The second World of Warcraft expansion, The Wrath of the Lich King, made everyone frantic to earn more gold than ever. What with passenger mounts and their 20,000 gold price tag, earning gold has become a much-debated pastime among players.
Even before level 80, you need to know how to earn in-game money. When you're a measly level 30 and you need 45 gold to buy your mount ... how do you do that?
No matter your level, professions and the Auction House are your biggest friends. And at level 80, there are various items you can farm.
The Auction House
Auction everything. Sell items with their names in gray to vendors, but load up the auction house with white and green items. You'd be surprised at how many of them sell. Things like Sharp Claw and Large Fangs are ingredients in alchemy and jewelcrafting, and sometimes they're hard to come by.
Cloth always sells, whether it be linen cloth, silk or netherweave. Some cloth, like wool and mageweave, sell for higher amounts because the level bracket of monsters that drop them is narrower. The Northrend cloth, Frostweave, has a low drop rate, and yet professions require loads of it, making it one of the most expensive cloths in the game.
Always put armor and weapons up for auction at least once. If nobody buys them, sell them to a vendor. If you have the Enchanting profession, disenchant items after you've run them through the auction house. Enough items will return to keep you supplied with enchanting materials, and sometimes a green item sells for more money than its equivalent enchanting components. Check your market to find out.
There are addons like Auctioneer and Enchantrix to help you maximize your gold-making potential in World of Warcraft. But you can do fine without them ... you just have to read the market a little more carefully.
Professions
There are two kinds of professions in the game: gathering and crafting. Gathering skills let you collect items from certain nodes in the world. Crafting professions let you create things out of the materials you gather, like armor, weapons, and cool gadgets.
Your best bet in money-making is to pick up two gathering skills instead of crafting skills. Gathering skills are Skinning, Mining, and Herbalism. You might also consider picking up a gathering skill and Enchanting, since Enchanting turns unwanted armor and weapons into valuable dust and shards.
Skinning earns leather. Whenever you kill a beast, you can skin it. Killing higher level beasts earns you better types of leather, and nearly all the professions use it at some point.
Mining earns ore, which can be sold raw, or it can be smelted into bars. Ore with its name in white sells better as unsmelted ore (such as copper, tin, and iron), whereas ore with its name in green sells better if it is made into bars (like silver and gold). The crafting profession Jewelcrafting uses tons of raw ore, which drives the prices through the roof.
Herbalism earns herbs, which are used in the crafting professions Alchemy and Inscription. Inscription in particular demands hundreds of stacks of herbs, and certain types of herbs are valued more than others. Check your market and see what sorts of herbs are selling for the most amount of money.
Enchanting is neither crafting nor gathering. Enchanting can be a real money maker, if you disenchant items and sell the resulting dust and shards. But leveling it up can be very expensive.
Farming:
Once you hit level 68 and are allowed to visit Northrend, it's time to think about what sorts of items to farm.
Farming means killing a lot of a certain kind of monster to get a certain item that they drop. In Wrath of the Lich King, the hottest items are Eternals. Eternals are items used in all of the crafting professions, and represent different elements. There are fire, water, air, earth, shadow, and life.
The rarest one is Eternal Fire, which you can only get from certain monsters in Wintersgrasp, a Player verses Player zone. It is so hard to get that Eternal Fire is extremely expensive on all servers.
As mentioned earlier, Frostweave is also worth farming. Check websites like wowhead.com to find areas with monsters with high drop rates. As of this writing, the high-level trolls in Zul'Drak are the ones that drop the most.
Other notes:
Don't spend your hard-earned cash at low levels by buying better armor or weapons. Better weapons or armor usually come from quests anyway. Your primary money-sink will be buying your upgraded skills every other level, and some classes, like druids or mages, have several skills to buy each time. Be a miser. Spend as little as possible.
Once you hit level 60 and start playing the Burning Crusade expansion, you will make far more money from quests, gathering, and selling items than you did in Azeroth. However, don't buy a flying mount at level 70. When you go to Northrend, you aren't allowed to fly until level 77 anyway. By the time you have leveled that high, and if you have saved your money, you will have enough for flying mount training and an epic flyer of your choice.
If you abuse the auction house and gather everything in sight, then you will be rolling in the dough.