Gold making 101- Sell what people need (o rly)

I was leveling an alt through Arathi Highlands the other day, and was reminded about how I made the gold to get the mount on my first toon at level 30.

Back in the day, to get your fishing, cooking and first aid professions past level 200ish, you needed to buy and read manuals. Each manual was sold by only 1 NPC, and they were a pain in the ass to get if you were power-leveling.

So, when my first toon was level 20ish, he needed the fishing manual to level up. I checked wowhead.com for where to get the manual, read the comments and realised that people were making gold off these books!

So, I corpse ran to Booty Bay, spent all my gold buying 3 or 4 fishing manuals, and threw em on the AH. They sold, I bought more, they sold, I bought more and investigated what manuals were needed for other professions. I bought those, sold em, and the rest is history.

To make gold in the game, you need to learn what people need, and thus what they will pay money for.