One of the easiest ways to make gold in World of Warcraft is buying items from vendors in out of the way (and sometimes not so out of the way!) areas then reselling them for huge profits at the auction house. The Expert First Aid and Expert Fishing books are two good examples that will make you around a gold a book (buy for 90 silver and sell for close to 2 gold).
But, there’s a good reason people don’t want to go get them themselves - the travel time is so long that unless I’m going through Booty Bay, Arathi, or Dustwallow Marsh it’s just not worth the time and effort to pick them up. But, what if I told you that there’s a way to make over 20 gold a trip just for going to Southshore? And unlike the book vendors mentioned above this one has a flight path!
If you’re in your 20s and 30s you’re going to be going through Southshore a lot anyway so on your trips through visit Micha Yance who is the Trade Goods merchant in the house directly south of the Gryphon Master. He sells 6 recipes that you can buy and mark up anywhere from 1 to 6 gold at auction:
This is an oldie but goody that I’ve been using for well over three years now. Even though my mains have all the gold they need, I still enjoy the challenge of leveling up from nothing with no outside help (and no guild help - I’m primarily a soloer and have never bothered staying in a guild for more than a couple of weeks).
This tip is Horde-only unless you’re not on a PVP server and/or can make it there without getting killed if you’re below level 20. What we’re going to do is fish for Deviate fish. This fish is found only in the Barrens and there are periodic schools of them in the oasis areas (Forgotten Pools, Lushwater Oasis, and Stagnant Oasis) but you can catch them in any water source in the Barrens (include inside the Wailing Caverns).
What makes Deviate fish interesting is that they’re the main ingredient in Savory Deviate Delight which is a rare cooking recipe (also found only in the Barrens as a random drop)that gives Deviate fish some special powers…namely the ability to resist shape changing effects (like the infamous Mage sheep spell) and also turns the eater into a Pirate or Ninja for an hour.
If you’re running your first character through World of Warcraft you’re probably short of gold. I know when I got started in WoW I knew nothing about add-ons, nothing about what items sold well at auction, and nothing about how to earn gold beyond lucking into a rare drop from a mob and selling it to a vendor.
So, in the interest of saving you from having to decide which spells or skills you should buy when you level up because you can’t afford them all here are a few tips for making gold in WoW at low levels.
5. Sell Your Cloth or Make Bandages
Especially at low levels, you can typically make more by selling bandages made from cloth to a vendor than by selling the cloth itself. I don’t recommend you sell the cloth to a vendor at all (auction it off instead) but selling the bandages to a vendor is a good way to recoup a little gold as you’re leveling your First Aid skill.
4. Don’t Pick a Crafting Profession Before Level 30
Crafting at low levels (below level 30 or so) is a gold sink. You don’t have the skill to make anything anyone wants to buy and all those materials you put into your crafting could easily be sold at auction. Instead of choosing Herbalism and Alchemy for example, choose Herbalism and Skinning or Mining and Skinning (I recommend either of these combos and not Herbalism and Mining because you can only show one type of resource (either herbs or ore nodes) on your mini-map at a time).
Then, instead of wasting the stacks of low level herbs, ore, or leather that you gather, put them up at auction. You can easily get 20 to 50 silver per stack of even the lowest level resources as many high level players buy these materials to level crafting in their alts.
Notice that this screenshot was taken before the other items in the backpack were auctioned off. In fact, this character is at the gold limit so these items need to be mailed to another character to auction because he can't hold any more gold.
I can make this kind of gold because I know what to farm, where to farm it, and what to buy and sell at the auction house for maximum profits in minimum time.