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!

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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!

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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!