Quick Buck

I normally am against side-ventures when you're starting out. You need to focus on your business, and collecting data for it is key to your long-term success.

When you're first starting out though, you need some capital. Leveling and skills, you might have spent the easy 3-4k you get just from being alive. The most common thing I hear is 'How can I make 4k gold quickly?' because people just want to get their flying mount or shiney-worthless-object or +10 achievement points for fake money as fast as possible. This blog isn't for people like that. The things I write about are breakdowns behind logic and theory of trading fake currency virtually. Don't confuse the two.

Regardless, everyone should always be on the lookout for deals and profits to be made. I tested one this week, and saw it fizzle out on Proudmoore in about 4 days. This is merely an example. In /trade, I offered to buy the new Stormwind cooking badges for 20 gold a piece. Yes I know you cannot trade Badges, but the items that you can buy with badges sometimes are tradeable! Here's what I did:

New cooking recipes and new cooking meat means people will have demand for a new commodity... One that officially doesn't become available until Dec. 7th. But there is a way to get your paws on some. 'Crate of tasty meat'

Which will give you a random quantity and selection of some cooking reagents, as well as some trivial grey item. I've been lucky and not received any empty boxes, but I've heard it can happen.

So for 40 gold I picked up boxes of random meat, and turned the meat around to the AH for the going rate, minus a reasonable undercut to hopefully prevent competition. I sold out all of my inventory in a matter of minutes. During this time, I watched and waited... seeing no one else offering to purchase crates as I was doing. My testing period was a total of approximately 4 hours.

I only sold 9 pieces of meat, which cost me a total of 160 gold for 4 crates. My revenue was around 780 gold. This activity ate up around 60 mouseclicks of effort, maybe 2-3 minutes of planning time, and the passive activity of reading /trade for four hours post-process. What I risked was the investment fee, plus the potential of having inventory goods that I could not use or craft anything with, and might possibly become devalued in a limitless commodity environment as is possible with anything from an NPC vendor.

So looking for these kinds of quick-money profits are not long-term profitable, nor are they 100% safe, they can be the boost you need to get your business rolling. Or just finish saving pennies for that stupid-mount-that-is-identical-to-all-your-other-ones.