Profiting from Your Motivations

     I'm so excited to be participating in Copper-To-Gold's/Cold's blogging carnival for the first time. I've read them individually for a while and have always thought it was a great way to bring the blogging community together. This month topic is "What drives you to make gold? What do you do to avoid getting burnt out?"

My grandaddy always said, "make WoW gold like ya got a fire under your..."

What keeps driving you to make gold?
      If I can say anything on this topic in order to save a new goldmaker time, it's this; my driving forces have always been things that I eventually incorporated into my sales routine. So, look at what motivates you to make gold, and figure out how you can sell that.

     One of the great things about WoW is that its developers are smart enough to keep the game decently malleable. When I was first starting out, I was making gold because it was just, you know, part of the game. You level your skills 1-525 (or whatever it was back in Lich King when I started, shhh! How am I supposed to remember way back then?!)  I was in a social guild and pretty quickly I was the wealthiest person in the guild because I was the only person regularly mining copper ore and posting things on the auction house...without addons, omg. When Cataclysm rolled around, I transitioned to a different part of the game: raiding. My gold making goals transitioned as well to supplying myself with weekly raiding consumables of food, flasks, gems, and enchants. After a few months of that I leveled an enchanter, jewelcrafter, and started grinding crocolisks in order to supply those consumables to the raiding community and profit from it. Later when raiding got more serious, I had to start saving to buy BiS craftables. Only took buying one of these (and spending everything I had EVER EARNED) for me to realize that selling these, while slow sales, is a great low-competition market.

Not what I bought, of course, but makes you feel honored thinking that some people have only made that 41,800 gold, ever 

     About this time Blizzard introduced transmog and outfitting my characters drove my gold-making goals for a while, but then I figured out a way to profit from it, thanks to all the wonderful sites out there dedicated to TSM shopping, crafting, and auctioning lists. In summary, I recommend working in markets as they interest you. Sure, you can capitalize on everything all at once, but it's much more fun and rewarding to be profiting from something that is also your personal goal at the time. 

      I actually just hit a big milestone, 500k gold, and with my inventory of about 800k, the question "why continue crafting?" is a lot more valid, when I could just sell off what I have and be set. I wasn't playing during the Mimiron's Head days and missed the Invincible's Reins push by about a month or two. So, neither of those holds a special 999,999g spot in my BMAHeart. I guess it goes back to the general consensus of last month's carnival- Gold making is fun for me! :)  It's like asking Riggnaros 'Why do you keep raiding?' or any of the Loremasters out there 'Why do you keep questing?' Well, for me the answer is, "Why not? Logging on and looting the mailbox is enjoyable enough at the moment for me to be a major part of why I play the game." Although...

What do you do to avoid getting burnt out?

      I'll take a break. As most of you know, my motto on WTBGold is "Search. Craft. Post. Every Day." It's an easy to remember breakdown of how to make gold. But, if you're doing that at the expense of your sanity, then that's just silly. I've got a loving family, a business here we're building, a blog I'm trying to grow, and a progression raid team. There are days, rarely, when posting 700 glyphs and/or 1200 Vine Britches of the Monkey morning and night is just not a priority. So I don't do it that day. And you know what? That's ok. The market will be there tomorrow. I don't make the 5k-20k gold from those glyphs, and that sucks, but I will tomorrow and I'll be happier. If you do the same, so will you. Even people who love their jobs take vacations, and in fact, I'd be willing to bet that people who vacation love their jobs even more. 

      A big problem with MoP was that people who weren't used to dailies were suddenly bombarded with them. And while it hasn't had as much press, people who weren't used to raiding, were suddenly "forced" to do 4/8/12 LFRs every week in much the same way they just had to do the dailies. Blizzard lost subscribers because of this, despite having an absolutely superb expansion. Take a cue from them, and don't let your drive to succeed at goldmaking become an obsession. Use a checklist to help you remember what you have to do everyday, but if you are looking at that checklist and saying to yourself "Ughhh, that sounds awful," then just queue up for a dungeon with some friends and go wreck some face instead. :) I hear Heavenly Shards are going to be selling higher at the start of 5.4, anyways.

Less posting. More Bladestorm.

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