What do you do wrong?

This was a question I had asked myself several times in relation to making gold in the game. When I stumbled on the Call to Auction podcast and Markco's Just My Two Copper blog site, I quickly realized some of the things I had been doing wrong.

1. For one thing I had always stayed with a gathering profession and a production profession which isn't necessarily wrong. Except that you can only gather so quickly in the game, and it is very time intensive. (However, not being able to gather your own mats does in a way put you at the mercy of others or the AH to obtain mats, which can make certain rare or unique items more difficult to find.) If you have two lucrative, well played production professions, it is much easier to increase your income. Along the same lines, I realized that I put too much focus on earning and retaining what I earned as opposed to reinvesting in the market. I realized by listening to what other people were doing, that spending hefty amounts on items you know will sell, or are grossly underpriced can pay HUGE dividends in terms of multiplying your investments. It's the old adage - it takes money to make money.

2. Another valuable thing I've learned is the importance of diversification in making gold in the game. I sell many different types of items on a daily basis. Some net me a regular income of a few gold per item, but sell with extreme consistency. This allows me to not rely on big ticket sales to keep moving forward. Some items I sell daily are Armor vellums 3, Runescrolls of Fortitude, Netherweave bags, Advanced mining and herbalism glove enchants, Titanium bars that were transmuted, and Primal Mights.

3. I would have to say the third basic key to my success is a better understanding and use of my add ons, auctioneer in particular. Allow automated price checking for items worthy of flipping, or more importantly mats to craft any of the items that I craft on a regular basis at the best prices possible. Besides that learn small areas of the market too. So that you aren't completely relying on an add on to figure out if somethings a good deal or not.

Once I was able to get past these three things I was able to make serious gold. Now I'm no where near gold capped, because I tend to spend alot of what i make. And since I started I've power leveled my Leatherworking to 450, and completely powerleveled Jewelcrafting and Tailoring from 0-450. At the present time I also have 2 Battered Hilts in the AH which I'm trying to flip for at least 2000-3000 gold profit (I bought them at a really good price.) One other very valuable lesson I've learned is when listening to podcasts and reading gold blogs, don't assume your server is the same and the same items will sell on your as on other servers. Again learn the market.

Happy Prospecting!
Fat Jack

Shared business opportunities - a partnership

Approximately 8 months ago, I entered into a business partnership in game with a long time guildie (and in my case blood relative) to try and combine our professions to make some extra gold. By the time we started out, neither one of us really had a great deal of trouble making gold individually but really we just wanted to see how much more we could make combined.

My partner likes to spend some of his in game time on gathering professions. When he used to play a hunter he was an avid skinner and fisherman. With the skinning feeding his leatherworking. And as we moved into WOTLK he began to roll a warrior so for him it was a natural progression to take up mining and blacksmithing. So he would supply our venture through his mining.

I, on the other hand, had recently dropped herbalism and was leveling tailoring on my priest for several reasons – the cloth gear i could use, the flying carpets, and bags, bags, bags… So I also had alchemy fully leveled and moved from an elixir/flask specialization to a transmute specialization. I would handle the transmuting of any gems he would pick up. Generally we both contributed different eternals needed for epic gem transmutes, and he would also supply saronite bars, which I would transmute into titanium bars and sell on a separate banker which I really just use for our joint business sales (just to make the sales cleaner for me to keep track of.)

I would post the auctions, and would keep us competitive and make sure we were not losing on sales. Around the same time I dumped skinning on my hunter to pick up jewelcrafting. So that I could take those transmuted gems and cut them and sell for an even higher profit. Because he was doing all the mining, I absorbed the deposit costs on anything that didn’t sell. I tried to even things out where ever I could.

He then purchased the pattern to make the Titanium Spikeguards plate bracers. I’d transmute the titanium for him, and donate a portion of the crusader orbs and we’d split the profit. Because the titanium transmute had no cooldown period like the 24 hour epic gems, I could do quite a bit at a time, and we’d have multiple procs per batch most times.

Not counting the profits from the bracers we have made over 17,000 gold each just from this little side venture. I’d say we sold about 10 of the Titanium Spikeguards to date bringing in about 16,000 gold from those alone (another 8,000 gold per person) I’ll admit the bracers we didn’t track profits on. But for the gems I did run a simple spreadsheet on the item, date sold, purchase price, subtracted the AH cut, and then came up with the sum total and cut it in half to display the cut we would each get. To make it easy I’d total up his cut every so many sales and when I sent him his gold, I would color in those boxes leaving only the white boxes as unpaid revenues.

We are both very casual players and as I said this was a side venture for us. It was more about working together than getting rich. Neither of us was hinging on any sales so that we could pay repair bills. But it was a fun little ongoing experiment and a way for more casual players who may not have time to level multiple toons and their professions to combine forces to make their time more profitable.

My best advise to someone interested in trying this is:

1. partner with someone you trust
2. be as honest and fair as you can with your partner
3. use some type of system to track your expenses and profits to make sure both are equally distributed
4. It was helpful to use some of the gems we got from mining to also level my JCing since I wasn't a miner (realizing that I would pay that back in the solo profits I'd give up on down the road. I also discussed this with my partner up front, and we agreed we'd make more if I had the JCer leveled up.)
   
5. have fun! Its a game and there's more to World of Warcraft than the Auction House and /trade channel.

Happy prospecting!