Making Gold: The Foundation.

[Daylyte]

What this guide will be covering is how to create a gold stream from multiple markets, how to maintain your supply on your own stocks, time management, when & how to venture into other markets, as well as investments; when it is worth tying up your gold.



Creating A Gold Stream:
Initially starting a gold stream is the biggest problem people have while trying to make gold. I always ask everyone who inquires how to make gold the same question, what is your routine? 90% of the time people give me no response, or ask what do I mean. To create a gold stream, make gold & have a constant income you must have a routine, a plan of action.

This requires decisions to made on your part as to which markets to dive into, you must do the research on the market to see if it is worth your time / are you capable of keeping a supply in the market via difficulty of farming for your class, professions available, etc. You will also want to acknowledge how much competition you will have in this market as well as the rotation of market value.

Understanding a gold stream is a constant delivery of gold is key, niche items such as Battered Hilt isn't qualified as a gold stream. Its hit or miss, when we want to create a gold stream we look for items that are required daily by majority of players & sell on a regular basis.

When first creating a gold stream I suggest something you have quick access to & can put up a decent supply of that you can keep in stock or restock within a short period of time. This usually will not net amazing gold intake but it creates your initial stream you will later widen out to create an ocean with.

The first step is to reason with yourself on what is actually manageable, acquire you an initial stock of your first market and to deliver it on the auction house. Being aware of how much stock you have left & keeping it supplied is the first step.


How To Maintain Your Supply:
Maintaining a considerate stock of your markets is another large part of making gold, if you don't have anything to sell you don't have any income. Players will supply items to the auction house then attempt to resupply when they notice they are sold out, you can get away with this in certain markets where you are crafting items & can purchase the required mats on the auction house however you are losing gold by having to pay for them. Being self sufficient makes a huge difference in amassing gold, never pay for something due to being lazy.

I suggest using a notebook, notepad on your computer, your favorite addon or however you want to go about keeping tabs on your stock. Note how much you have in back stock, how much you have on the auction house, when & how much of the item sells each time so you can begin to learn the trend of your stock. This way you can learn & predict how often / when it is time to restock your market prior to it going empty.

Having the knowledge of when your stock will take a major hit will prevent you from looking up & noticing your out of multiple markets, forced to scramble & missing thousands of gold in a tiny window of time. Especially if its the peak periods of your sales. No one can predict when Billionaire Ben will come & completely annihilate your stock by buying it out, but this is when time management comes into play so you have free time to do emergency restocks.


Time Management:
Time management is a universal theory, with the goal being to keep all markets stocked. The way it is delivered will be completely different for every person farming due to different routines & markets.

You must weigh your markets with three key principles. How often you make a sale in the market, the value of gold you make from each sale, & the time it takes to farm the items in the market.

An item could take you two minutes to farm, but only bring in ten gold. While another item can take you an hour to farm, but brings in thousands. Clearly the item that brings in thousands will outweigh the item that brings in ten gold. This part of time management is easy. The third variable is how often does your items sell. If the item that brings in ten gold sells almost instantly while the item that sells for thousands can take days or even a week, the item which sells for ten gold becomes higher priority. The goal is to continue a constant stream of gold income with consistent sales at a high rate & quality.

Sale Consistency > Value / Time


When & How To Venture Into New Markets:
Once you learn to maintain a market or two, understand time management & get in the routine of having free time you can begin to branch off into new markets. I suggest doing this one at a time, or two at the most. This allows you to get comfortable with the new market, the sale rate & time it takes you to restock as well as maintain these markets as well. Every time you add a new market, it will adjust your routine due to priority so throwing ten new markets in at once without complete control will cause you to lose gold due to loss of stock across multiple markets or simply lack of efficiency.

When adding new markets you will do the same background checking you did with your initial start up stream but now you can factor in niche markets, you can begin to play with items that dont sell every day as a surplus.

Never allow a new market to abuse your previous markets, a sure thing is always better than a possible thing.


Investments:
Investments happens to be part of adding markets however needs to be discussed on its own. Investments have the ability to bring in lots of gold via flipping items on the auction house however it ties up your gold until the item is actually sold. This is when you need to make the decision of how long it will realistically take you to sell the item, how much your putting into the investment, if not having access to the amount of gold you spent is worth time profit from the time it takes to sell the item, if you can continue to function without the amount of gold your investing & if the gold your spending can be used elsewhere to at least match the profit from the investment elsewhere at a faster rate.

Clearly investing 5k to make a few hundred gold is pointless, the return value isn't enough. Investing 5k on something that will take weeks to sell without a large return profit is pointless due to that 5k being able to be used elsewhere for faster returns.

When investing the usual rule is, buy low with high return value aka underpriced items as well as big ticket items which are considerably low in supply (rarely seen) on a global market scale. Items removed from the game fall under this category & are the number one item to really invest in, as long as you know it can be sold. Buying a dirty rock just because they vanished from the world is pointless.


Other Notes:
Create a bank toon, a lot of people skip this step & just post their auctions on their main toon. This is a horrible decision for the fact that you will be able to be tracked easily, copied & scoped. All it takes is someone to add you to their friends list to discover where you are farming your stock from, as well as know when it is okay to completely stop all sals by undercutting you. A bank toon parked next to the auction / mailbox also allows for quick reposting, undercutting, etc.

Acquire a guild bank, this has perks to it such as cashflow however they will be removed from the game with the release of WoD. The main reason for this is to acquire more storage. Your personal bank will not hold your stock, a guild bank grants you access to more thanenough space with all the tabs. It will allow you to store niche items that are currently overflooded on the market without hurting your personal storage space.

Certain Addons will make life easier, even if you have never used them before. Postal allows quicker gathering from the mailbox, auctioneer allows quicker undercutting / shopping, etc etc. Addons speed up the process of things to grant you more time maintaining your markets as well as controlling them, I suggest putting the time into learning which ones are worth using.

[fishnugget]

well written. worth the read as a reminder to how economics works.

[MrPanquecas]

Really usefull, nice tips for the ones trying to get on it

[kindellyilo]

nice tips for the ones trying to get on it

[Daylyte]

^ same people??