Making gold has always one of the things that the players strive after. Having enough gold to not having to do boring daily quests to pay for your raiding costs is of course awesome, sadly, this isn’t the case for most people. Many people out there in World of Warcraft are quite low on gold, and with the recent Cataclysm expansion, more and more people need gold for repairs, for enchants, for gems, and of course to buy the best and the latest gear. The best way to make gold in Cataclysm would be using the Auction House, but this can be quite hard if you’re inexperienced, so I’ll teach you how to make gold with your professions, we’ll take the Auction House gold making part some other time.

So, to begin with you need to know which professions are profitable and how you’re supposed to use them. Well, for starters, there are two different types of professions. The Gathering Professions and the Crafting professions. Which is exactly what it sounds like, with the gathering professions you will gather materials such as ores and herbs and sell to the people with Crafting professions that makes them into an item / enchant / potion / Glyph, etc. A nice thing which people often do is combining these two, because you can have two professions. The combinations could be something like Enchanting / Tailoring, Herbalism / Alchemy, Mining / Blacksmithing, etc. But let’s break it down a bit more so you understand which one is what and how you monetize it for the highest gold profit.

Gathering Professions

There are three different Gathering professions, Herbalism, Mining, and Skinning. I wouldn’t recommend that you choose skinning because the demand compared to the supply and the price of it just makes it less profitable than the other two. Mining would probably be the best professions for you as a new player, Copper ore currently goes for 55-70 gold per stack on my server, and these are the ores that you get in the starting areas, so everyone can mine them, including you. Mining will always pay off nicely and it doesn’t really matter what mining level you are, people need ores of all different levels for loads of different purposes, which has increased a lot in Cataclysm and that has made the demand for ores higher than ever before.

Crafting Professions

The Crafting Professions are all the ones that I didn’t listed as Gathering Professions, the top three profitable crafting professions would be Jewelcrafting, Blacksmithing, and Inscription. I’ve personally made loads with gold with just a few minutes of work per day thanks to Inscription, the glyphs sell like crazy now when everyone wants to get a glyph of every kind for their class. Jewelcrafting will make you loads of gold as well because people need gems for their new items, and most people are prepared to pay up to 50% of the gem cost for a cut gem. Blacksmithers makes gold the same they’ve always done, selling high end gear recipes, some level 80-85 blues can go for quite a lot as well so keep that in mind.