Making Materials for Profit

For this week's Gold Making Basic's Friday I want to talk about making crafting mats for a profit. I've written previously about converting for a profit but in addition there are many other skills that produce crafting materials in known quantities that can be utilized to make a profit. The various transmutations in Alchemy are the most famous of these skill but there are many other skills out there.

Leatherworking has leather making and hide making skills such as Light Leather and Cured Light Hide.

Engineering has numerous part making skills such as Fused Wiring.

Mining has all of the smelting abilities.

Tailoring has the abilities to make special cloth and bolts such as Spellweave and Bolt of Linen Cloth.

Enchanting has a few abilities dealing with shards such as Large Prismatic Shard.

Inscription has all of the ink making skills such as Moonglow Ink.

Alchemy has the ability to make oils and transmutes such as Blackmouth Oil and Transmute: Living Elements.

Blacksmithing has the ability to make grinding stones such as Rough Grinding Stone.

Jewelcrafting has the abilities to make different settings such as Bronze Setting.

While all of these items probably won't sell for a profit on your server many of them probably will. In addition that materials for many of the items are very cheap and you can often sell tens, if not hundreds, of the items a day. So when you are thinking of how to make a profit with your professions don't forget to look into making some mats!

10 Things You Didn't Know About Me

This is my post for day 8 of Spellbound's Blogging Challenge - 10 things you don't know about me.


10. I have a Bachelor’s degree in history and a Master’s in Strategic Intelligence with a specialization in Terrorism - neither of which I have ever used for anything.

9. I have a PADI certification for diving - unfortunately I also have tiny sinuses that make it very, very hard for me to clear so I don’t go diving as much as I would like.

8. Now that I live in SE Asia I can never imagine living in the west again. Winter? Fatty crap ass food everywhere? Way too many laws that actually get enforced? No thanks.

7. The main dude in the show Sister Wives is slowly becoming my hero - minus the whole Mormon thing.

6. Every time there is red shirt - yellow shirt violence here I go out and take pictures for fun. This is probably the closest thing I have to a hobby besides gaming. It’s given me lots of (cool?) pics of burning buildings, people shooting at each other, etc. I’m just hoping it doesn’t get me shot soon.

5. Even though my accent is American I think at this point I speak a Thai dialect of English. As far as I’m concerned sanuk (fun), Lao (Laos/Laotian), rak (love), jai (heart), mai (no), 555 (lol),  mee (have), and mai pen rai (don’t worry about it / it doesn't matter) are perfectly fine English words.

4. If you know who Chuwit Kamolvisit is and you don’t love him - I hate you. Seriously.

3. One of my dreams is to one day own an elephant. Why? Because they can pick up stuff with their NOSE. Think about how impressive that is for a minute. Try to pick something up with your nose. Can’t do it, can you? Didn’t think so. Quite simply if you can pick up stuff with your nose, you = awesomesauce.

2. I love style and might be considered a bit of a metrosexual. And by “style” I mean Hawaiin shirts and mirror shades. Period.

1. Even though my gaydar is still notoriously inaccurate I have developed, as a matter of survival in Thailand, an incredibly accurate sense of whether any particular “girl” was born as a girl, or was in fact, born as a boy. The trick is to listen to the voice and look at the size of their hands. Everything else can be changed. Everything.

What Will I Do With a Million Gold?

This is my post for the JMTC blogging carnival for May and the topic is, "What will you do with a million gold".

Well the basic answer to that is easy. I'll set aside 100k to spend on any doodads that I want and then use the rest to speed me on my way to two million gold. The thing I haven't decided is how risk averse I will be in my path to two million gold. I could use the 900k in a relatively safe manner - sticking to whatever tried and true tricks of the goldmaking trade are profitable at the time. Or I could use the gold to do experiments and engage in more risky investments in the hope that they pan out. If I went this route I could get to two million pretty quickly - or I could lose most of my million. Even if I lost most of my gold though I figure I could get it back and I would get into some interesting situations and learn some things along the way.

The thing is at this point I don't know how attached to the one million I'll be. It is something that takes a bit of time and effort and this might make me be a bit defensive about keeping it. Then again the whole reason to make gold is to have fun - and I like doing AH experiments. I really don't know which route I'll take. I guess at this point I'm just enjoying the trip to one million.

Have fun making gold!

Day 7 - The Reason Behind My Blog's Name

This is my post for day 7 of Spellbound's Blogging Challenge - The reason behind my blog's name.

So why Bangkok Bill's World of Goldcraft? Well I wanted a name that was a bit over the top and ridiculous. One of the things that I love about Thailand is the ridiculousness of some of the names here and I wanted to have some of that in my blog. According to Wikipedia the full Thai name for Bangkok is of particular inspiration for me - in Thai it is, "Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Yuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Phiman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit" which means something along the lines of, "The city of angels, the great city, the eternal jewel city, the impregnable city of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarma". A bit over the top, no?

If I could get away with it I would probably have named this blog something along the lines of, "Bangkok Bill's World of Goldcraft, center of the universe, where happiness and gold flows through the internets like blood through an elephant, where all Chinese botters come to sell cheap mats and bow in veneration, where all subscribers are billionaires and all critics are cursed to become a NELF dancing on a mailbox for tips, a site of perfection under the guardianship of all the gods." Unfortunately I have to worry about things like SEO, domain names, and actually being able to remember the name myself. For these reasons I picked the shortest name I could think of that was still a bit over the top or campy.

 So what do you guys think? Should I look into if BangkokBill'sWorldofGoldcraftcenteroftheuniversewherehappinessandgoldflowsthroughtheinternetslikebloodthroughanelephantwhereallChinesebotterscometosellcheapmatsandbowinvenerationwhereallsubscribersarebillionairesandallcriticsarecursedtobecomeaNELFdancingonamailboxfortipsasiteofperfectionundertheguardianshipofallthegods.com is available or just keep things as they are?

To Autopost or Not To Autopost?

Autoposting is a technique that can save you lots of time while posting auctions to the AH. By organizing your items into groups and categories with price ceilings and floors with an add-on like TradeSkillMaster you can lessen your work at the AH and post an auction with a single click of your mouse. Come back a few hours later, scan your auctions and if anyone has undercut you you can cancel your auction with another click of the mouse. Grab the item out of the mailbox, click the post button again and the item will again be put on the AH within your price settings.

There can be no doubt that autoposting like this is a very valuable tool in any gold makers aresenal but what is the cost? Recently I've found myself assigning almost all of my items to groups and I would say over 95% of my auctions are now posted in this way. This has saved me heaps of time and made posting thousands of auctions a day much more manageable but I've also noticed that I've lost some of the connectedness I used to have with the markets. I'm not so sure which of my rings, enchants, and glyphs have been selling really well over the last few weeks. I could look the data up but before I started autoposting everything I would simply know this information without even having to think about it. I also knew what the going rate was for most of my items. I can't help but think that I was much more aware of price increases and decreases in the selling price of my items before I autoposted so much. It's simply hard to remember the prices when 500 auctions are posting at a machine gun rate.

What's the solution? Spend more time going over your auctions. Personally I still plan to autopost most of the time but 1-2 times a week I plan on posting manually just so that I can get a better feel for the market again. Saving time is invaluable - but knowing your markets is worth a bit of time.

What about you? Do you autopost a lot or a little? Are there certain items that you think are better to autopost than others? Sound of below and have fun making gold!

Day 6 - My Workplace/Desk

This is my post for day 6 of Spellbound's Blogging Challenge - My Workplace/Desk.

Well there it is in all it's glory. As you can see I have a desktop and laptop next to each other. I generally run my main toons on the desktop while I'll monitor trade, bark my auctions, check out twitter, use The Undermine Journal, etc. on my laptop. If I'm making inks, doing the shuffle, or anything else equally as tedious I'll usually watch a movie on the TV next to my laptop.

I'm not enough of a nerd to go into to detail about all of my computer specs but I will say that the desktop is able to run Warcraft at the highest settings while they need to be turned down pretty low for the laptop. In addition I use a Razor Naga mouse (Awesome!) and a Razor Lycosa Keyboard (sucks).

Other things that will usually be on my desk are my blackberry, ipod (both charging on one of the computers), DVDs, a glass of something, my speakers, a crap ton of wires running everywhere, and my remotes for the TV, DVD, and aircon (this is a necessity in Bangkok).

Well that's my set up. If you all have any other questions about it sound off below and have fun making gold!

My Favorite Non-Core Add-on

This is my post for the May blogging carnival at Cold’s Gold Factory. While the carnival is a bit of a ways away I missed last month’s carnival and want to get this post up so that I don’t end up rushing at the last minute.

The topic for this month is,

"Which supplementary add-on would you recommend that all auctioneers should use and why?  (Do not use a Core Add-On)"

Since I can't recommend a core add-on and it should be an add-on that all auctioneers should use I want to recommend everyone go out and check Tbag. Despite having a horrible, horrible name Tbag is a great add-on that helps you save immense amounts of time by merging all of your bags into one big window and auto sorting everything. This will save you an immense amount of time as the auto sort feature makes it easy to see how many of any particular item you have in your bags. Ore will be next to ore, herbs next to other herbs, weapons next to weapons - forever. Check out the results and see for yourself.

BEFORE TBAG

AFTER TBAG

So go grab this add-on and get your bags organized!


Have fun making gold!

Day 5 - My Favorite In Game Item

This is my post for day 5 of Spellbound's Blogging Challenge - My Favorite in game Item.

Besides gold? Probably Noggenfogger Elixir. It isn’t really used to much now (that I know of) and seems to be a bit of a forgotten item now that you can fly in Azeroth. Before the cataclysm though Nogenfogger was probably the number one tool of people who liked exploring. The slow fall would allow you to get to places you couldn't otherwise get to and so I always kept some on my toons. Even though it’s time as passed I still have a real soft spot in my heart for this stuff.