bad, just different approaches to the same problem. The path you choose most often will normally depend on the amount of time you have to invest.

Speed

The Speed style is focuses more on getting your gold from items sold on the Auction House and spending as little time as possible on your bank toon ( To be discussed a little further on). Speed is what will be discussed primarily in this guide as it is the easiest form to start with for a new player. The Speed player is generally a casual player who has less than 10-15 hours a week to spend on World of Warcraft.

Quantity

The Quantity players can turn a copper on anything. These players know where to look for bargain-priced items and will travel the extra distance daily to pick them up and resell them. They know all the tricks ( Such as buying cloth cheap on the Auction House, turning it into bandages and then selling the bandages to a vendor for a profit.) The Quantity style is intended for the players who have 20+ hours to spend playing World of Warcraft and do not mind that 1/4 of that time will easily be spent on their bank toon.

Add-Ons

There is only one add-on that you truly need to be profitable in WoW and that is Auctioneer.[1] It will take some time to get your Auctioneer database to a point where it is truly useful, but you have to start somewhere. Once you have it installed, you should run a scan ( There is a small button at the bottom of your Auction House window now that says "Scan") at least once per gaming session. Twice is optimal; once when you log on and again when you log off for the day. These scans serve to help Auctioneer find the market value for items on the Auction House. After about 1 week (2 if you scan once a day) of scanning the Auction House daily you should have a nice idea as to the value of your items.

A Fresh Start

While this can be done at any time during your adventure in Azeroth, I am going to start at the beginning: Character Creation. After you have created your main character ( The one you will level-up and use for all your wild and zany escapades.), go back and make another character. This one should be anything but a Night Elf for the Alliance or an Undead for the Horde. Both of those races have a long run to a capital city and have capital cities where the Auction House, Mailbox, and Bank are poorly lined up for quick movement. The two top choices are Trolls and Orcs for the Horde and Draenei for the Alliance, but any of the others will do nicely as well. This character needs to have a personable name. The tendency is for players to type random letters ( Like akdsfsdk) for their bank toon's name and the result is that people view that character as a gold farmer. You do not want that stigma. Instead, make it something funny or witty so that people will want to talk to you. Do not aim to be offensive as your goal is to get people to like this character. If offending people is part of your personality, do it with your main, but make your bank toon the life of the party. You want people to know your toon's name and to like him so that when they see his name in the Auction House they have nothing but pleasant thoughts. It's marketing and it works just as much in WoW as it does in real life.

To The Capital!

Before you start playing your main, run your newly-made bank toon all the way to the nearest capital city and position him next to the mailbox. His job will be to take whatever you mail him and sell it on the Auction House. Obviously, he will need a little scratch to pay the deposits on these items so be sure you send him some silver along with your items until he starts rolling in the gold on his own. Don't worry about not having a ton of money on your main. In fact, your main should be broke most of the time, with only enough gold to buy necessities like food, water, reagents and so forth. Let your bank toon hold the gold until you actually need it. This helps reduce the "impulse purchase" that comes with having money. If it isn't accessible, you won't spend it.