Building a 30,000g Passive Income with Inscription – Part 1
Plan:
Using Trade Skill Master and a character with Inscription, automate a Passive Income to generate 30,000g regularly in order to purchase wow token/s.
Steps:
- Transfer old level 90 scribe to main server
- Ensure scribe has all patterns / completed researches
- Craft 2 of every glyph
- Post 2 of every glyph on the AH
- Cancel undercuts and repost quickly
- Craft 18 of every glyph (a stack of 20 minus allowance of 2 in case of errors)
- Store all glyphs in a new guild bank except for those on the AH
- Replenish stock using TSM crafting prompts.
Over the course of the next few blog posts in this series I will guide you through how I made a scribe to generate thousands of gold on the AH, crafting glyphs to sell, all automated by Trade Skill Master. If you prefer to read this series in your email, sign up to the blog post updates/newsletter and get a free Daily Cheat Sheet.
About the Author
The Gold Queen is written by Alyzande. With many level 100s, 9 years expertise in making gold, 11 garrisons, 17k+ achievements, 1593 days played, and over 32 million gold earned. The Gold Queen blog teaches you how to make gold playing World of Warcraft using ethical trading, auction house flipping, crafting, reselling snatch lists, and farming gold making
A Long Tail Alt is the New Bank Alt
New Bank Alt
Readers who have also seen my stream at twitch.tv/thegoldqueen will have noticed I spend a few hours per week on what looks like a mid level bank alt.
I recommend you do not have a bank alt, especially not wearing bank alt clothes/armor. Having a level 1 alt immediately rouses suspicion from a potential buyer, who is slightly more likely to buy from what they think is a “Normal Regular Player” rather than a dodgy looking level 1 called “Marksbank” wearing a tuxedo. This goes back to my opinions about keeping a “golden reputation”.
I recommend you post your crafted items by the character which crafted them. This avoids competitors stringing together A plus B and realising that you are not just one player but have a whole matrix of alts working in synergy. You want to slip under the radar of competitors. You want to appear non threatening.
Pareto Principle:
80% of your sales will come from 20% of your items.
The remaining 80% of items should be mailed to your Long Tail Alt to deal with.
More posts about the Long Tail:
Levering the World of Warcraft Long Tail Economy with Addons
Can you dominate the new WoW Gold microfinances?
Your Long Tail Alt
Best type of Long Tail alt is a half-leveled abandoned alt, with access to a guild bank, and lots of bag space. They should appear to competitors as just a random mid-level character who happens to have a lot of random stuff to post on the AH.
Your long tail alt will handle:
- Gear found when leveling
- Greens from the Salvage Crates
- Transmog items
- Crafted items that do not sell after 1-2 attempts by main character
In short:
[bctt tweet="Your Long Tail Alt will handle the sale of large volumes of items that take a long time to sell."]– The Gold Queen
About the Author
The Gold Queen is written by Alyzande. With many level 100s, 9 years expertise in making gold, 11 garrisons, 17k+ achievements, 1593 days played, and over 32 million gold earned. The Gold Queen blog teaches you how to make gold playing World of Warcraft using ethical trading, auction house flipping, crafting, reselling snatch lists, and farming gold making
What is Flipping?
Flipping means to buy low, sell high. You purchase one item or many, either in the Auction House or through trading direct to another player. Then you ‘flip’ that item around by putting it back where you bought it, but for a higher price, and earning gold from this work.
What is a Shuffle?
In World of Warcraft, a “shuffle” is when you transform one item into another, aiming to add value. For example, buying ore, and creating jewellery.
The best shuffle is moving one item into another repeatedly, adding value at every stage, until you end up with something worth considerably more than you paid.
What is AH?
The Auction House is abreviated to AH, and can be found in capital cities, plus Shattrath and Dalaran. There are also auction houses in the Shrine in Pandarian (one horde, one alliance) accessible only to engineers. The previously neutral AHs in Booty Bay, Gadgetzan and Winterspring are now part of the cross-faction AH system. All the access points to the AH connect to the one central Auction House system per server/realm.
What is TSM?
Trade Skill Master, TSM, is an addon that modifies your user interface in WoW. It’s perfectly within terms of service, and can be downloaded as part of my Gold Queen auctioning and gold making pack at Curse Gaming. TSM is not a single stand-alone addon, but comes in its own suite: a core addon with modules. Make sure you download the core addon, all the modules, the new apphelper module. Then go to the trade skill master website and download the desktop app which runs minimized on your desktop providing your addon with data drawn directly from World of Warcraft via Wowuction
What is GPH?
Gold per Hour, GPH, g/hr. A way of measuring and then comparing farm spots or auctioning work to discover which auctions give the most gold for your time.
What is Mats?
Short for materials. The basic items that you use for crafting. For example, you would use the “mats” cloth with your tailor to create cloth armor.
What is Walling?
When you ‘wall’ someone, you undercut your competitors on the Auction House so that it makes it nearly impossible for them to buy you out, forcing them to cut their prices either under yours, or to leave that market completely. Walling is a form of market manipulation. Examples of walling are posting 500 stacks of Sumptuous Fur in singles, requiring your competitor to click 500 times to buy you out (if they don’t have the TSM keybind/mousewheel macro), and posting 4 of every glyph craftable for only a few silver over the crafting price.
What is Undercutting?
When you undercut your competitor, you offer your item for sale at less than them. Either by one copper, or by a significant chunk. What the vast majority of auction house users do not know, is that you don’t have to undercut, you can in fact overcut instead. See my post on dealing with your competitors.
What’s a Stack in World of Warcraft?
A stack is when more than one item fits in a slot in your bag, bank, auction house. Armor and gear are single ‘stacks’ while you can carry 200 herbs in one slot. So if you see someone advertising to sell something “one stack of x” then you can assume the amount of x you will gain is the maximum number that can fit in one space. When you have more than one of a stackable item in your bags it will show as a small white number on top of that item.
One stack of 200 Fireweed
What is blacklisting / a white list ?
To black list someone, you add them to a list, either mental, on paper, or in an addon like TSM, making a note to always undercut them. A white list is the opposite. With a white list you make an agreement that two players will not undercut each other and will not drive prices down by competing against each other. When it’s more than 2 players, its a Cartel. When it’s all the players, you’re in deep trouble if you’re a buyer.
Have I missed out an important auctioning term? Do ask!
About the Author
The Gold Queen is written by Alyzande. With many level 100s, 9 years expertise in making gold, 11 garrisons, 17k+ achievements, 1593 days played, and over 32 million gold earned. The Gold Queen blog teaches you how to make gold playing World of Warcraft using ethical trading, auction house flipping, crafting, reselling snatch lists, and farming gold making
Selling Elixir of Giant Growth on the World of Warcraft Auction House
This is an example of flipping, aka “buy low, sell high”.
How to find an item to flip on the AH
Two places to start looking:
- the Wowuction website Bargains section
- the TSM website Great Deals section
These two sites give you an easy list of items to buy for a resale profit. Make sure you check the item before you buy it. Why it sells, who buys it, what it can be used for, whether the price is an outlier, whether someone is trolling you or manipulating the market. Then buy, and flip for a resale.
How to learn to flip on the Auction House
Everyone wants to know how to learn to flip and the answer is not an easy one.
Watch what you are crafting, what you are looting, and look at the prices on the Auction House when you sell. You will start to learn the normal price levels for your item, roughly, without having to check the TSM database or look the item up online.
If you sell a lot of potions for example, then you will notice which days, and which times the prices spike. Demand will go up just before raid times when guild leaders call the faithful to battle. This maximum price is the one you will aim for, always. Do not sell when the items are below this price.
If the item/s are significantly lower than the price, then you BUY.
Unless there is a reason why they are suddenly coming down, eg oversupply, been replaced by something better, no longer wanted.
[box type=”warning”] Learning to flip is not easy because the prices are different on each server. You must put the “hard work” in, and learn the prices yourself.[/box]
How I flipped Elixir of Giant Growth
Elixir of Giant Growth drop a lot from the garrison missions, and players just slap them on the Auction House for the cheapest price. I consistently saw mine selling for about 90 silver to 1 gold. When I posted some for 20-30s, I immediately saw them sell and therefore learned the price was too low.
This is when I knew that the item was flippable on my server. That I could buy them for anything under 50s, and aim to sell them for as near to 1g as possible, taking undercuts into consideration.
Trade Skill Master Accounting Module tells the rest of the story.
Click to Enlarge
Total price spent 80g 99s 87c
Total gold earned 957g 2s 5c
Total profit made 876g, 21s
About the Author
The Gold Queen is written by Alyzande. With many level 100s, 9 years expertise in making gold, 11 garrisons, 17k+ achievements, 1593 days played, and over 32 million gold earned. The Gold Queen blog teaches you how to make gold playing World of Warcraft using ethical trading, auction house flipping, crafting, reselling snatch lists, and farming gold making
Hope you enjoyed the April Fool’s joke yesterday.
How is your gold making coming along?
I have another two guides scheduled to be published this weekend. Free as always. Hope they help you. Let me know.
About the Author
The Gold Queen is written by Alyzande. With many level 100s, 9 years expertise in making gold, 11 garrisons, 17k+ achievements, 1593 days played, and over 32 million gold earned. The Gold Queen blog teaches you how to make gold playing World of Warcraft using ethical trading, auction house flipping, crafting, reselling snatch lists, and farming gold making
AH Costs Changes to Cover WoW Token Costs in Patch 6.1.4
WoW Token
Item Level 1
Binds when picked up
“Use: Adds 30 days of game time to your World of Warcraft account.”
[blizzardquote author=”Blizzard Entertainment” source=”http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/18390557/”]INTRODUCING THE WOW TOKEN
Coming soon to an Azeroth near you: the WoW Token, a new in-game item that allows players to simply and securely exchange gold and game time between each other.
Players will be able to purchase a WoW Token through the in-game Shop for real money, and then sell it on the Auction House for gold at the current market price. When a player buys a WoW Token from the Auction House for gold, the Token becomes Soulbound, and the player can then redeem it for 30 days of game time.
The WoW Token feature will be enabled at a future date. Patch 6.1.2 adds in the framework needed for the WoW Token feature in the game client and is not active at this time. Check out WoW Token Coming Soon – Additional Details for more details on how the feature works.[/blizzardquote]
With 6.1.4.2015 introducing the new WoW Token, Blizzard have sneaked in a change to the Auction House which most gold makers have missed.
Because the Token exchange has to start somewhere, we will be setting the initial gold value of the WoW Token ourselves. The starting gold value in each region will be based on several factors, including regional in-game economies, but ultimately our goal is to select a fair and reasonable starting price. After that, the Token’s gold value will be determined dynamically based primarily on player supply and demand. Simply put, if more WoW Tokens are being listed than are being purchased, the price will automatically drift downward over time. If people are purchasing Tokens from the Auction House faster than they’re being put up for sale, then prices will go up accordingly. In order to cover the costs of the new WoW Token we will be increasing the Auction House cut from completed sales from 5% to 20%. As a reminder, to help make sure players can trade WoW Tokens confidently, once a Token sells, the seller will receive the amount of gold they were quoted at the time they listed their Token. We know a lot of you are excited to exchange a WoW Token or two, and we’re looking forward to making the feature available in the near future. We’ll provide additional updates on the rollout of the WoW Token feature soon.
Nasty shocker.
When you successfully sell an item on the auction house, the house will take a percentage of the winning bid as its cut. From 6.1.4 this increases from 5% to a whopping 20%.
What should you do?
- If you are posting a lot of auctions, consider giving them away to friends instead.
- Another option is to post your auctions for longer, so they have more exposure in the AH.
- Readjust your TSM to take into account the new costs.
Cut = 0.05 * Winning Bid changes to
Cut = 0.2 * Winning Bid
- Alternately you could check your calendar.
About the Author
The Gold Queen is written by Alyzande. With many level 100s, 9 years expertise in making gold, 11 garrisons, 17k+ achievements, 1593 days played, and over 32 million gold earned. The Gold Queen blog teaches you how to make gold playing World of Warcraft using ethical trading, auction house flipping, crafting, reselling snatch lists, and farming gold making