One thing I see people do all the time is fixate on min-maxing low value markets. This isn’t bad per-se, but if you really want to get rich you need to be in high value markets.
A conversation with a friend
This post was actually inspired with a conversation I had with a real life friend. We’ve both been interested in goldmaking since wrath. He was discussing his plans for making gold in TBC, using things like profession alts for tailoring cooldowns and alchemy cooldowns. He was also considering jewelcrafting, but he was hesitant to commit.His story reminded me that loads of people have a similar focus. This is actually one of the reasons why I don’t read the woweconomy subreddit much any more as most players focus on ways to optimize low value markets rather than optimizing to spend more time on high value markets.
High competition means high value
Generally speaking profitable markets will be popular for gold making. Since the best markets are generally also the most popular ones it means they can be really hard to break into or understand. Some of them also require a significant amount of gold to even consider entering, which makes it even harder for regular joe player to get into it. So newer goldmakers are unlikely to be exposed to these markets, and also unlikely to see significant success in them if they are exposed to them.
Entry level markets should remain entry level
A lot of the markets I recommend to people starting out are recommended because they are good for players who are starting out, not because of their top level potential, but because they are easy to get into and get some success with. Those markets are entry level for a reason however, and many of them do not make sense to focus on long term.
Keep growing
All of this means that many players focus too much on min-maxing something familiar, rather than actually learning the next market “up” the food chain. Material flipping works really well in classic, but eventually just volume crafting might be a better use of your herbs if you have some good recipes. This concept is something you need to keep in mind if you want to keep growing your gold pile. If you spend too much on markets that your capital has actually outgrown then you will stagnate.
Look at my NA series for some examples
I’ve done this a lot so far in my NA zero to hero series on youtube. I’m still only doing entry level markets in that series, but i know that I will graduate out of them as soon as I have enough gold for it. Your approach needs to adapt, and that means changing more than just going to a slightly higher potential gold per hour farm with more variance, it means hitting the big potential markets like rank 6 legendaries, or large scale prospecting, or crafting BiS gear. In fact I probably need to take my advice and start working on this.