I just reserved my character names and I am very ready for classic. Last week we looked at some longer term techniques, today we will focus on techniques to use very early on.
Raw gold is king
Early on in classic raw gold methods will be the way to get money. There will be very little gold going around as no one will be high level yet, and thus the mobs they kill and the greys the vendor won’t have enough value.
This means you want to focus on methods that generate raw gold from either mobs or vendors. Selling to other players can certainly work, and will get you a nice amount of silver relative to what is in the game, but it may not be the best GPH.
Ways to get raw gold
Raw gold is generally generated from killing mobs and looting them for the currency and from vendoring items. As such you want to maximize the amount of items you can vendor and the gold you get. This will primarily be done through killing mobs, but there are some tricks you can use.
Skinning for vendoring
Material prices will be quite low in terms of raw gold early and you may be able to make more gold by picking a gathering profession like skinning just to vendor the leather you get. Obviously selling to players will get better, but for the first days you may be better off just vendoring.
Vendor scans
This is something that TSM has as a functionality where you can scan the AH and it will return any items with a lower buyout then the price you can sell it to the vendors for. This is a great way to generate risk free gold, and with very little gold going around players may post their items below the vendor price without realizing. Hopefully TSM is live for classic so you can do this automatically. Alternatively you will have to make a list of items from wowhead based on the vendor sell price that you can check regularly.
Kill mobs
This is the main way in the early parts of the game. Go out, kill mobs and loot. You have to do this to level up anyway, so it’s not like you will be losing out on anything.
Good luck!