Making money with Inscription without Glyphs

Before I start, let me say that this post could also be called: "Making money from what people want instead of what people need".

A little bit of backstory
I have been trying to break into the Glyph industry for a while now.  Using my DK, I power-level his inscription up to 400, and started to to the daily research, creating 5 of every new glyph, which normally listed for about 20-30g each.
I'm up to 435 skill points now, and I have quite a few glyphs listed on the AH any given time. I also try to check if I've been undercut 2 or 3 times a day, and relist everything if I have.

The end result? Almost nothing, not even 100g a day. I'm still hoping that once I get more and more new glyphs, I'll start making money eventually, but this post is not about that, actually, it's about making money without the glyphs.

How?


I have to admit, I actually stumbled upon this miniature gold mine by accident, you see, I started inscription on my DK, not for the gold making opportunity, but for a specific item that I wanted to craft. That's right, a long time ago, I started inscription because I wanted to craft this. The thing is, I eventually forgot about it, and abandoned my DK's profession for a while, until the other day I remembered that I wanted this item, so I leveled him up, soon to realize that the technique required to craft it, was a drop from a specific part of Grizzly Hills.

Lucky for me, my DK is lvl 74 (has been for a long while), the exact same level as the mobs I had to kill, so I went there and killed humans for almost 30 minutes until the item dropped.
Once I was back, I decided to check the AH, since now I'm all about making gold with this toon, I thought I would see if this was actually a gold making opportunity. As it turned out, there were 4 other books listed on the AH, 3 of them were listed at 500g buyout, and the last one was listed at 1000g buyout.

When I saw that, I thought about listing mine (I had only enough money to make one, since I have been trying to make Northrend Cards aswell, and they are expensive to make), but something stopped me. Something I read somewhere around internet about using the Trade channel to sell your items.

So I gave it a try:
When using the trade channel, things change, for starters, you're offering a product, and specially in this case, one that not many people know about or even care about, so your message to the channel has to catch the readers attention.

You can't do something like this:
/2 WTS [Rituals of the New Moon], 500g

Simply because:
a- Some people will see you listing an unknown blue item at a relatively high price and won't care to look again.
b- You're actually setting the price, limiting yourself to only people who have 500g to spend on a luxury item, and leaving those who are willing to negotiate with you, out.

So, I choose the following message (wich produced nice results actually):
/2 WTS [Rituals of the New Moon], pst me and GET YOUR WOLF ON!

There are some key points we should be looking at on that text:
a- No price, this normally makes the initial whisper something like: "how much?", or even, people giving it a prices already. I haven't had the luck of having someone offering me an initial amount higher than what I normally ask, but still, it's a nice open door for that kind of opportunity.
b- The last part: "pst me and GET YOUR WOLF ON!" actually catches the readers eye. It will make them wonder: "why the hell a blue item will get my wolf on?" and subsequently, makes them click and read the tool tip. This way, you get people interested in what you're selling instead of waiting for those interested in it to go and look for it on the AH.
c- Negotiation: This relates to point "a" actually. My normal initial price for this item is 500g, so, when people say "how much?" I answer with: "500g", to wich sometimes I get a "ok, i'll get it", sometimes I get a "lowlz no" and sometimes, I get a "100g and I'll take it off your hands".

This last one is the most interesting one. You see, making the item (in my realm), costs about 80g on a bad day, so selling it at 500g is a super profit, one that allows me to actually lower the prices as much as I like. I normally take it down to 250g at most (which also makes for a killing profit if you ask me).

So, back to the negotiation part, if you happen to get a possible buyer who wants to save himself a few bucks, you can actually arrive at a middle point, where you feel comfortable with the profit, and he/she is happy thinking what a great deal they just made (a win-win situation :) ).


There are two important points here:
1- Instead of listing your known-to-few-players item in the AH and wait for them to go look it up and pay and overpriced amount of money, you offer it in Trade, making it posible for them to buy it and also letting everyone else know about it, which increases your customer number.
2- You are free to choose the price you want to sell the item for a specific customer, instead of having the strict and cold system that the AH has.

In my experience, I have to spend between 20-30 minutes offering the item and chatting with users until I sell it for a nice price.
I have had luck on some cases and I've sold it 2 minutes after my first post on Trade, at 500g.
One thing to notice about my experience, is that even though it's an item that requires lvl70 to use, most of my buyers are lvl80s, who want it exclusively for the use effect.
What does this tell us? Well, to me, it tells me that I'm not selling a standar item, and as such, I can't charge it at a standar price, no matter what some people might say.

Hopefully, you'll get lucky and in your server this item will sell for a nice profit aswell :)

Have fun making money!

Tips for the poor: Selling vendor stuff

Yes! As amazing as it might sound, I have yet another tip for those of you out there, who struggle for a living in the World of Azeroth.  If I keep this up, I might have to make a whole section on the blog dedicated to this topic!

Today's tip: Selling vendor stuff.

What is that you say? How can you make any money at all, selling stuff from vendors? Well, let me elaborate a bit more on that:

First of all, I'm not talking about any kind of stuff, I'm not talking about buying Fine Aged Cheddar and then posting it at the AH... no... I'm basically talking about profession recipes, plans, designs, and the whole enchilada. 
You see, profession trainers are not the only way to learn recipes, some can only be bought from specific vendors around the 2 worlds (Azeroth and Outlands... duh!) and some, can only be obtained through rare drops. We'll cover the easy ones to obtain today, the ones you can buy.

Now that we've cleared that out, how can you make money out of those items? Well, some of those items are really usefull to some professions.
Lets see an example here:

• Recipe: Blackened Basilisk
• Recipe: Warp Burger

Those two items are cooking recipes, they're sold by Innkeeper Grilka (horde side) or Supply Officer Mills (alliance side) on Terokkar Forest at 3g each. They are excelent for leveling your skills as a cook. And the most amazing thing? Almost no one knows where to get them. Since you don't learn these on the cooking trainer, people forget to go looking for them.

The only good thing that we can do for these poor people in order to help them is, yes you guessed it, fly/run up to Terokkar Forest, buy a bunch of them, and them put them on the AH.

Now, here is the tricky part, since we're trying to make a gold out of a market that not many people realizes it exists, we have to keep it simple, dont fill the AH with 10 or 20 recipes of Blackened Basilisk.., someone is going to realize sooner or later and then undercut us (the horror!), so... try to post them one at a time. I used to sell them at 40g each. That's right, 40 gold per recipe, that's a big profit if you ask me. 

Eventually, some less-than-smart player realized that he too, could make a buck out of those recipes and started to list them at 17g each..., needless to say, I had to put my stock down for a while, until that person had ran out of recipes, probably a leveling toon, who saw the oportunity and took it.

Yes, I could've listed mine a bit lower, and still would've made a killing profit, but I chose to wait, and time proved me right :) I have to go back and restock now.

Ofcourse, those two recipes are not the only ones that you can use. Like almost every tip for gold-making around here, your realm is going to dictated what you sould sell and what not to sell, you just have try and err. That's how I've learned.

A few more recommendations that have served me well in the past:

• Formula: Enchant Cloak - Superior Defense If you got a druid, this one and the next one, will net you some pretty good gold, since you have a free port to the only place where they're sold.
• Formula: Runed Arcanite Rod Excelent for making some fast and easy cash. I've sold this formula for up to 50g. Only one at the time, and if someone else is selling it, I'd wait, since I don't want everyone to know how easy it is to get.
• Pattern: Imbued Netherweave Bag Bought this on the AH the other day at 30g, then realized that I could buy it for much.. MUCH less at Shatt, so I now, every once in a while, I go there, and buy some, I've been selling them at 35g each. Pretty they sell better than the actual bag... wierd uh?
• Pattern: Dress Shoes This one right here, net me a few golds a while ago, I bought them since it was one of those items that once you buy them from the merchant, you have to wait to buy it again. And since the vendor is so out of the way, I thought it would be an interesting experiment. I honestly don't remember how much money I made with it, since after selling a few, I was out of the zone and didn't care to go back. (Shame on me!)

Anyways, that's a very simple list of formulas/patterns to buy low and sell extra high :). They can be a great money maker, specially for the first few hundred gold.

Now, go on, search the AH for them, and see if anyone is selling them, if not, then get out there, and try it out :) You'll probably be pleased with the results....

Cya around!

Tips for the poor, working the AH

Today, I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the subject of making money inside the game. Sadly we're not all blessed with the brains and times necessary to hit the goldcap like others do, but we can still make some gold out of nothing if we pay a little attention at the market and ofcourse, have our trusty Auctioneer addon installed (there are alternatives to this addon, but since I've never used them, I can't really recommend them.. can I?).

Today's tip: Bags

This might not work on your server, or even on your side of the server, but since EVERYONE needs bags, I think most realms will allow this tip to work.
Since this all comes from personal experience, lets put this into perspective:

Char: Verasshen
Level: 60
Professions: Tailoring (340), Enchanting (287)

As you can probably imagine, I'll be using the amazing 340 points on tailoring to make some gold.
So, lets start at the begining shall we?

Can one really get rich from selling bags?
Let me remind you, my intention is not to make you reach, but to teach you how to earn a few extra golds here and there, so really? I don't know how much money one can get from this things, but I've done my share...


Which bags are we talking about?
The first bags that are semi-usefull to an experienced player, are (in my opinion) Netherweave Bags. This bags have a capacity for 16 items and are really not that expensive to buy/make, which makes them a perfect starter bag.
Leaving Netherwave bags aside, anyting bigger than this babies will work for our case, so if you can make or know a tailor who can me 18 or maybe 20 slots bags, try to extrapolate and see what happens :)

Lets talk about money, how much can gold can I make from this?
Ok, before getting to the revenue part, we gotta think about costs, so lets get to it:
Note: prices were taken from my realm, horde side (Alliances were different, and not really profitable for this kind of bags imho).

Materials needed for one bag:

• 4 Bolts of netherweave
• 1 Rune Thread

For those 4 bolts of cloth, we need a full stack (20 items) of Netherweave cloth.
In my realm's AH (again, horde side), the stack of Netherweave cloth sells for 4 - 5 g each.
The rune thread is vendor bought, and goes for about 50 silver each.

So, doing some really basic math, we can assume that making one bag will costs us:

5g from cloth

50 silver from thread

_________________________

5g 50s total

Again we ask.. how much money can we make from 1 bag alone? After studying the AH for a couple of days, I've seen the prices of Netherweave bags go from 10g up to 12g each. 

So, considering our worst case scenario (which you should always consider when making a decision like this), we have 5g 50s of expenses and we're selling them at 10g each, so we're making 4g 50s profit!

You're not just getting your money back, but you're also getting almost enough money to make another one (specially if you grind the netherweave cloth instead of buying it from the AH). Not too bad.. now multiply this by.. I don't know.. 10? And you've got 45g profit.

Bags sell, specially this ones, smaller bags are harder to sell, since experienced players will find them inadecuate for their needs, and the netherweave ones are really cheap.

So, is that it?

No, not really, let me share another related experience with you...

Here I was, a few hours ago, on my toon, making a few bags to sell, from the cloth my hunter (who's leveling in outlands right now) sent him... I've just put 4 bags a few minutes ago for sale.. there weren't many, and mine were selling at 11g each. When I suddendly get the beloved "A buyer has been found for your..." message :)

I had just sold all my bags, to the same person... great! So I was about to post my new batch when I suddenly had an inspiration. There weren't many bags left on the AH from other people (always talking about the same kind of bag.. netherweave), and they were listing them at 12g each (probably 5 or 6 bags left),so I went ahead and bought the whole lot, and reposted all of them at 20g each....

Sold 4 before login 30 minutes later.

So, that was 80g of gold incoming, just because I had the oportunity to take the prices a bit heigher.. this is what I mean when I say: you've got to pay attention to the market.

Pick an item, and study it.. check the prices regularly and when you see the oportunity.. take it! Buy it low  and sell it high! 

That's the basic idea behind this rant :)

Hopefully, it'll enlighten some  of you out there!

For now, catcha around...

"How to make some gold" for Dummies

First real post.. here we go:

This may not be really usefull for someone with a lvl80 main already, since they have access to things like Daily Quests (so many that tends to be boring...), other might have capped professions able to make some of the best crafted epics around, etc, etc...

The idea behind this post, is to list some basic tips for you, the newbie, the guy who's just starting out and has no idea how other players run around with their mounts at lvl 20, and have all this cool gear, when you have barely made it out alive, running by foot and with a few silver coins on your pockets :( (Been there, done that... everyone's gotta start somewhere right?).

So, this tips are all server dependent of course, since the economy behind every realm is incredibly independent from the others (which is logical, once you think about it..., different players, different needs..), but they should be good enough to guide you in the right direction.

This is all based on my own personal experience after almost two years of play, but there is really no big fansy economic analisis behind any of this.., it's just a start.