Trading the auction house might very well be the most powerful way to make gold in WoW. You can learn more about this strategy from these wow gold guides.

The best way used to be with the help of the addon Auctioneer Classic. Regrettably, that addon was discontinued in October 2008, and the replacement, Auctioneer Advanced, is not very user-friendly, in my opinion.

The good news is that a new and better way to make gold in the Auction House has appeared.

The great thing about Auctioneer Classic was that it would scan the auction house for good deals, i.e. underpriced items, and allow you to buy those easily. Then you’d just relist them at the appropriate – higher – price and profit.

Nowadays, what you can do instead is manual searches.

Price ranges of items can now be determined by performing regular searches for the items in question. As an example, mithril ore might sell for 2 g on your server (look it up please). So when you see it for 1-1.5g each, buy it out and save it until prices hit 2 g at which time you list yours, undercutting the competition slightly.

This is easier to do once you have a little more gold. Using Auctioneer Classic you could start with 1g and turn it into 100+ g in a few short hours.

The new method of manual searches enables you to start with a bit more gold, say 10-50g.

Now I will tell you some things to look for:

Especially when starting out, try to focus on things that can make you a lot of gold, but have  a low vendor sell price (and thus deposit). Some things that come to mind:

* Enchanting materials (no deposit)

* Food (high-end raiding food)

* Ore and bars like silver bars, gold bars, mithil ore, iron ore etc.

* Big stacks of stuff that I split up. For example: purchased 20 eternal fire for 310 g and sold them off for around 460 g.

* Eternals (fire, earth, water, shadow, life, air)

* Crystallized elements (fire, earth, water, shadow, life, air)

* Herbs

* Leather

* Gems

Try to focus on learning a few items well, for example the eternals, before branching out. Focus on the most profitable items to earn maximum gold in minimum time. Consider the sell price and the demand of an item. Big demand and high price = good profit opportunity.

Manual searches are greatly facilitated by the use of the Auctionator addon, a must-have mod that I first learned about from Hayden Hawke’s Secret Gold Guide.