Making Gold in WoW - The Basics.

Whatever race you are and whatever class you play you will at some point need to grind some gold to progress in the game. If you are raiding in WoW you may find that on progression instances, where wipes are common, you end up spending huge amounts on repairs, flasks, elixirs, food and buffing mats

So how can you make gold in World of Warcraft?

There are a few different ways, all of them have their pros and cons.

Grinding, the most common way of making money is grinding. Whether it is for netherweave cloth, primals (Primal earth, air, fire, water, mana, life and shadow, although some are worth more than others!)

Grinding is pretty much guaranteed to make you gold, at a speed dependant on the skill of your toon, it is however very boring and very repetitive. Grinding can be done in many places, I prefer Nagrand, For the elemental plateau, the lake below it for motes and the warmaul ogres for their netherweave!

Auction House Trading. Playing the action house game is a risky, but lucrative way of making money. Buy low, sell high. Search for things you think are under priced and sell them on for a massive profit. You can make big money doing this, the downside is you can easily lose the gold as well as earn it!

Using your Professions. By the time you have hit 70 you should have two high level professions under your belt. Some of them are fantastic for making money, others less so.

Alchemy
- A great way of making easy money, personally I find Healing Elixirs, Mana pots and Tanking Elixirs sell well. DPS items seem less popular, since DPS do not personally take responsibility for their actions as easily as healers or tanks they are much less likely to stock up on expensive raiding mats when they can just as easily coast through an instance.

Enchanting
- Another great way to make cash, though more by disenchanting than enchanting itself. Enchanting mats are worth a lot of money, and picking up greens in instances can net you a fortune in gold

Engineering.
- Engineering used to be the worst profession for making money, however recently they have brought out a mote extracting device, using this in conjunction with a helmet that lets you see 'clouds' from which you can extract numerous motes is an amazing way of making cash, especially for those with epic flying mounts.

Skinning/Mining/Herbalism

Gathering professions inherently bring in money, you can make a lot for this simply by gathering what is lacking on the auction house and selling at massively inflated prices. However it is also quite boring, and requires you to keep an eye on the minimap as opposed to simply grinding by killing all the mobs around you.

Leatherworking/Tailoring/Blacksmithing.

Fairly useful for yourself, but not so much for the making money. There are however some fantastic patterns that drop endgame, these can bring in some massive sales, with some epic patterns making items that can sell for 1-3 thousand gold, though much of that is in the price of materials.

Running Instances

Yep that's right, running the instances in normal mode may only net you a little reputation, but with a high drop rate of greens and blues you can make a lot of money here, especially if you have an enchanter to turn some of those blues into large prismatic shards (Sell for around 30g pre patch 2.4, expected to drop by a huge amount afterwards!)