Making gold in WoW

This post has both observations from my experience and an ask for help.  So hopefully everyone can find something useful regardless of their experience in WoW gold-making.

When I first stumbled upon Gevlon’s blog, I was very impressed (I still am).  Not so much by the amount of gold he could make per week, but by the fact that he managed to turn glyph selling into a system that can generate large sum of gold with minimal effort.  In addition as others mentioned in comments to his posts, this system is easily reproducible (even if not everyone can make the same sum per week).  However, there was one thing that bothered me.  Week after week Gevlon was making the same 10-15k.  He was making it when he had 30k and he was making it when he had 130k.  This seemed odd.  In real world if my wealth goes up, so does my income.  I can put extra money in the bank to earn interest, I can buy stocks or mutual funds, I can invest in other areas.  Surely, there must be a way to do the same in WoW.  So I started an investigative project.  I looked into various ways to make gold in WoW and came up with a very short list:

• Manual Labor.   This category includes running around herbing or mining and selling proceeds on the AH.  It also includes grinding mobs for drops or coin as well as doing quests.  If you only have a few hours per week to do this, you won’t get rich (but you won’t be poor either). However, this is extremely time-inefficient and doesn’t scale much – you won’t be able to mine/herb/quest more just because you have more gold.
• Using a crafting profession.  Of all the crafting professions, I think four are worth looking at as far as money-making goes: Inscription, Alchemy, JC and Enchanting.  Depending on your server economy, if you control the markets, you should be able to get around 8-10k per week from inscription and 6-8k from alchemy.  JC and enchanting can get you 3-5k each.  If you set up your production pipeline for these professions, you can get very good return on your time.  You can also scale this to a point, but once you’ve saturated the market, there is no room for growth.
• Playing AH.  This is basically buying stuff off the AH and reselling it for profit.  My original thinking was that this should be the most scalable method since clearly the more gold I have the more I can buy. 

So these were my assumptions when I started the experiment.  Since I believed that playing AH was the most scalable way to make gold, I started with it.  I moved 1k to an alt and started to resell cheap items from the AH.  I set up auctioneer’s snatch list so I didn’t have to spend too much time searching manually and the gold just poured into my mailbox.  It was extremely easy at first.  I hit 4.5k by the end of the first week and as I predicted the more gold I had, the more I could make per day.  However, it didn’t last too long.  Once I hit about 30-40k, it became very hard to spend it all on items to resell in a reasonable timeframe.  At that point in order to keep the return on my total wealth constant as I got richer, I had to spend more time at the AH and I didn’t like this much.  So the next step was diversification into crafting professions.  I leveled all four mentioned above (inscription, alchemy, jc and enchanting) and life was good again for some time.  So now I’m getting close to 100k and while I can definitely squeeze a bit more out of my crafting professions, I’m not sure I can get a lot more.

And this is where I want to ask the readers to see if you can come up with additional ways for me too keep scaling the gold making.  If you have any ideas, please let me know.