Prior to earning vast amounts of gold in game, you will need to do the following:

1) Create an auction house toon. You should create a new toon that is strictly for managing and selling your auction items. My auction house toon is named "Zauction". With that name, it's much easier to mail things to it because its name starts with "z". After you create your auction house toon, make sure you add that toon to the friends list of your other toons.

2) (skip this part if you are on a PVP server) Create another auction house toon on the opposing faction's side. If you are a Horde player, you will need to setup an Alliance toon and park it next to the auction house in Ironforge, Stormwind, or Darnassus. Same goes if you are an Alliance player.

3) (skip this part if you are on a PVP server) Create a new toon and move it to the neutral auction house in Winterspring, Gadzetzan, or Booty Bay. Do this for Alliance and Horde.

4) Do a web search for this site: Allakhazam. Go to that site and bookmark it. When you search for items at that website, you will notice that you get a "median AH price" with every search result. This price will be your gauge for determining the resale value of your items. Become familiar with using this website before you start selling items on the Auction House.

5) Analyze your toon. What are its natural strengths? For example, a hunter's strongest asset is nature resistance. Any hunter can build a pet with the highest level of nature resistance and then turn on his Aspect of Nature. That will give his pet around 240 nature resist. What does this mean? It means that a hunter can kill mobs that do nature damage better than any other player class in game. Each player class has its own strength. You must determine what your strengths are before you can start earning large amounts of gold.

You will need approx. 1,000 gold before you can start earning larger sums. Hopefully you followed the first five steps and you have now determined what your toon's greatest strengths are.

As a hunter, my greatest strength is nature resist. I can build a pet with the highest level of nature resist and when I activate Aspect of Nature, my pet will have approx. 240 NR. This makes my hunter very strong against any mobs that do nature damage.

For a level 70 hunter, the easiest mob to kill that drops a high priced item is an Air Elemental. You will find these primarily in Nagrand. You can turn on Aspect of Nature, let your pet tank, and kill three or four Air Elementals before you need to rest and/or heal your pet.

If you aren't a hunter, you will need to find mobs that you can kill with ease. Are you strong against undead? Then you should be farming undead for netherweave cloth. Are you strong against casters? Then you should be farming caster-type mobs that drop valuable loot.

The lesson in this tutorial mirrors real life: in order to be successful, you must focus on your strengths.

What exactly does that mean? It means if you are weak against fire damage, do not waste your time farming Fire Elementals or any other mob that does fire damage. Instead, focus on mobs that you can kill with ease and then sell the items they drop on the auction house.

For gatherers:

If you are a flower-picker (herbalist) or a miner, you will find that materials found in areas with mob levels of 50-60 can be quite profitable to farm. The reason why flowers and ore found in those areas are more valuable is because the bulk of players are not playing at that character level (50-60). That means less farmers. And that makes those items hard to find on the auction house.

Now that you have a basic understanding of how to earn gold within game by actually working for it (aka farming), get to work! Farm items, mail them to your auction house toon, and then sell them on the AH. Save your gold until you have acquired approx. 1,000 gold cash.

After you have acquired a 1,000 gold cash, give yourself a nice pat on the back before continuing.

What do you think is the most profitable item to sell on the auction house? Motes? Primals? Cloth? Herbs? If you answered with any of those, you are wrong.

Here are the two, best selling items on the AH: BOEs (bind-on-equip items) and recipes!

In order to make large sums of gold in World of Warcraft, you need to sell BOEs and recipes.

The reason why BOEs and recipes are the best selling items is because they are in limited supply. They must drop from a mob in order to be found. Not only are they the best selling items, they also make it far easier for you to get rich.

How many gaming hours did it take to farm your 1,000 gold? 10 hours? 20 hours? Twenty hours is probably an accurate number to farm 1,000 gold in loot. (By the way, I commend you for completing this necessary task.)

By comparison, how long do you think it would take to farm a BOE item or recipe? Since the drop rate on both is an extremely low percentage, let's just say it takes 100 gaming hours for every BOE that drops. And that is probably a modest estimate considering that I have seen only THREE epic BOEs drop in my entire World of Warcraft gaming experience.

But wait! Who said you have to actually farm BOEs and recipes to get them? That would be a precious waste of your game time! Wouldn't you rather be running Karazhan or Gruul's lair instead of killing mobs and hoping a BOE item or a recipe drops? Of course you would!

How do you acquire BOEs and recipes? You buy them on the trade channel or the AH.

A typical scenario might go like this: Another player is selling an epic BOE sword on the trade channel for 500 gold. Before you send him a whisper, you go to Allakhazam and do a search for the sword. You discover the sword is indeed worth 500g. Apparently this player has done his homework and is asking the correct price for the sword. Send him a whisper and say, "I'll buy it, but it's only worth 100 gold to me". Most likely he will proceed to promptly cuss you out. But 8 times out of 10 he is desperate for cash (otherwise why is he selling the item on the trade channel?) and he will take your offer. This person will complain and try to get you to pay more, but your answer is always NO. If he doesn't sell it to you, fine. If he does, then you turn around and put the sword on the AH with a 24-hour auction and a buyout of 500 gold or more.

I made at least 20,000 gold by using this exact strategy, and I had fun doing it! You will quickly develop a reputation of being a "reseller". This is both good and bad. The bad is that people will get angry with you, mostly because they are envious of your ability to barter and make gold. The good part is that very soon players will come to you with BOEs and recipes because they know you have the cash to purchase whatever you want.

You should limit your purchase price to 20% to 30% of the "median AH price" found on the Allakhazam website. This leaves a safe margin in case you need to resell something at a much lower price than the listed median price.

You now have knowledge very few wow players possess. But do you have the skills to implement? Only you can answer that.