Are you seeing streamers or content creators or discord users with big gold numbers and wondering how the hell you get started: let’s get into it.
Tradeskillmaster
If you want to earn gold with professions or the AH, tradeskillmaster is as close to mandatory as it gets. I won’t go into the full intricacies here, just a quick and dirty version, for a more in-depth look check out my written guide linked in the description.
Start with what you have
There are literally thousands of items you can sell for a profit in WoW, so starting out you need to focus on something. You also need to get experience with the AH. Reading guides, importing TSM settings etc. is useful, but what do you do when your results are substantially different from mine? You need to learn from that, and you learn from that by changing your approach, and tailoring it to your realm.
So let’s start
The first thing you’ll do is open up your profession windows, if you have any. Then you’ll look through the list for anything that is profitable (it has a big green number). Now of course, profit is not enough, you also need the item to actually sell. So we’ll check the sale rate and average daily sold.
There’s no hard and fast rule for this, but if both are below 0.1, then you should steer clear.
Add to queue
Then you add one of each, or a stack of each if a consumable or similar to your crafting queue. Simply click the Queue button after typing in the amount you want to craft.
This will add them all to a list so TSM can easily calculate what materials you need and save you time when buying.
Gather materials
We’ll now go to gathering and pick the crafter and professions we want to add to the task list. This will generate a list of what you need to gather, and where you can get it. Simply work your way through either buying from the AH or buying from vendors.
Posting to the AH
Lastly we want to post the items to the AH. Since we are selling crafted items we need to make sure we make a profit over what we bought the materials for. I have a generic operation I use for almost all crafted items. Min price 120% crafting, normal 200% and maximum price 500% crafting. This works well as a starting point. For gear go with 1 as a max post quantity, for consumables you will want to go a little higher, 5, 10 or more can all work.
Assess and iterate
Then you just have to wait. For consumables and some items it can make sense to sit at the AH and cancel scan, for other items you would just let them sit (like transmog or Crafters mark gear). Once your auctions have either expired or sold you can craft more of what sold. The most important part is to learn from what you’ve done, and to tailor your approach based on that. Sold a ton of potions after posting at a specific time, try to time your post at that time slot, etc.
Get out there
That’s pretty much it, now get out there and make some mistakes. The worst that can happen is that you’re forced back into doing callings or farming for a while. Even losing 100k will teach you a lot about your realm that you can never learn from a guide. Good luck!