Just a heads up that this is an independent review, and if you’re looking for the official Gold Secrets website then click here.

WoW Gold Secrets by Luke Brown

My review of Luke Brown’s Gold Secrets guide

WoW Gold Secrets is a comprehensive and detailed guide to making gold in World of Warcraft.  With 325 pages of content, 3 bonus guides, a profit chart, and free lifetime updates, the guide totally over-delivers.  The presentation is great, too.  The author clearly put some work into the WoW-themed design, making it feel like a perfect companion to the game.

The table of contents is huge, and covers pretty much every niche you could think of and some that you probably haven’t.  The writing is done in a first person style, and holds your hand all the way through.  The individual sections are really well written and informative, and the author makes it clear that some techniques may be more effective than others depending on your server.

I obviously can’t go over every method in the book, so I’ll just say this much.  As you probably guessed by my earlier post, I HATE farming gold.  I’d rather do pretty much anything else in game, but as someone who likes to keep my gear up to date and have the best gems and enchants available, I spend a LOT of it.

Usually when I logged in, I spent 2-3 hours on daily quests and grinding, and on some days I would spend another hour or two mining.  That’s almost a part time job, just to keep my characters in decent shape.  It got to the point where I was seriously thinking about just buying gold, risk of getting banned and all.

Trying this guide was my last ditch effort before risking a ban just so I could stop farming.  I read through the guide, found the techniques that I thought would take the least amount of time, and started using them.  And guess what?

I spent less time farming, and actually made MORE gold!

Click here to discover the secrets I used.

I cut my dailies down to just the ones I needed for rep grinds.  I only mined while waiting for random heroic groups.

I’m going to be totally straight up with you guys here.  I am a pretty lazy guy.  I wanted to take the work out of making gold in WoW.  I work 40 – 50 hours a week at my day job, I don’t need to turn World of Warcraft into a second job.

I ended up using mostly auction house techniques to earn my gold.  Combine that with the auctioneer mod and the bonus guide to using it that comes along with the guide, and I had myself a cash cow that could be milked on short notice for 10 minutes of my time.  I used the Profit Chart that was included with Gold Secrets, and did less of the stuff that didn’t work and more of the stuff that did.

Now to be fair, I’m not making the author’s listed 497 gold per hour.  You might be able to get there depending on your server’s economy, but mine is trash.  I’m not doing too bad for myself though.

My current average is 426 gold per hour of play time, and yes, that includes the time that I’m PVPing and waiting for instance groups.  Pretty good, especially when you consider that I only really spend about 20 – 25 minutes a day playing the auction house.

The guide also claims to offer gold-making solutions for characters of all levels.  Last time I started a new character on a new server, I didn’t have the gold at 20 for my mount, so I decided to test this theory out.  I started a Night Elf priest on a new server,  and by the time I bought my Nightsaber at 20, I had almost 300g to spare.  Now, when I first leveled my Undead Rogue to 60, he barely had 100g when he dinged.  It’s pretty clear that the lowbie strategies work too.

If you have ever had issues with keeping your characters in decent gear for leveling, getting upgrades enchanted and gemmed, or earning the gold to get your epic flying mount, this guide WILL change how you play WoW.  If you’re anything like me, you’ll find that your play time just got a LOT more fun.

Click here to discover WoW Gold Secrets.

Auction House Control

How to properly dominate the Auction House in WoW

Controlling the Auction House in WoW boils down to a simple formula (one that can actually be applied to most markets outside of the game as well, but that’s a bit off topic) that can be replicated across practically any in-game market you choose to enter.  The steps are as follows:

1. Identify the niche you want to control, and the most profitable item within it.  This is well and truly server dependent, and will require you to monitor your niche for a week or so to judge what is worth controlling and what isn’t.  I could write a whole guide on how to judge liquidity in the Auction House but it’s a bit beyond the scope of this guide.
2. Once you’ve identified the item, make sure you have enough money to buy it out and to keep buying out any competitors.
3. Relist your item at an inflated price in relatively small quantities to create the illusion of scarcity.
4. Pick up the gold from your mailbox.

If you’ve chosen your niche appropriately, that’s really all there is to it.  If you’ve started small, scale it up by broadening your niche (i.e. go from red +str gems to all red gems to all gems) or moving into another one (which is the better option if you’re in a market with a lot of dud items) and keep expanding until you have to buy a new account to hold all the extra gold you’re carrying.

If you’re not doing this 7 days a week, I would strongly suggest listing items for 48 hours starting on Saturday morning, and buying on Sunday evening when most of the weekenders have put up their items at reduced “weekday” prices, although this pattern may vary depending on your server.

If you have any questions about this method, feel free to drop me a comment and I’ll respond back.

If you’re looking for more ways to make gold, make sure check out my review of Luke Brown’s WoW Gold Secrets!

Gold Secrets Auction House Domination

Finding A Profitable Niche to Dominate

OK, so how do you decide which niche to enter?  Unfortunately, this is the truly boring part, because it largely just boils down to a whole lot of research.  My personal process is as follows

1. If there is a trend I can cash in on, start there.  This really only applies around holidays or new patches / expansions.
2. If there are no profitable trends, pick a broad category.  As a specific example, let’s say Gems.
3. Since controlling every gem would be far too much work and would cost a ton of gold, we need to drill down.  Which gems are most in demand?  Well, everyone loves to DPS, and red gems have great DPS stats for all classes.  Let’s start there.
4. There are quite a few red gems, and some sell substantially better than others.  Given that our goal is to pull gold from the gigantic DPSer market, let’s stick to the basics.  We’re going to go with the agility, strength, attack power, and spell power gems to start.
5. Do I have enough gold to easily control all of them?  To handle a spike of new ones from someone who was hoarding?  If not, which one or two are likely to bring in the most gold?  Let’s say I have enough gold to handle 2.  I’m going to go with the attack power and spell power gems, because that covers the vast majority of classes.

Once you’ve drilled down to a manageable niche, you’re ready to create your alt and start the gold flowing in.  In my experience, the most consistent gold comes from recipes, consumables, crafting materials, and twink items.  More Gold Secrets to come!

Click to go back to WoW Gold Secrets

We’re going to go with a basic overview of the strategy this time around, and I’ll expand on each step in further articles.  Welcome to part 1 of my:

Gold Secrets Auction House Control Primer

The secrets to unlimited auction house gold in WoW

Let’s go ahead and outline the process.  As I mentioned, we’ll get into each one in more detail later.  If you consider yourself fairly auction house savvy, this may be enough to get you started.

1. Find A Niche – Depending on  how much gold you have to invest, you can go as broad or deep as you choose.  Things to consider are ease of access, free alternatives, scarcity, and maximum profit potential.
2. Create an Alt – The simple fact of it is, if you take a market, you will have your fair share of haters.  Better that they send their hate mail to a level 1 alt than your main.  It should go without saying, but make sure the name isn’t similar to any of your “real” toons.
3. Move Gradually – You need to make sure your niche is going to have more gold flowing in than out.  Find out what the “best seller” of your niche is, buy it out, and relist it at a markup.  Keep in mind that auction house domination requires you to take over the niche completely, so if you can’t afford to buy out the whole shebang, either go deeper into the niche or choose a different one.
4. Measure Success – Are you making more gold than you are spending?  If so, continue on to step 5, otherwise head back to step 1.
5. Expand – Take your gold income to the next step by broadening your control.  If you are already at the top level of a market, now is the time to expand into other niches.

As we expand on the key points here, you’ll be equipped with all of the info you need to become an expert at auction house domination.  Stay tuned for more WoW gold secrets!

The method for this is pretty simple, the only real work involved is the research.  Bring up Wowhead in a separate window and then head to the auction house.  First, type “dust” into the search box and sort it by price.  Write down the prices of the different types of dust.  Next, do the same for essences.

Now that we’ve got that data, we’re going to run a search for green items, filtered by level.  As a rule, dusts come from armor, and essences come from weapons, although every now and then you’ll get the odd crossover.  Sort by 10 level blocks to make it easier to sort through and see what’s available, and make sure you stick to just armors or just weapons.  Look for items ending with of the Boar, of the Owl, of the Whale, or other relatively useless stat combos.

Ready for the gold-making bit?  Pull up any items that look under-priced for their level bracket on Wowhead and check what they disenchant to.  If the mats would sell for more than the price of the item, buy it, disenchant it, and relist the mats.  If not, move on.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

This one does take a little more initial setup than the last one, but once you get a feel for it, you can probably do the whole range of weapons and armor in about 10 minutes.  As a side note, this was how I got my regular flyer on one of my rogue alts, so it definitely does work very well, though better on some days than others.  That’s my Gold Secret of the week.  See ya next Wednesday!

Today’s tip (and, to be honest, a lot of the future ones as well) will be centered around exploiting the twink market.  The twink market is easily one of the most lucrative in the game.  The items are easily acquired through trivial content and are in high demand, which is pretty much a recipe for success.  This particular tip will take you to Old Hillsbrad via the Caverns of Time.

Take a flight to Tanaris, ride to the Caverns of Time, and jog through until you get to the Old Hillsbrad instance.  Once inside, you’ll want to mount up and ride to Southshore.  Head in to the Inn, and speak with the barkeep.  Ask to see what he’s got for sale.  See that Rumsey Rum Black Label?  Buy as much of it as you have bag space for.  When you’re out of bag space, go ahead and hit your hearthstone.

When you get back to your main city, do a quick search on the auction house.  If you have competition, undercut them slightly, otherwise list it in stacks of 5 for 1-3g per stack.  Considering your cost per group of 5 is 10 silver, that’s a pretty hefty return.

Don’t forget to check back next Wednesday for a new Gold Secret of the week!

Stacks of silk and mageweave cloth don’t sell too hot on ye olde Auction House, so I was kind of looking for a way to offload them at a decent profit when I stumbled across a few listings of bandages.  These things sell at triple the price of the cloth they’re made from.

Apparently the reasoning behind this is that twinks can use higher level bandages than they can make, and a lot of the time they don’t feel like logging back onto their main and losing their spot in the battleground queue to make bandages.

So what do they do?  Well, if you’re smart, they run to the auction house and buy YOUR bandages at a markup.  The bonus is that because this is so under the radar, you can easily control the market with only a small amount of gold.  Give it a shot and let me know how it goes for you!