Today I’m going to discuss a framework you can use to view your goldmaking activities. The point is to help you get a clearer view of what you are doing, and which activities are important for your growth, and which are important for your gold right now.
The three levels of goldmaking
Today I will show you a way of thinking about goldmaking activities. We are going to break activities down into three different levels of activities and talk about what they focus on.
The base level is your core areas.
The second level is growth areas.
The third level is the explore activities.
So let’s take a look at what I mean by each of these levels.
The base level, your core
The core is the set of goldmaking activities you have nailed down. Markets that you make steady gold from. For someone just starting out this could just be emissary caches or some mob farming somewhere. When I did my gold challenges this has typically been material flipping and various crafting markets. It is incredibly important to make sure your core activities continue to generate gold so you get richer, and so you can afford to test new markets continuously.
The second level, growth
These are the markets you are focused on growing. You probably have some sales, but the sales are lower than your spending so far. These are the ones you should focus on. You want to devote just enough time to the base level so you can afford to experiment here. These markets should not stay in the growth level indefinitely though. If you are doing it right, they will eventually become a steady market that is more at home in the base level of this model.
The third level, explore
This is where you take risks. These are markets that you want to look into. This will generally be the riskier markets like battle pet flipping, BoE flipping and super rare transmog. Single items are very expensive and just entering the market is a huge risk. It can be smaller markets as well of course. For these you want to just take a stab every once in a while when your core has generated some extra profit. These are the markets that you will have to enter to get super rich, so you want to get experience with them, but they should not be your focus until you a million gold (BfA money). In classic this can actually apply to pretty much any market as everything is massively in flux right now.
Summing up
Focus on the core activities that you know make gold first. Then you spend as much of your effort as possible on growing new markets you can confidently enter. Every once in a while you should also dip your toe into markets that are your long term goal, the super expensive markets that most of the richest players in the game engage in.