From noob to pro: the journey of a new goldmaker.
The best goldmaking methods require gold
You can always make gold with farming, and while there have been periods of time and specific farming techniques that have been the best goldmaking in the game, in general it is outclassed. Flipping and crafting have a much higher top end potential, as you can leverage your gold to get advantages. The amount of time it would take to make a hundred million gold on retail from farming is astronomically higher than what it would take to make that same amount with say battle pet flipping.
Raw gold per hour is what matters
Now if you want to get rich, what matters is your gold per hour. Essentially your time is the most limited resource in most cases. So at eveyr point in time you should prioritize the highest gold per hour methods you have available, with one important caveat: if you have little gold, they need to be markets that sell quickly. It is much better to make 10% profit on all your gold every day than to make 50% profit on all your gold once a week, as the 10% profit compounds every day.
Start with low gold cost methods
When you are starting out you need to use low gold cost methods to quickly build a baseline. Gold is needed to level professions or to build up a stockpile of battle pets you can move around. That means you want to either farm, or use patron orders with professions like tailoring and engineering or do very low cost concentration setups to generate gold. Then you want to invest this gold into more longer term or total profit markets. This can be battle pet flipping, or it can be min-maxed crafters for guaranteed max quality volume crafting where you need every bit of multicraft and skill available.
Start testing and scaling gold cost methods as soon as possible
It’s also very important to start your scaling methods early. This is because literally nothing can teach you as much as experience. You need to screw up and make mistakes to learn from, and that means taking risk. Even if you just have 20 000 gold right now you should use at least half on some risky market, whether buying some battle pets, buying some transmog or trying to set up a crafter. This will teach you more than 100 hours of youtube videos can.
Pick one and work towards it
Essentially you need to pick one of these approaches. The more time you have to play the game and immerse yourself the better the integrated crafting setup is. If you don’t have too much time concentration can be better, but if you truly want to scale concentration to a ludicrous number of alts that is also quite possible.