20 Days of Gold Making - Day 1 - Beginnings

This entry is part of a series of gold making posts answering the questions in the 20 Days of Gold Making Challenge started by Nev over at Auction House Addict.  Be sure to check out the gold blogging challenge for post topic ideas.

20 Days Of Gold Making (Day 1)
"When Did You Start Making Gold & What Triggered It?"

First off - Thanks to Nev for creating the 20 Days of Gold Making Meme and providing some fresh ideas and topics for us gold bloggers to write about.  It does get a bit tough to pull topics out of thin air, especially when you've been writing for over 3 years and are pushing close to 800 total live posts, like I am.  I hate writing about stuff I've already written about, even if it is buried in the posts from years ago, so this challenge is a nice spark of fresh ideas for blogging.  I won't be doing all 20 posts in 20 days, as I will be working them in between my other normal gold making posts, Gifts for Gamers articles (on Saturdays), Eviscerated Gaming Podcast show notes (Tuesdays), and monthly gold blogging carnivals.

When Did You Start Making Gold In WoW & What Triggered It?

For most of the time during Vanilla WoW, I was clueless about the gold making opportunities.  I had horrible strategies for making gold and was resorting to farming vendor trash off of mobs to sell to raise what seemed like an outrageous amount of gold required to get my very first mount.  After quickly growing bored of my role as a lowly gorilla hunter, I set my sites on larger profits and headed over to farm rare world drops of all things, not fully grasping the concept of what a world drop truly was.  I remember looking up an item online on wowhead and then taking note of the 1 or 2 listed mobs that had been recorded as dropping the world drop item and then headed out to grind those hoping for the same world drop.  Damn, was I a moron back then! 

After getting nothing to drop worth selling and banking all of the non-vendor trash raw materials (because I may need to use them some day), I headed over to farm some of the Enchanting recipes that I had seen people looking for in trade chat, like the Crusader Enchant.  I killed Scarlet Spellbinders (or whatever they were) for days and weeks on end until one day I finally got the Enchant Weapon - Crusader recipe to drop and had a brilliant notion.  Instead of a one shot sale to some Enchanter, why don't I level an Enchanter and start enchanting player weapons for tips (with their materials) or for a profitable fee if I have to buy the materials myself?  This was before the addition of enchanting scrolls to the game.  So from there, my first alt ever was born, my Enchanter.  She would disenchant the junk I would find and level her Enchanting skill up so that I could start making gold off of these Enchants that everyone was always asking for in trade chat. 

I then started to look into crafting other items with my main character, who was a Skinner / Leatherworking Rogue.  Of course with all of the gorillas I had been killing and skinning, I had a nice collection of hides, leather, and found some pearls as well, so I started crafting Barbaric Bracers for selling on the auction house for a nice profit.  I then dug in deeper with my Vanilla Leatherworker and expanded into Deviate Scale Belts, then into Spidersilk Boots as my Enchanter was an Enchanter / Tailor.  Of course the Netherweave Bag market sort of fell into place afterwards and I was on my way to starting my empire of crafters.  Seeing the ability to actually turn a profit via crafting got me longing for one of every crafter and so my journey to build a factory of gold making crafters started the long trek to complete my army of alts.

So what triggered my venture into gold making?

I found my motivation from being sick and tired of being broke, not having enough gold to pay for raid repairs, not getting my first ground mount until level 46 (a full 6 levels later than the minimum in Vanilla WoW) and never having any extra gold for anything.  I was sick of being broke and had started to hear bits and pieces of economic discussion over the guild's TeamSpeak channel.  So I knew other people were making gold and pulling it off, so something had to give.  I would listen quietly at the ideas and discussions these guild members where having about controlling markets, or buying out all of an item to relist it for much higher, or stockpiling certain items for the upcoming expansion's launch, and I would just sit back and take it all in.  Then I started to make my own gold and became a competitor of a few of these guys, without them knowing I got the ideas from them in the first place!

It only takes a bit of understanding to start to become eager and thirst for more knowledge.  From there, I found my first gold making blog ever, Greedy Goblin, and dug in to start learning and snicker at all the idiots featured in his weekly "Morons and Slackers" posts.  I do miss those posts as they were always great for a snicker.

Continue On Reading More 20 Days of Gold Making

• 20 Days Of Gold Making - Day 2 - Goals

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