Here are a few reasons why its worth buying a professional gold guide instead of just googling (or yahooing or binging or whatever flavor you use!):

1. A lot of the free information on the web is crap
   How do you know that the information you get from a web site is any good? A reliable purchased gold guide has well researched and tested info to help you learn how to make gold in wow fast. You can spend hours trying out tips you find on the web, only to find they don’t really work. I have personally tested Luke’s Gold Secrets Guide (the only general gold guide I recommend) on multiple characters so I know that its good.
2. There is good free info on the web, but its hard to find
   You can spend literally hours trawling the web and Googling for info about how to make gold in WoW. I don’t want to do that really…do you? I mean, I have a family, a job, a house and all that other stuff  and when I have free time, I want to play, not spend it researching how to make gold. Buy a gold guide and all that work has been done for you.
3. A lot of info on the web was great….3.5 years ago
   Web sites get out of date and don’t always get updated for new patches. Go try searching for info right now and you will find pages that haven’t even been updated since Vanilla. WoW is a game that changes constantly. If you want to learn how to make gold in WoW, you need info that is constantly updated too. Good quality professional guides are updated for free for each patch, and you get access to every update once you have purchased the guide.
4. A Professional guide has all the information in one place. The info is clearly written and organized so you can get straight to the business of implementing those gold-making starts in-game. For all that you will save and the great information that you will get, a top quality paid guide is great value.
5. If you don’t like the guide, you can return it for a full refund
   A good paid gold guide has a 90 day unconditional money back guarantee. That means you can get a refund of all your money for any reason for a full 3 months after you buy it. So there really is no risk to you.

Try Luke’s Gold Secrets Guide for a top quality guide that has been helping WoW players like y0u get the gold they need for over 4 years.

Zygor’s Dailies and Events Guide Finally Released!

At last, 25 dailies in just over an hour (and 300g) here I come!!

(and there’s still time to get in the draw for a StarCraft 2 beta key and other prizes, so hurry).

From what I’ve seen, the daily quest guide will be exactly the same. You’ll be able to follow it to make the maximum gold per day from dailies (about 300g) in less than 2 hours. I also saw that there will be a guide to the Crusader title (yay!) and that in-game holidays will also be included. So, using this daily quest guide, it’ll be really easy to get those holiday achievements in future. I checked out the free trial that’s been available on his site for a few weeks and I’m really excited about it. There’s really only been one daily quest guide available until now. Based on previous experience with Zygor’s stuff, I think this one will be much better.

Now you can’t buy it yet, but you can check out his Announcement video and shiny new web site. While you’re over there, check out the free forums he has up and see how much other folks love his guides and how great his customer service is.

I also hear that just before the launch, Zygor will be giving away $5000 worth of prized in his launch contests, so be sure top check back often! I’ll keep you updated when I find out more.

UPDATE! Price and Prizes revealed (and they’re awesome)!!! Click here to check it out and find out when you’ll finally be able to buy it!

The PDF is still available to anyone who still wants it in that format. Click here to download it or use the link in the ‘Stuff to Read’ section of the sidebar. Email signup is no longer required.

I’m going to be working on some updates for it to cover some of the changes to Auctioneer in the past few versions so look out for that!

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Patch 3.3.3 released tomorrow (3/21/2010)!

The big change is the removal of cooldowns for the higher end profession mats  titansteel, moonshroud, spell and ebonweave. The cost of these items will fall as their availability increases. There will still be gold to be made on these, since they still require a high skill in the relevant profession to create, but you will now be relying on selling in quantity for that gold.

In other news, Frost Orbs will now be able to be traded for other items, like essences. Multiple Frost Orbs will be tradeable for Runed and Crusader Orbs. The number of Frost Orbs available has increased a huge amount since the introduction of the Dungeon Finder, while their usefulness has decreased. As a result,  their price has dropped by an insane amount. You may see the price increase a little again as they become more useful. I would save any Frost Orbs that you get right now until after the patch.

STEP 1: Create low level mules and park one at an Alliance AH, one at a Horde AH and one of your main faction at a neutral AH. YOu will need a mule on the opposite faction on a different account or a friend on the opposite faction to help you transfer items. If you do not want to do cross-faction arbitrage, just create one mule on the faction of your choice. If you have gold on a main character, buy the biggest bags you can afford for your mules. If not, buy bags as soon as you make some gold.

STEP 2: Get 5-7 days worth of scans from each faction you are working on. Scan twice a day if you can but once will be ok.

STEP 3: If you GATHER or CRAFT, create batch posts for all the items that you sell regularly. If you are going to use DISENCHANT, MILL or PROSPECT arbitrage, set up batch posts for the products you will create using those skills. You will need to have at least one of the item in your inventory to set it up as a batch post item so collect the items and mail them to your main mule first.

STEP 4: Configure a RESALE and CONVERT searcher. You initial settings need to reflect how much gold you have to invest. If you only have a small amount, set your maximum item price and minimum profits low. As you build up your bank balance, you can increase these. Make sure that you SAVE the searchers for later use.

STEP 5: OPTIONAL – Configure an arbitrage search. Don’t forget that when you buy items using this searcher, you will need to mail them to your neutral AH mule on your current faction and have a character on the opposite faction (on a different account) buy it. You can then mail it to your opposite faction AH Mule and list it on the opposite faction’s AH. Phew. Sounds complicated but it really isnt and its very profitable!

STEP 6: Configure DISENCHANTING, MILLING, PROSPECTING if you have any of those skills. Make sure you set them up to return items appropriate to your current skill level.

STEP 7: Load and Run your searchers. Review the results and buy the items you want (or CTRL+ALT+SHIFT click Purchase to buy everything in the list.

STEP 8: If you identify items that you can profit from regularly on your server, add them to your SNATCH list. Enter a price threshold that you are sure will guarantee you a good profit at resale.

Now, when you have everything set up, on each visit to the Auction House on your mule, you will do the following:

1. Scan (Get All if it works well for you)
2. Run Searchers and make purchases
3. Collect purchased items from mail
4. Collect gathered, looted and crafted items that you have sent from your alts (including cross faction or from main characters) from mail
5. Convert, Disenchant, Mill, Prospect items
6. Batch Post gathered, looted or crafted items
7. Appraise and post additional items

If you want to learn more about Auction House gold making strategies, Mayley Winters has launched a complete video series that shows you how to master the Auction House. Check out my review here.

You can limit the information that BeanCounter displays to bids (yours) or auctions. You can also choose to list things like unsuccessful auctions.

You can use this tool to see how well certain items performed for you in the past and to help you decide if an item is worth continuing to buy. For example, you can check how many times you had to relist an item in the past and what it finally sold for. This might tell you that the item just does not sell well.

If you want to really be successful at making gold using the Auction House, BeanCounter is deceptively simple but is in factone of the most useful tools in the Auctioneer Suite, even though it is much easier to learn to use than the other modules (just search for what you want). The complex part comes in when you need to figure out what information to look for and then what you should do with it. You need to learn from your mistakes and then change your strategies. I have tried to show you the technical parts of actually using the add-on to help you in this tutorial, but the strategies have been simple; usually just help with default settings.

But you are certainly aware that there are much more interesting strategies you can develop and that goes beyond what I can tell you here. If you are serious, your next step should be to consult other Auctioneers – although don’t expect them to give away too many secrets – or move on to an advanced Auction house strategy guide.

Happy Auctioneering

Auctioneer Disenchant Filter

Using  Searchers for Fun and Profit

The complete list of profit searchers is:

• Converter: convert items for profit without using a specific skill
• Disenchant: Disenchant items and sell results for a profit
• Milling: Mill items and sell results for a profit
• Prospect: Prospect items and sell results for a profit

All of these work in a similar way and their settings work just the way resale does. Just like resale, you need to set it up to work with your own situation.  In general, you should use all profit searchers that you have the skills for for maximum profits.

One setting to be aware of is the ‘Use custom levels’ option. This lets you search for items that you can convert using a skill that is in a specified skill range. For example, if your Disenchant skill is at 300, you can select Use custom levels, then set the Minimum skill slider to 0 and the Maximum skill slider to 300. Now the search will only return items that you can disenchant at your skill level. You can also use the Minimum skill slider to eliminate low level items from your search (although setting an appropriate minimum profit will take care of that more effectively). Once you are happy with your configurations, click Search to see your results.

Purchasing and ignoring works in exactly the same way as Resale.

Using Arbitrage Searchers to For Even Bigger Profits!

An additional profit searcher which works a little differently is Arbitrage. What Arbitrage does is find items that you can buy on your current faction and sell on auction houses of the opposite faction. This can be one of the best money making strategies you can use if you do it right.
You will need to use the neutral Auction Houses in Everlook, Booty Bay or Gadgetzan to transfer items. You will also need help from a friend or a second account because you cannot buy auctions that were posted by a character on the same account as the purchaser. The neutral AHs take a 15% cut so post your items at a low price and be very quick about having your friend or character on a second account purchase them. Leave it up too long and another player might come along and buy it. There are so called ‘Auction House Snipers’ who spend time doing just that. I suggest making your transfers at a quiet time for your server to reduce this problem.

When you use the Arbitrage searcher for cross-faction selling, you will need to make sure that you have several days of scans for BOTH factions if you want to get accurate results. While the whole process seems a bit involved, this is really a great way to make gold on the Auction House. Make sure that you have alts set up at all the Auction Houses that you want to trade on to save you time!

Save Time Using Snatch

If you really know the market for some specific items, such as certain crafting components and you know that the price can really fluctuate throughout the week, you can use the Snatch searcher to automatically find those items when they are listed below a certain price. You can add items from your bags to the snatch list and then set the price threshold or you can add an item from a search results list created by any other searcher.  Just select the item in a search list and click the Snatch button. To run the Snatch search, click Search on the Snatch page to show any item in your snatch list that is below the price threshold. Then alt+ctrl+shift click Purchase to buy all the items that it found.

Applying Filters

Filters are useful because they let you exclude classes of item that you never want to see listed in your search results for any searcher.

• ItemLevel: Filter the list by item level. Use to exclude low level items that don’t sell well or make much profit
• ItemQuality: Filter by item quality. Use to exclude gray items for example
• TimeLeft: Filter out items by auction time remaining. Useful if you are going to bid on resale items etc instead of buy out and you don’t want to have too long remaining when you can be outbid.

Saving and Loading Searchers

If you have created a search that you want to run over and over, enter a name for it click the Save button at the top of the Search tab.

When you want to run the searcher again, select the saved search from the drop down menu and click Load to load those search settings. Click Search to run the search as usual.

If you want to learn more about Auction House gold making strategies, Mayley Winters has launched a complete video series that shows you how to master the Auction House. Check out my review here.

Argent Crusade dailies are tiered. You start out as an Aspirant, then a become a Valiant and finally rise to the rank of Champion. To rise to the next rank, you must complete a certain number of daily quests and collect a token for each one. You can rise to Valiant in 3 days and Champion (for a single faction) in another 5. Once you have reach Champion in your home city faction, you can go back and do the Valiant dailies for all the other cities and earn the right to represent each one. Once you are exalted with each city and have earned the right to represent each one at the tournament, you will gain access to special Crusader daily quests (and items). You will no longer be able to do the Valiant quests though. You can just keep doing the Valiant quests by not turning in the final quest to become champion with the last faction. If you do that, you will not get the Crusader title or access to the Crusader items or dailies.

Aspirant

If you have not completed the quests to enable the Argent Tournament dailies for this rank, you will need to do those first. The chain begins at Justicar Mariel Trueheart. He will direct you to the representative for your faction. You will then need to complete three jousting training quests that will teach you how to joust. Pay attention to these. You will be doing a lot of jousting and the better you are, the faster the dailies will get done.

You will then be able to accept the quest Up To The Challenge. To complete this quest, you must earn 15 Aspirant’s Seals. You can earn a maximum of 5 per day from the daily quests that are enabled on the quest givers near your faction reprentative. There are three dailies that you should do each day to earn your seals:

A Blade Fit For a Champion or The Edge of Winter or A Worthy Weapon (only one of these is given each day and rewards 2seals, plus gold). Requires some travel but is generally easy to complete.

Training in the Field – Easy kill quest to kill any 8 scourge in Icecrown. The closest Scourge are just south at Sindragosa’s Fall (73,38) but not all the mobs there count towards the quest. The Cult of the Damned members at Sindragosa’s Fall no longer count for this quest but the necrolords do. You can continue further south to Scourgeholme where all the mobs are scourge.

Learning the Reins – Jousting! You must practice your jousting moves against some stationary targets. This won’t help much with the real jousting at the next rank but at least you will know which button does what!

Do each of these dailies for three days. When you have 15 seals, turn in Up To The Challenge. Congratulations, you are now ready to take the The Aspirant’s Challenge. Accept the quest from your faction guy then go talk to Squire David at the Aspirant’s Ring. When you are ready, go ahead and defeat the Argent Valiant in a joust.

Once you have turned in this quest, you will become and Aspirant and earn the achievement Argent Aspiration. You will be able to start working on becoming a Valiant and earning the right to represent your home city in the tournament. We will cover this in the next post in the series.

If you want the easiest possible way to do all the Argent Tournament dailies and earn maximum rewards, Check out Zygor’s daily quest guide!. It includes a full in-0game, step-by-step guide to earning the Crusader title in the fastest possible time.

Remember…new raid content means that raid consumables will be selling well. This is new content so even the top end guilds will be taking along every potion and consumable they can stuff into their backpacks while they work on getting this new stuff on farm status. And when they start to upgrade their gear with new drops, it will all need to be gemmed and enchanted. So Alchemy, JC and Enchanting mats and end products will sell well. This happens every content patch, so if you want to know how to make gold in WoW, make a good mental note of this.

The new DE option and Dungeon System will probably mean a drop in the value of enchanting mats though, cause they will be much more common. So you might want to stay away from those.

Changes in crafting recipes can mean big profits to those paying attention. For 3.3, the Saronite to Titanium cooldown has been removed, so expect Saronite to be in high demand as people stock up.

Don’t forget,  Check out the WoW Stimulus Plan! to get the best WoW gold guide on the market and learn top secret strategies for taking advantage of every new patch.