Friday, March 26, 2010

But I only have 5k!



This post is part two of my series showing what you can do with your money. This post will not focus on the up and coming auctioneer, but on one that has already found a niche or a market that is doing well for them. So for the sake of argument, today we will pretend that the following is true: you do not have to farm anymore, you have at least one market that you have a solid grasp on, you want to make more gold because...MOAR! Ok now that's out of the way, here's a few things you can do with 5k gold to turn it into more.


The first thing I would recommend is creating a massive stockpile of your current market. If it's something like enchanting, jc, or glyphs, you can easily drop 5k on a month or two worth of mats. This will give you a nice bit of personal freedom since you won't have to scan daily for good deals.

Perhaps you've taken my advice already and have a sizable stockpile of materials and want to be a bit more adventurous. Why not take that money and venture into a whole different market? It's risky, dangerous, and fun! It almost feels like you're the first person doing it ever in the history of WoW. Not true of course but doesn't change how exciting it can be, especially when it turns out to be a big success. Every market can be gotten into slowly no matter how big it might be. The only thing to keep in mind is inscription won't get you a big pay back unless you've already done a lot of the daily research glyphs. But for these purposes we'll assume that you've done it enough (both major and minor) to at least compete.

With 5k gold you can break into enchanting. Buy yourself about 800 dust, 100 greater cosmics, 3 stacks of armor/weapon vellums, 20 eternal water, 60 eternal earth, 60 shards, 20 titanium bars, and 3 stacks of abyss crystals. That should cover all the northrend enchants for a good amount of time and totals a hair under 5k spent. After that go to the AH and search for "scroll of enchant" and "scroll of enchant weapon" for the full list of all enchanting scrolls being sold. That will let you know the price range of each scroll, which appear directly in the "consumable - scroll" category. Check on them every day for a week for a good idea of what to make first. Also be sure to read my How To Enchanting post in the mean time for how I work this market. If you've read my business reports, you'll see that enchanting is a large portion of my income so you can make this investment back rather fast.


Perhaps you want to try glyphs. First you'll need a whole new banker with 4x scribe bags. Your crafter will need at least two of them to reduce the time from crafting to mailing. If you're just starting I'd recommend only making ones that use ink of the sea or etheral ink. These are the most common sales and there aren't a few thousand to make. Start with small stack sizes of 3 of each and list them all. Put your max price in the 20-30g range so you can start with some decent profit on the few you're making, but if you suspect a few glyph campers drop it down to 10g right away and become the goblin. You can easily drop 5k on herbs at 13g/stack and hundreds of parchment, it's normal for me to refill my stock of inky and spend 5k a month for more inks all at once.


I'll be stopping here for today since it is rather wall o text already. I'll let this sink in so you can come up with some of your own thoughts on how to turn 5k into 10 or even 20. Till next time have fun and good luck.


Thanks for stopping by!

7 comments:

  1. Just wanted to say keep up the great work! Too often great blogs get no vocal feedback, so I figured I may as well give ya a shout.

    I started following your blog towards the end of last week, and I definitely wanted to say thanks for both the frequency AND quality of updates. I managed to start at the beginning and work my way through all your posts and I honestly hope your progress to 1 million drastically slows down (no offense or anything, I just want to see your blog active for as long as possible! Heh, =P).

    I currently do decently well for myself in the enchanting market and am considering branching out to glyphs (I grabbed inscription on an alt a long ways back... the alt has since became my main, and I realized that having every glyph and not making any of them is a serious waste of potential).

    In terms of "breaking into" the market... all northrend herbs are equal in terms of milling for IotS, correct? Wowhead has the pigment drops listed as the same % for all of them... I just want to make sure I'm not missing anything before buying out a ton of herbs =) I'm torn between valuing inks at 1.5g or 2.5g each and making only glyphs that sell for 4 (or 6 respectively) gold, rather than trying the "blanket" approach. Something like, 4g min, 15g fallback, 1g undercut - posting 3-5 of each glyph and seeing what the response is like (I have no clue how many campers my server has... I've tried to track some of the more prominent names in the AH but I can never catch them online, so I'm hoping I have no full-time campers).

    When determining how much you're willing to pay for herbs, do you account for Snowfall inks, allowing you to pay a bit more for herbs, or do you only track how many IotS a stack of herbs will give you and treat the Snowfalls as pure profit?

    Thanks again for the amazing blog!

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  2. Inst. I have recently entered the glyph market myself. WHile being picky and choosing only high sellers is good. i found the blanket apporach to be easiest in managment. I suggest you get ktq and qa3. making 3 of every glyph is easier to manage and ktq will help you refill your stacks.

    As for your question on herbs no not all northrend herbs are equal. I would suggest using adders tounge , ice thorn, and lichbloom. these herbs have the highest chance to give you icy pigments which is used to create snowfall ink. You can use this ink or sell it to help offset the cost of the herbs further reducing the cost of your glyphs.

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  3. Hey bob, thanks for the response!

    Ya, I definitely agree with using ktq and qa3 - I use KTQ to keep my stock of enchant scrolls in tip-top shape and it works beautifully.

    For glyphs, I was going to use the selling-threshold setting with ktq to do all the decision making for me, in terms of which glyphs to make (as I have a ton of auctioneer data populating LSW)... I was going to just tell KTQ to make 5 of every glyph worth more than X, that way if a glyph that sells for nothing now goes up in price it will automatically be added to my queue without me having to track it (and vice-versa).

    What to do about snowfall ink is more what I was having trouble approaching. Do I count the value of potential snowfall inks when factoring in how much I buy herbs for? (creating different price points at which I'll buy different herbs), or do I completely ignore it, let it turn into pure "surprise" profit and only buy herbs at a price point based on my IotS valuation (meaning I probably buy lesser quantities of herbs, since fewer will be sold at the cheaper prices required). I suppose I'm just trying to be lazy in a round-about way, only using 1 price for all herbs, even though it means I'm likely to miss out on adder's tongue, icethorn, and lichbloom unless they are ridiculously cheap.

    I guess you're right, there isn't really much difference in valuing snowfall ink as "surprise" profit that I just turn around and reinvest in herb purchasing... and I should really use two price points for herbs.

    If I include the value of snowfall ink I can buy more expensive stacks of herbs... I guess it comes down to if I can find enough "cheap" herbs to support the quantity of ink I need?

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  4. Yeh i look at snowfall as a way to offset herb cost. i generally get icethron between 15-18g i refuse to pay more. I did buy tiger lily and the amount of snowfall created by it was pitiful. 1 stack from 40 stacks of tiger lily. 70 icethorn gave me 6 and a half stacks from milling. which sells for around 150g a stack basicly making the cost of my IOTS 0.

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  5. Wow people having a conversation on MY blog, who would've thought? Hehehe!

    @ Ist
    Bob covered the herb approach, adders/icethorn/lich > others. That doesn't mean not to buy the rest since lichbloom and icethorn are usually expensive. The snowfalls, though slow in selling, will almost always pay for the full stack of herbs. If you make and sell 1 snowfall for 10g from a stack of 10g herbs, all glyphs are profit.

    Use the snowfalls to make offhands or even runescrolls (which I haven't looked into personally). I also suggest the blanket approach as you called it, it makes management far easier and give you a better chance at making a profit.

    If nothing else, the inks will offset at least 80% of the price of the herbs. That's another reason that inscription has such huge profit margins.

    @ Bob and Ist
    I wish you both luck in the glyph market, it can indeed be a bunch of fun!

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  6. Pile,

    Yeh i always enjoy giving advice in comments if i can. Great blog i look forward to reading it more often

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  7. Just wanted to followup with my weekend escapades... holy freakin cow!

    I'm certainly kicking myself for not jumping into glyphs sooner, in 24 hours I made more with glyphs than I did in 5 days with enchanting. I don't know if it will keep up, but there is seemingly no competition (I initially posted before I went to sleep, went to cancel-repost when I woke up and I believe it canceled 20 auctions? nuts!)

    I spent 10k on herbs (a combo of auctioneer's snatch to gobble up any super cheap herbs, then the milling search set to 15% profit), turned it all into ink - made 5 of every glyph that would sell for more than 6g bought a bunch of emerald bags, cursed myself as I realized I needed bag of endless pockets NOT emerald bags (/fist shake), and then posted up a storm. I'm curious to see how things continue, but it certainly was a kickass weekend. I still have bank tabs full of ink and have already made back most of that initial investment.

    Go glyphs!

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