Guide: How to Make Gold #6 - Learn Which Crafted Items Sell Well

If you decide to take on one (or more) crafting profession(s) the only way you'll be making money out of it will be by selling the stuff you make.

Keep this in mind though: don't take 2 crafting professions. Always combine them in a way by which you can gather your own materials (Mining and Blacksmithing or Skinning and Leatherworking, for example). Also, you will need to spend money on trade goods. While this may be seen as an "investment" you may actually lose money if you don't manage to sell the items you craft at the price necessary to, at least, cover your expenses.

If you do decide on a crafting profession, try to learn what items people need and what price they are willing to pay for it – try not to speculate though. There's nothing people hate more than seeing an item being sold for 4 gold coins when they know the fair price would be around 1 gold piece. They may not buy from you again – ever.

Quest items are usually sold well (such as the Deadly Blunderbuss, for example, which is a gun used on the Warsong Saw Blades quest).

Rare or Epic items are harder to sell although they can very profitable. For the Barbaric Bracers example we gave before, we spent around 6 gold on materials, gathered some more while questing and sold it for 17 gold coins. We had a net profit of about 11 gold coins but we had to put it on AH every day for nearly a week. It was still worth it, of course, but we didn't do it again.