Please note, this isn't so much a step by step follow through to money. It takes effort and an understanding of the market of your server. But it's worked for me enough that I could afford lifestealing enchants and rare weapons right up to 60 everytime I upgraded weaponry. I had my 100 gold for my 40 mount (back when mounts cost that much and you needed to be level 40) at level 10.
When I started, I made 25 gold a day. These days, I'm only level 64 and I don't spend as much time doing this, but I make about 100 or so.
And I never went out of my way just to make money. Never farmed on mobs. Never farmed on ore or leather. Ever.
But it always took at most 2 days to make money. I'd have hundreds of auctions up for sale. Still do actually. So without further ado, here's Ishy's method:
Lots of guides I've seen online involve lots of effort, farming, or luck. All three of these things take away from your most valuable asset in WoW: TIME!
For every hour you spend farming mobs that are either beneath your level, or getting there, you miss out on valuable experience to bring yourself to higher levels. According to Jame, you're missing out on hundreds of thousands of experience points, just farming mobs that aren't even don't even generate revenue that high!
Inefficient, I say.
Now what my method does is it 'uses' the time you're spending leveling to generate income. This is a guide that relies on patience. It's also an easy guide, and doesn't require for you to go somewhere specific (with the exception of Eversong, assuming you have no money to start with)
Further, this involves a LOT of use of the Auction House (AH). The AH is the ONLY way to make the kind of money you need for both a mount, an epic ground mount, cool looking equipment, gems, and other nifty types of items that you, in your own unlucky state of things, may not be able to find.
My first character was a Blood Elf Paladin named Salae, and it was the first time I'd ever really played WoW and got into it. Certainly, I didn't have any 60-70 friends who would give me free money, nor did I really know anything about the game. I will say I downloaded a few addons that helped, after reading a good bit. Auctioneer and Gatherer were the ones that helped the most. Apparently, lots of people use these addons, some abuse them, and others just don't understand. I also downloaded a simple mailbox checker addon (you can find a bunch at Curse.com) to cut my time down more.
Auctioneer is a handy program which scans the entire auction house and sets up a median price for every item it finds in there. How does that work? Well, that's a complicated process, but the gist is this: It scans every instance of a particular item, and what it's currently selling for, and then, it averages the totals.
What this does is give you a rough estimate of what players are willing to pay for that particular item. This is key.
What gatherer does is it keeps track of every resource node you ever find. It's handy, though I rarely use it these days, I never go out of my way to simply farm ore or herbs, I normally just grab what I find on my way during questing.
So, the methods I'm going to talk about are things I did while also following Jame's leveling guide, meaning you don't have to go out of your way each time you want to make money.
You *do* need to have some money to start out with. "You need money to make money." It's a crappy addage, but it's true. Getting money is easy. If you don't have any at all, pick up a gathering profession, like mining (mining is really good), and go to say ... Eversong Woods, go south along the rocks, and look for copper. It's easy to do once you start out, and pretty soon, maybe after 1 hour, you'll have roughly 2-3 stacks of copper ore. Easy.
Now you put those up in the auction for whatever it's going price is (you don't need auctioneer, but it helps to establish what a good price is), normally 1-2 gold a stack, and wait a while. Go quest, go grind, go do some leveling!
Within a few hours, or maybe a day, if the market is slow, you'll have money. Now what do you do with that money?
You spend it. That's what you do. Sounds counter productive, right? Why make money if you're just going to spend it? Well, that's the point. I know lots of people who invest in bank alt and just funnel their money to the alt, where it sits, and does nothing. Nothing! What good is it gonna do you if it's just sitting there? Bragging rights? Who cares! Better to put that to some good use.
So let's get started. Let's say you have ... 3 gold.
(Let's also assume you have auctioneer, because while doing this without it is possible, it's also a hassle and takes valuable time. Auctioneer cuts time in half. GET AUCTIONEER!)
In order to make money, you have to invest it. And where do you invest it in?
In people who sell their goods cheap!
The idea is to find a trade good that's popular, find the established price of that item, and then look for people who are selling at a markup that's much lower than the going price. Say, 50%. If you buy it at half price and then resell it, you're making 100% profit for every sell!
The trick is knowing if that item is too popular, or not popular enough. If an item is too popular, it becomes harder to score a sell if you sell too high. A good examplie is linen cloth: You can buy say ... 20 stacks of it with that 3 gold that you have, but when you go to resell, two days later, there are 80 stacks of it, all at half the price you're selling it. You have no sales, and suddenly you have 6 gold worth of materials just sitting there. What do you do? Do you resell it at the same price and hope that it won't be flooded again? No. Because items like that are typically always going to be flooded in the AH. The thing is though that items like that are used all the time by new tailors all the time. I'm not saying never invest in linen cloth, that's just an example. Some things just won't work.
Another thing to watch out for is enchanting materials. I suggest never investing in enchanting materials unless you've got a REALLY good deal, normally because everyone and their mother wants enchanting as a profession, because it's one of the easiest ways to make money at higher levels. Note: I am NOT an enchanter.
Good things to invest in is metal and ore, and when you can afford it, some of the higher levels of cloth.
So what's the trick? Well ... there really isn't one.
To start out, try something like copper ore. It's a good used by multiple professions, meaning that you're more or less guaranteed a sell, so long as you don't sell too high. Now a lot of players aren't crafters, they're just gatherers. (I'm a gatherer actually)
This means they're not out to sell the fruit of their labor, they just want to make money, regardless of how much. Thus, they'll sell at something they think is fair, without checking to see what other people are selling. What this means is that you'll see a lot of gathered resources up for sale really cheap, compared to what most other players are selling. For those of us without auctioneer (man, how do you get along with it?) I'll tell you an easy method: Find the most expensive stack for sale ... then find the next expensive stack, and so on. Do this until you think you have the going price of copper ore ... then find the cheapest instances of copper ore. Buy it. Buy as much as you can. Then, get to the mailbox, get your ore, go back to the auction house, find the established price, and sell all the ore at just a *little* less than the most expensive. Assuming that the most expensive price isn't extremely high.
Auctioneer helps establish what's fair, and what isn't. I'm not saying it's sure fire, a lot of people would swear by it, but a lot more would say it's extremely unbalanced. I just use it as a second opinion, but then, I've been making money with this for a while.
When you make enough money, you can start looking at other trade goods. I like to look at the different categories of the 'trade goods' section of the AH and find good deals, normally at 50% the going price. The trick is knowing what to buy.
Metal and Stone is good because Blacksmithing, Jewelcrafting, and Engineering all use these things, so scouting for good deals and reselling in that category is pretty safe.
Elemental items are good too, but only at the higher levels, when you have the money to spare.
It's a lot of trial and error, it takes time, lots of time. But the point is you keep your money invested. Don't let it sit. Also, don't waste time buying new equipment every level. I did, but then, I spent weeks not leveling at all just making money. I'm a lazy kid.
Be sure to invest in 16 slot back when you have the money for them. Believe me, it pays off.
PIck up gathering professions for a while. Anything that you'll need a crafting profession to get you can just buy in the AH.