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.

Well, if you’ve been following along for a while now, you probably know how stoked I am for WoW Auction Mastery, the new video guide from Mayley Winter. I’ve included a video review of the guide above, but there’s something that wasn’t mentioned in the video that you guys should be pretty happy about…

The Early Bird deal for the launch will only be available for the first 200 people, so I strongly suggest you click here to get through and secure your spot. You’ll be getting the guide at a reduced price of $57, and on top of that, you will be getting a FREE guide of your choice from UltimateWoWGuide. The choices are:

• Dugi’s Alliance 1 – 80 Leveling Guide
• Dugi’s Horde 1 – 80 Leveling Guide
• Ultimate Gold Farming & Profession Guide
• Ultimate PVP Strategies Guide
• Dugi’s Dailies & Events Guide

I have the Dailies Guide myself, and even though I’m not much into dailies, it comes in very handy for getting your rep up with the different factions, and we all know that rep is something that gold can’t buy. If you want to lock in your Early Bird pricing and get your FREE bonus guide, click here to go to the official site.

Just one last thing: Mayley said she has over 5000 people on her “early members” list right now, and she’s sent off an email to all of them. With only 200 early bird bonuses available, the math suggest that you had better act fast if you want to get in on this. I’ve already bought mine, so I guess that makes it 199 copies left!

Click here to get your copy of WoW Auction Mastery and your FREE bonus guide now!

The new video series is created by a player named Mayley Winter, and it is actually called WoW Auction Mastery.  Dugi is a friend of hers, and has been sending out emails on her behalf.  Anyway, as I mentioned before, it’s going to be all video, and it deals with everything from getting Auctioneer set up for the first time to advanced market control and total domination.  Did you watch the video above?  She takes a new character from 0 to 1000g in 4 hours.  On top of that, she’s got even more free videos on the official site!

Pretty amazing.  This guide is pretty much a must have if you’re interested in making money off of the auction house.  I can’t wait to get my hands on this.  The guide is being released on August 6th, and Dugi and Mayley will be sending out regular updates via email, so if you don’t want to miss out on this click here to go to the official WoW Auction Mastery page and punch in your email address to get access to even more videos and a FREE e-book!

On that note, Dave Farrell (known in game as Dugi and best known for his leveling guide, gold guide, and most recently his WoW daily quests guide) is releasing an in-depth video guide to playing the auction house for maximum profits.  Whatever strategy he’s teaching obviously works, because in the videos he takes a BRAND NEW character from flat broke to 1000 gold in 4 hours.  

Yes, you’re reading that right.  250 gold per hour on a brand new character.  That’s a tough number to achieve on a level 80, let alone a level 1.  As someone who has been using Dugi’s Dailies Guide for a while now (yes, I hate dailies, but I need rep and I don’t want to PUG Heroics so…) I know the guy puts out some quality stuff, so I’m pretty stoked to get my hands on it.

I’m sure he’ll be sending more info out prior to the launch, so I’ll be sure to keep you guys up to speed on it.  This is shaping up to be the best WoW gold guide out there if it does what it claims, and Dugi definitely knows how to deliver.  Stay tuned for more info on Dugi’s Auction House Gold Guide and make sure to head back to the home page for more 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!

The whisper he sent me was “Hey, you’re not the only one with a website now, cool guy.”

Then he linked me to his site.  All I can really say is, if you are planning on leveling a Paladin, you should definitely check out Paladin Leveling Guide, as Quanta knows his stuff.  This is his 3rd Paladin, and he has been every spec under the sun, and has leveling down to a science.

If you want to level a Paladin painlessly, check him out.

Auction House Domination

The Art of Hiding Your Stacks of Gold Behind an Alt

This is going to be a short one, because most people are intimately familiar with the process of hitting the “Create new character” button and entering a name.  I’ll just stick to some basic tips here.

• Use a Human if you are Alliance or a Troll / Orc if you are Horde.  It will save you some time getting to the major city for your faction, and after you get some of the tells you’ll get, trust me, you will never want to level that toon.
• Name them something that a noob would name their character.  Try this:  Next time you see someone asking where Mankrik’s wife is, or begging for gold in trade chat, write their name down.  Use that as the basis for your AH character’s name.
• DO NOT TELL ANYONE who you are when you are on that character.  Never /wave at a guildie, don’t answer questions about your main’s class in trade chat, don’t give anyone a hint of who your main is, ever.  I am speaking from experience.

Those 3 tips are usually enough to ensure that you stay under the radar.  I’d recommend grabbing a few bank slots and some big bags if you plan on moving large amounts of product (which you should) since it gets pretty tedious sorting through the mailbox and sending stuff back and forth.

The next installment of my Gold Secrets should prove to be a little bit more helpful than this one, but hey, I said I would cover every part of this stuff in depth, right?  Till next time!

Click to go back to 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 main reason I’m pumped about this is that I’ve never had the time to get all 3 archetypes up to the level cap before, despite having wanted to since release.  I now have a tank in my Death Knight, a DPSer in my rogue, and a dedicated healadin to round out the mix.  This means that my guildies can stop whining about not having a healer and put their money where their mouth is as far as getting me geared up

On a more gold related note, and speaking of putting my money where my mouth is…  After getting my professions capped and getting a few choice gear upgrades, I am now flat broke, so it’s gonna be back to the books for me and see if I can come up with something truly impressive to get my World of Warcraft bank account back in the green.  I’ll be sure to share.