200k PER DAY?!

You can find WoW gold making moguls where you least expect it. Occasionally you'll find that your raid team's vegetable farmer is actually a booming tycoon who rakes in 100k-200k DAILY and has 21 MILLION Gold across all of his toons.

For those of you who may be new to the gold making game, this is just ridiculous. Jim from PowerWord:Gold is an expert and has helped thousands of players make gold. He has just over 2 million. Elvine, another expert, totes on his stream a lifetime earning of 11 million although this doesn't take into account what he's spent, or how much of that is profit. A consistent ~150k daily is bonkers. So who is this farmer?

He's missin a nickle.

I was able to sit down and talk to him for an hour shortly after I finished up the Disenchanting Goldifier post and he was nice enough to let me pick his brain. He's a quiet guy, keeps to himself, and every week keeps the guild vault overflowing with crocolisk meat, Sunsong Ranch mats, and potions. I've asked around and apparently he is also quite the miner too, supplying several people with person-to-person daily ghost iron contracts of about 100 stacks each. He's had his account active since Vanilla, and while he used to raid, doesn't do much more than LFR or the occasional alt run nowadays.

His advice:
First off, don't expect to make outrageous amounts of gold without putting in time to do so. you can make a very decent income in a limited time flipping greens, or crafting specific items, but when I asked him about how he found time to farm so much ore regularly, he said "well, do you want to raid or do you want to make gold?" So here's my interpretation. Ask yourself, "is goldmaking a legitimate part of the game to me, or just something I use to pay for the actual game itself?" If it's the former, then get out there and farm away, but be ready for the work, I vaguely remember him saying something along the lines of "12,000g a day in Auction House posting fees." If it's the latter, then take it easy, and don't kill yourself, because the game won't be as much fun.

He stays  up  to  date. One thing he's been doing regularly because of this, has been running old raids. 5.1 and 5.3 introduced some battle pets that make Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Temple of AQ, Naxx, Karazhan, Serpenshrine Cavern, and Tempest Keep extra viable to farm. There are 2 or 3 pets in each raid and each pet has a 10-25% drop chance. I've never been into Pet Battles, but gave it a whirl and ran all of em; got 7 pets ranging in value from 800g to 6,000g. If you bother to loot corpses with an updated version of The Undermine Journal Addon, you'll get a ton of sellable transmog. I generally only pick up anything worth more than 200g, and get about 5-10 pieces per raid. My fingers are crossed for your AQ runs. Do this every week on multiple toons, and multiple accounts, and you can rake in a hefty sum. I'd put an expected value of loot at about 20,000g/character per week for all 7 raids.

One transmog costs 150,000g more than the other. Sure. Whatever.

He follows a plan, and has been using the same 14 methods to make gold since he started, 11 of which do not directly use the Auction House. What are those methods? Well, sorry guys, but I don't know him well enough to have gotten the whole shoot-n-works, and honestly, I don't know if he'd want THAT much of his secret out there. However, I can say that, the aforemention battle pet farming is not one of the core steps to making gold, and from how the conversation went, neither was daily questing. Both are merely bonuses. I can say that rep grinding has something to do with it, so let's just speculate that old-world rep-required transmog items would sell for a decent markup on the AH without any competition. What I can say for sure though, is that if you find something that works for you in particular on your server, stick to it.* Heck, write it down on a laminated checklist and keep it by your computer if that helps you. Use a dry erase marker and every day go through your checklist. May seem silly but until you get used to a system, little things like this can really help. (*Note: Stick to it, but always keep an eye out for ways to improve.) PostEdit: Alternatively, you can just use this checklist addon. Thanks to GoblinRaset's blog.

Embrace all markets. To bring in that amount of gold, you need to diversify diversify diversify. So, you have two max-level professions? Great! Go get two more. You have four now? Great! Go get two more. Or, if that's too much crafting for your taste, Google some other ways to make gold. Flip some greens. Snatch some pets for cheap from another realm (I'll fight you to the death on the term "Arbitrage," Jim!) You can even Duel people for gold, if PVP is your thing. Specific advice from Mr. 200k, was to focus not just on crafted items but also on farming and selling materials, specifically stocking up on Ghost Iron ore/bars like a mad man in preparation for the new patterns in 5.4. Each pattern requires a higher amount of bars than the current ones do, and the rumor mill has Blizz even upping the spawn rate on the GIO nodes in the Valley to compensate, so that prices don't skyrocket longterm.

I'll be sure to keep everyone informed of any future information I glean from him that is worth sharing, but follow me on Twitter cause we all discuss things there too. He's a really nice guy, and I've not only made a lot of gold since talking to him, but I've enjoyed our conversations. Good to have new guildies to talk to. :)

Until next time, remember that all of this can be summed up in a few simple words:
Search. Craft. Post.
Every Day.