Everyone has experienced it. You’ve hit one of the landmark levels and you don’t have enough gold for whatever mount you were after, or you just hit the level cap and you’re stuck with your lame leveling gear because you can’t afford an upgrade. What you need are some quick WoW gold secrets to make sure that you don’t find yourself in that situation again!

1. Loot everything. This is one of the most common gold-making mistakes I see players making. Gray and white items, commonly known as vendor trash, add up to a very large percentage of your income while leveling or running instances. If you have room in your bag, loot it. If it’s vendor trash, sell it to your local merchant, and if it is green or better put it up on the auction house. Invest in the best bags you can afford so you never have to pass up free loot.

2. Quest rewards are good money. Weapons and plate armor make a very pretty penny, so if there is nothing you need from the quest, or if you just happen to be a plate wearer who gets to sell something expensive with every upgrade he gets, go with a weapon or a piece of plate. Outland and Northrend are both gold mines for this, as you end up doing so many quests that only about 1 in 4 gives you a solid upgrade. Remember that bigger weapons fetch a higher price than smaller ones, and main armor slots sell better than the offset slots. When in doubt, check WoWHead for the prices.

3. Learn a gathering skill and use it frequently. If you do just this, you will make twice as much as the people who don’t gather. Just picking up herbs or mining or skinning on your way to quests and dungeons brings in a fortune, and if you decide to actually invest some solid time into gathering, you will make a killing. Mining is usually the best, with herbalism and skinning trailing in a tie for second place, but this may vary depending on your server economy. If you take any two of those professions, you’ll be rolling in gold.

4. Sell pieces of cloth individually. It may take a little more time, but it is worth it. The auction house sorts by price, so if you are selling a piece of linen cloth for 2 silver, and a stack of 20 linen cloth goes for 20 silver, your single pieces of cloth will be listed ahead of their full stack. You can generally get away with doubling the price per unit and just filling up the first 2 pages, because people are lazy and most will just buy the first item listed if it’s not unreasonably priced. This also has the added benefit of allowing blacksmiths, engineers, and leatherworkers to buy exactly the amount of cloth they need, since they rarely need it in bulk.

5. Quest until you run out of quests, then quest some more. This is absolutely crucial for keeping the gold rolling in. There are plenty of opportunities to do quests on your way to instances or other quests, especially with the amount of daily quests in Wrath of the Lich King. Once you hit the cap, you’ve got that handy little experience to gold conversion thing too, so following this rule is kind of a no-brainer.