Bank Alts Anonymous - 20 Days of Gold Making Days 4 and 5

My pet Secretary is camera shy :D

For days 4 and 5 of Nev's 20 Days of Gold Making, she asks "When did you start a banker alt?" and "Do you keep the same banker alt?"  I'm combining these two into one post for two reasons.  First, these questions go great together, and second, I don't feel that I can write a meaningful post on each question by itself. 

Day 4 - When did you start a banker alt?
Day 5 - Do you keep the same banker alt?

I started my very first banker alt after my first month of playing WoW.  A co worker of mine introduced me to the curse website for addons.  After he pointed out some helpful UI addons, I browsed around a little.  I stumbled upon Auctioneer, my first auctioning addon, and it sparked my curiosity.  To learn about how to use Auctioneer, I did a google search and somehow came across the idea of using a bank alt to auction my items for me!  Garmemnus was born!!!  A level 1 human warrior destined to live out the rest of his days in the Commons of Ironforge.  With the release of Cataclysm, Deathwing forced my hand in moving Garmemnus to Stormwind so he could be easily accessible to his customers.

Garmemnus' Glorious Glyphs (3G)

My auctioning has evolved since then.  I now participate heavily in a few markets and I'm continuing to expand!  Garmemnus now handles glyphs only.  He doesn't need a guild bank, but he does belong to one of my banking guilds.  After Garmemnus started to handle around a 300-400 glyph posting cycle, I decided that I needed another bank alt to manage all of my other items.  For this purpose I created Selltacular.  Any item I picked up that could be useful to someone else was sent to Selltacular for listing on the AH.  Now that Selltacular is managing random items, gems, enchants, shoulder inscriptions, DMF items, he is carrying a pretty heavy stock.  Things were a bit chaotic with Selltacular.  I needed a better way to organize my auctioning.  Consequentially, I decided it's time to bring on another toon to handle the selling of all gear.

Behold!  My latest creation: BILLINGTRON!!!

Billingtron Doesn't Know Where His Diamond-Tipped Cane Is!

Billingtron got his name from the MoP Engineering robot - Blingtron 4000.  I was posting something on one of my banktoons in Stormwind, keeping my eye on trade chat, when someone asked if there was a 'bilingtron' up anywhere.  I was already thinking of creating another bank toon, and was just waiting to come up with a name that I liked before creating the new guy.  So I am giving a warm thank you to that random person who had trouble typing 'blingtron'!  After I finished posting my auctions, I created Billingtron and got the guild set up.  The next step was sending Billingtron all of my gear that had been crafted, dropped, or purchased for resale.   Once I finished and listed his auctions, I was quite happy with seeing my name in the auction house UI. 

I logged on to Billingtron to relist auctions the next day and almost immediately, someone asked trade chat for a bilingtron again!  He specified that he wanted it on the Trade District bank steps.  I took this opportunity to speak up in trade chat.  I stated that I was on the Trade District auction house steps if he really needed me.  My chat box was soon filled with whispers of laughter from others who had saw the entire event transpire.  That made me smile!

I have established a good name for myself on Selltacular by utilizing clever barking methods that were inspired by Cold of Cold's Gold Factory.  And for that, I believe I will always keep using him.  Come to think of it, I need to update and generate new barking macros.  Garmemnus will probably always continue to sell glyphs, and as far as Billingtron goes, I LOVE him!

Tips and Tricks - The Magic of The Darkmoon Faire

I know it's been 2 weeks since my last post.  I've intended on publishing a post for my readers but, instead I've started work on 6 other posts, leveled 2 of my alts from 85-90, and started 2 new gold making projects which I intend on sharing, once I have them completely figured out.  Those projects may even be worked into my regular postings, um... once they become regular.  I really do need a posting schedule.  Without further ado, here is my next post in my series of posts inspired by Nev of The Auction House Addict.

20 Days of Goldmaking Day 3 - What were the first techniques/tips/tricks you used when starting out?

It's so hard to remember that far back, especially since at the time, I barely had a grasp on the auction house.  However, one thing definitely stands out in my mind; The Darkmoon Faire

Before Blizzard revamped the monthly event with the creation of the Darkmoon Island and DMF Dailies, if you wanted to reach exalted with The Darkmoon Faire, you only had a handful of options to increase your reputation with them.  There were various items you could turn in for reputation, with the completed decks being the quickest (yet most expensive) way.  I found myself buying the random items and various cards and saving them for when the Darkmoon Faire was in town.  At the time, I didn't know that the faire came to Goldshire one month, and to Mulgore the next.  I thought it was a bi-monthly event.  After my initial discovery of the faire, I spent the next two months hoarding items to turn in for rep.  By the time the faire was back in Goldshire, I had lost interest in getting rep and had gained interest in getting more gold together for my epic mount.  I found that these items were now way more expensive than they had been in my days of saving up for the rep turn ins.  I decided to sell what decks and items I had, and to my disbelief, they ALL sold, for WAY more than I had paid for them.  I had just 'flipped' items for the first time in my gold making career!  Go me!  This little discovery opened my eyes to the gold making opportunities presented by other holiday events.  However, it would be a long time before I actually took advantage of these opportunities. 

When I started out, I used websites such as Thottbot, Allakhazam, and Wowhead to research everything I intended to buy or sell.  I learned through research, trial and error, that some crafting materials sold faster if I posted them in different sized stacks.  This taught me that I could sell a stack of mageweave cloth for 5 gold, or sell it in stacks of 5 for 2 gold, simply because some players only need 5 cloth and would rather part with 2 gold than buy an entire stack for 5 gold.  This allowed me to sell 20 cloth for 8 gold instead of 5 gold.  This is just a basic example of how it worked, I don't really recall what amounts I was selling the mageweave cloth for. 

I also learned the importance of diversity.  The more you diversify your markets, the larger your customer base becomes.  I wish I had the time to level an army of crafting alts back then, I am still struggling to keep all of my alts up to date.  However, armed with their professions, my small squad of alts are helping me to continue to diversify the markets that I participate in.  They continue to help me find new ways of turning profit.


Just one of my bank tabs dedicated to DMF cards


As a kid, I always enjoyed collecting things such as coins, baseball cards, arrowheads, and various rocks.  I guess I've allowed the collector in me to carry over into the game.  I still buy, and save cards from various expansion content and make the decks for profit.  The older decks are slow sellers, but, it's something I've always done and will probably continue to do until it no longer turns a profit.

"Goald" Making, My Path to Deep Pockets

20 Days of Gold Blogging - Day 2

I believe I will begin each of these '20 days' posts by giving thanks to Nev over at The Auction House Addict for creating these gold blogging questions for us to answer and for inspiring me to get started with my first blog ever. 

If you set yourself a goal, what was your goal & at what point did you set it?

Since diving into the world of gold making, I have made many goals; both related to and unrelated to gold making.  However, I think I'll spare my readers the pain of reading about making enough gold to obtain mounts and training.  If you're reading this blog, then you've most likely gone through that experience yourself or maybe you're in the process of getting there.  On that note, I think I'll treat you with something different that still pertains to "goald" (gold combined with goal) making.

My goalds revolve around actions or accomplishments rather than numbers.  Sure, like many of you out there, there are certain amounts of gold that I look forward to reaching. However, I find it more important for myself to focus on HOW I reach those numbers, rather than the importance of the numbers themselves.

In past expansions, I made most of my income through soloing old raids.  As a hunter, I found this both challenging and fun, and making gold from these runs was just a by-product of the fun that I was having.  Eventually, I realized that I enjoyed selling the items that accumulated in my bags, and saw that I was one of the few sellers for certain materials such as netherweave cloth.  As I continued to solo old raids and reap some nice profit, I began to thirst for more gold and thus, I created my first gold making goal.

My first goald was to start using my professions to quench my undying thirst for more gold.  At the time I only had one crafting profession that I knew inside and out; Alchemy.  When epic gem transmutes were released in Wrath, I started to use my daily transmute cooldown.  I don't think it was very long before some jewelcrafter started paying me for my daily transmute.  He would mail me the materials and a nice tip and I got to keep any procs!  About once a week, he would send me anywhere from 300-1000 gold which he considered to be 'profit sharing'.  I thought this was nice but it still wasn't enough, I wanted MORE!  I power levelled my jewelcrafting on my shaman, started cutting my own gems and began to post each of them, manually without using any addons.  It was extremely time consuming, but I was making a 3-5 thousand gold profit per day and I was happy with that amount at the time. 

Cataclysm is where my crafting professions really started to shine.  At the launch of Cataclysm, I was deployed and my internet was pretty slow at the time so I was forced to run fewer dungeons, fewer raids, and spend more time on the auction house.  Right after I hit level 85 on my main, I discovered TSM (more on that in a future post) and I finally jumped into the glyph market and had a good head start with jewelcrafting as well.  I started doing the elementium shuffle and got my Death Knight (enchanter/tailor) into the mix, disenchanting the green rings and necklaces and selling embersilk bags.  I found THE sweet farming spot in Deepholm, and with the use of potions of treasure finding, I was raking in the easy cloth.  Making roughly 80k in profit every week was exciting.

The raw results

After vendoring the trash

Looks like I found some screen shots of the results of one hour of my Deepholm farming!!! I thought I'd share them with you.

Boxes opened and greens DE'd

I kept a pretty heavy focus on the auction house for most of the expansion and thought I would reach gold cap by the release of MoP.  I was wrong, but not disappointed.  I had reached just over 600k before taking a five month hiatus from WoW.  I had a pretty good reason to stop playing WoW for that time.  However, that story will have to wait until question 13, which I may end up posting out of order.  I look forward to sharing my biggest 'yay' moment in that post!

The First Day, In More Ways Than One

20 Days of Gold Making - Day One

First, I would like to thank Nev of The Auction House Addict for creating this gold blogging meme and inspiring me to get started with my first blog ever.  I have also decided to enter my post as part of  Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival and will most likely continue to participate every month!


Over the course of the next few weeks you will get to know a little about my background as a gold maker through my 20 Days of Gold Making posts. It will most likely take longer than just a few weeks to tackle all 20 posts, but I'd like to stay optimistic on the idea of gold blogging.

The First Day - When did you start gold making & what triggered it?

My first in-game sale wasn't exactly an event that triggered my interest in gold making. However, it did teach me some fundamental rules that I now follow when it comes to making gold. Here's the story:

I had just started playing WoW on a trial account right around the time of The Burning Crusade pre-release event.  I started as a Night Elf Hunter and quickly found myself immersed in this new world called Teldrassil.  At this time I had no knowledge of WoW at all. I actually believed that Teldrassil was the only place in the game.  I read all of my quest info and all of the tooltips on my character abilities before taking a step away from my very first silver question mark.  As I leveled and looted my coppers, I vendored items that I didn't need and equipped any gear that I could that seemed like a good upgrade.  I was sure enjoying seeing my wallet fill with coppers and, after a while, silvers! I quickly came across someone who would teach me Alchemy and one who would teach me Herbalism.  I soon learned these professions and began to level them, not knowing what I had just gotten myself into.  After mindlessly chasing the yellow dots on my mini map, acquiring the herbs needed to level my alchemy, I really felt like I was getting somewhere in the game (boy, was my perspective extremely skewed!).  

Someone posted in general chat about wanting some minor mana potions.  I quickly looked at my list of items that I could craft with alchemy and found that I could make some for this guy.  Being the helpful person that I am, and wanting to make friends in this strange new world, I quickly responded in general chat "I can make those for you".  After some conversation, we met up, I crafted the potions and he opened trade with me.  Upon trying to confirm the trade, I got an error message.  I soon learned that I needed to have a paid account in order to trade with people.  He was offering me 30 silver for these potions that I had made with ease!  I felt that I just HAD to make this sale, so off I went to set up a paid account (he was nice enough to walk me through it).  After a few minutes, I paid my first monthly subscription fee to Blizzard and quickly logged back in to make my first sale!  I was so excited to see that incredible amount of silver sitting in my wallet!

I think the first thing that triggered my gold making was my love for PvP and the need for my first mount which, back then, was 40 gold at level 40.  I had heard about twinking from a friend and decided that I would make my Hunter a level 49 twink.  I made friends with a PvPing Warlock named Nedflanders who also happened to be an enchanter.  I may not have had the best of gear or enchants as a so-called twink, but it was fun.  At that time I only had one way of making gold without leveling. I didn't have any alts except for my level 1 bank toon.  I needed to kill things and sell their drops for gold.  I started with farming in a cave in Arathi Highlands where the mobs were respawning as fast as I could kill them.  I sold off the mageweave cloth and vendored the gray trash drops.  I gave the greens to my warlock friend to disenchant and also sold off the occasional blue world drop that mostly came from the chests that would spawn in that cave.  Gold making was slow until I discovered my first niche market, the Cold Basilisk Eye trinket.  This was back in the day of having to actually post in general or trade chat to find a group to do dungeons with. On a very low pop server it was almost impossible to ever get into a group to do any lower level dungeons.  This trinket was one of the very few available at that level. It's quite possibly the worst trinket in the game, yet I was able to sell them for 5 gold each due player's needs to fill their empty trinket slots.  Two days after this accidental discovery, I had farmed and sold enough of them to finally buy my mount training and my first mount at level 49.

After moving and taking a couple of weeks off from WoW I got back into the game, tired of PvP and ready to level.  I really don't remember how I made the gold for my epic riding mount and the training but it happened at level 60, if I recall correctly.  I ventured into Outlands for my first experience in The Burning Crusade around the time that The Black Temple patch was released.  At that point I had a new goal in the game, kill Illidan.  In the time that I had been away, my guild had merged with another one that just so happened to be a hardcore raiding guild.  I soon leveled my way to 70 and began gearing up and doing my dailies for gold, trying to save up for a flying mount and training and then the epic flying after that.  While the guild raided, I farmed for them, and I farmed too much.  I made flasks and food for the guild to show my support and dedication and sold excess on the auction house. The gold was building up slowly, but I would eventually get there.  I did end up making my debut into the raiding scene, but I never did get to kill Illidan during that expansion. But that's okay, I found my new reason for playing the game, making gold!