How to make gold?

Simple question right?

Simple answer?  Farm deadmines with big bags and vendor everything...  everyone loves deadmines anyway... right?

Hmmmm... not the answer you were looking for?  well its a good idea if you have a level 18 toon and your leveling your way into another xmute spec alchy or "enter profession here"  otherwise not so much IMO...

Balance, Balance, Balance, in all things moderation

What am I sudgesting you "balance" to make gold.. after the break
First off... Where does gold come from....  You had none when you were level 1 and noob... you got your first bits of gold from (bits of copper, more like) from the mobs you killed and the NPC who rewarded you, and the NPC vendors who bought your stuff. At level 10 and 20 and 30 and 40 and 50 and so on....  to now at level 85 those are still the options available to you...  Ohh... and other players...  You get their gold by direct and in person trading, and through the auction house and mail. 

There are pretty definable amounts you can make from farming mobs for drops (gold, vendor trash and the rest)  and how quickly you can get your gold... In most cases I think it is considered one of the lowest income potential earning strategies.

There are pretty clear limits on questing... 25 dailies being the first cap that comes to mind.. and dailies are the most profitable in this category

SO TO CREATE GOLD GO TO THE NPCs.. kill em, make em buy your junk and make em give you gold for killing other NPCs etc....

TO CREATE WEALTH, let others do ^T^H^A^T^ and take it from them...

Thats all the gold there is in the game... comes from the NPCs... sometimes... players find ways to take that gold from the other players, in large amounts, or not so large, but now enters the AH and /trade...

1. Balance the advice you recieve with the realized results from attempting such activities.  Advice is always good I think... even bad advice is good... (excepting false and misleading advice, i.e. trolls) Application is where I goof it up...  when to follow the advice, and such... it took me 6 months to start using ZA...
2. Balance new markets with old ones...  What I am sugesting is it may not be good advice to go nuts on all the Hollidays and not continue your bread and butter at a reasonable level, and conversly, redefining what your bread and butter is.
3. Balance the sustainment factor of your activities... You can farm, but can you stand to do it for hours on end?  You can do dailies, but can you stand to do that for hours on end?  You can craft good from mats bought on the AH for hours on end, but can you stand all the gold you will have to do that for hours on end?  Do you mix it up? Do you focus fire? Can you keep doing what you are doing for a couple months?
4. Balance the activities you spend your time on and how make your gold... Variety is the spice of WoW, why else would there be over 100 vanity pets and mounts...

Me, I can log on and for 2 hours log my various toons, cancel post, buy cheap mats, stockpile mats, precraft and have stocks of crafted mats, and cancel post again and buy again.. and hop a toon and do some more, head out on a farming the vendors circuit for all the piles of pets... cancel post, and look for more low hanging fruit in the AH, and thats just with my enchanter except the first 10 minutes on the bank alt AH poster toon.  90% of my sales is in Enchanting scrolls...  I don't have the patience for the milling for a glyph business atm, and I have not found a high enough return in alchemy to bother with more than a daily CD and the occasional batch of primal might..  the other 10% of sales are primal might, LW patches and pets and a couple miscelany things... 

I used to log on and spend 20-30 minutes emptying the AH of pile and pile of herbs... at the rate of 20-40K/day (prices were higher then) then mill the herbs then ink the herbs and that was 2 hours or more most days..  bahh... I know I could go mess with the glyph market, and do well, but atm the "gut" feel for me is that the returns on the time and balancing other activitities in... too painful... I failed to ballance the previous entry and exit in the Darkmoon decks business...   I did hit 415K, and have since made a couple big mistakes, and a couple big purchases... around 350ish now... 150K spend on BOE epics... :-) fun to do that sometimes... 50K lost on maelstrom crystals... (I had about 100+ when 4.1 hit)  zero profits on forty something darkmoon cards as prices just plumeted.... and supplies did not... shoulda held em for another couple months.. woulda been a better bottom line...

So, I must do something well, I was that level 1 nub nub toon... 2 weeks before Cata hit... by March I had hit 415K liquid... since then I got tired of the scribe market. leveled a hunter up to 84.88 atm... leveled a bit with a pair of druids, a rogue, a warrior, a warlock.. all in their 30s...  maxed out enchanting and now that is the market I play in...

K, the post is too long for me.... and i think i am rambling.. bye..